zorzii, i definitely agree with these guys that if you are looking at this other team, and your team, and seeing a big disparity in who should have won - you have got to be looking at things wrong. i think its pretty clear you are overvaluing ath/def based defense over just about everything else - you seem to be doing it both on your own team, as well in analyzing their team. i would start there. i don't really agree with some of the criticism along the lines of, why would you expect to crush them - i totally get it - but i do think you have a great opportunity here to recognize a disparity between your perceptions and reality, and to address those! those don't come that often for folks who have been around a long time.
in short (no promises), think about diminishing returns with respect to each major ability in this game - defense, offense, rebounding, and guard skills. you can subdivide further, and should in general think about things like 3 point vs 2 point shots, how guard skills is really kind of two abilities (not creating turnovers, and the more important one dahs talked about, which is as he said both very important and undervalued, the ability whereby good passing+iq makes your team mates take better shots), and things of that nature. but you can get pretty far by team building around those 4 major abilities, and then just making sure you have decent 3 point shooting balance.
if you think about the quality of each of those things, and how much each marginal player helps you, i think it kind of helps clarify things.
offense - suppose you have no great scorers, or anything close. the first great scorer makes your offense massively better - while hes on the floor, he might pick up say 1/3rd of all shots, so hes basically contributing 1/3rd of what 5 great scorers on the floor together would contribute. thats 33% vs 20%, massively higher (like the first great scorer is 67% more valuable than the average great scorer if you have 5 playing together). the second guy might take 30% shots but take a bit from the first guy, say they get to 60% or so of shots being taken by great scorers between them. then the third guy might bring that to 83%, the fourth to 95%, and the fifth to 100%. those are half pulled from my rear numbers (especially the last ones), but the effect is definitely along the lines of what i describe here - the first guy or two contribute a huge amount, and by the end, you get almost nothing. the first guy might contribute 6 times what the 5th guy might. diminishing returns are in effect, HARD.
rebounding - suppose you have no great rebounders, or anything close. the nature of rebounding isn't really like that of scoring - scoring, you can more or less have great scorers at any position. adding a 100 rebounder to a mediocre team, at pg, is going to help - but not even close to what it helps at the C spot. PF matters about/almost as much as C, SF is a decent drop off but still big, and PG/SG matter more than most give them credit for - but we pretty much know that once you get to 95 reb c/pf, 75 at sf, and 40-50 at pg/sg, there is almost no room for improvement. a team with 5 95 reb centers wouldn't crush you or anything, they'd have an edge. so, there is diminishing returns team wise to stacking up rebounders, because you just don't need that many, because its just not worth playing them at the 1 or 2. you just really need enough to have beast pf/c and a solid sf, and there is not much room for an elite rebounding team to create a major advantage. they'd have an edge, but that is where the diminishing returns are. there is almost zero diminishing returns on your first rebounders, who are playing all their minutes at the 4/5 - so you really want to make those as good as possible.
this whole team building concept really is about getting the returns out of each team ability and each player ability, while those returns are substantial, and not going much past that - so you don't use up talent that could otherwise be used getting substantial returns out of other abilities.
guard skills - this is basically the pair of rebounding, but in reverse. a team of 100 passing players is good i guess, but its just an edge over 95pg/90sg/60sf/1pf/1c type of setup. so, this is like rebounding in terms of how it works as a diminishing return that is based on the positions you are filling. however, the PG matters a lot more than the SG, so that makes it a little different from rebounding. what this means is, if your pg isnt the bomb at passing + iq, for the creating better looks for the team mates deal that raises shooting %, you are giving up something huge. diminishing returns are massive in guard skills, you want those 40m at PG to be as elite as possible, and its super important. SG matters a bunch, and you could really punt on the rest if you need to. not ideal maybe, but the return drops off massively. the PG pass is worth maybe 10x the C, unlike rebounding, which is maybe 4x ballpark. so, guard skills are one of the hardest hitting diminishing returns in the game.
defense - this is basically the pair of offense, in the sense that the diminishing returns is really about how many such players you have on your team, out of 5, and its more positionless. obviously for a specific opponent, the position matters, but we don't really need to worry about that here. basically, your first great defender on a mediocre team of 5, he contributes 20% of the defense, and he's worth roughly nothing more than the last game. defense is roughly the one area of the game where diminishing returns aren't a thing, at a team level (player abilities are still obviously subject to diminishing returns of their own, like how a 90 ath/spd/def defender is basically a lot better than 80/80/80 but negligibly worse than 100/100/100).
because defense is by far the least diminishing returns, it means that once your team is already very good at everything, the one area you probably still have meaningful gains left, is in defense. this is what spawns the applicability of the phrase 'defense wins championships' to HD. its not because defense wins championships, its because once you are really good, the only room for further improvement talent wise is defense. you are much better off to run 3 great scorers and 5 great defenders than the reverse, and its not even close.
now, consider that relative to your team. you are all over the defense, you are getting all those returns, but you are missing out on massive returns on investment into offensive talent and guard skills talent - where the returns on the investment are a lot higher. you could give up a decent bit of defense for a decent bit of offense and guard skills, and really help your team out. also, the 3 vs 2 point scoring is wrecking you, with how valuable 3 point scoring is relative to 2 point scoring. add those things together, and you are really giving up a lot compared to team that is great at everything. and basically, if you are great at only 1 thing - defense is the worst return on investment - because it takes so much more talent to go from decent to great, in defense, because the returns are higher in everything else until you are very good at it, then better in defense from there on up. its only when you are already very good at everything that defense becomes such an attractive investment, an untouchable investment.
anyway, it is rough because your defense is pretty awesome, your pg has great guard skills, you have strong rebounding, and have solid lp talent - and that is a lot of things you covered. a lot more 3 point scoring and some more guard skills, and you'd really be in pretty good shape. that said, when a press team hits their stride, their reward for having to be 2 players deeper than anyone else is that they REALLY hit that stride, so a big part of this is you simply were against a press team with great depth and speed, who was decent enough at everything else to be competitive in all areas, making them a tough opponent - even though you have a bunch more talent, the return they are getting on their talent is a lot higher.