Eric Gordon remains on a minutes restriction as he returns from his knee injury.

Gordon played 25 minutes in his debut against the Bobcats, scoring 24 points in the process. Against the Hawks, Gordon scored 11 points in 24 minutes.

"There's a part of me that just wants to play him," Monty Williams said, "but looking back on it I think I made a mistake doing that last year when he came back in the Philly game. He hurt his knee in Phoenix, then we played the Philly game, and just looking at my notes, mental notes I had, I played him too much.

"I don't want to repeat that. At that time, we didn't know he had an injury. He was sore, but I didn't know it was that bad. We just want to be smart. At the same time, your competitive dog comes out and you just want to win. But my responsibility to the team and organization trumps all that in this situation. You want to make sure he's right."

"It's going to be a collaborative effort and we'll see how I feel," Gordon said. "We do have a back-to-back so that's something we'll have to talk about. I definitely want to progress (to) more minutes every time, but that's something we'll have to talk about after every game."