game recap

none

Keith Langlois

In the waning days of a season that’s served up more than its share of misery and misfortune on the Pistons, there was no holding back the joy they derived from a night an unlikely star among them will never forget.

Malachi Flynn joined the rarefied air of the NBA’s 50-point club in Wednesday’s 121-113 loss to the Atlanta Hawks on a night the Pistons found out just minutes before tipoff that Cade Cunningham, coming off three consecutive 30-point outings, would be pulled to ease the strain on the left knee that’s dogged him since an early-January injury forced him out of the lineup for nearly three weeks.

Without Cunningham – plus the handful of other injured teammates – the Pistons needed scoring from somewhere, especially with Jaden Ivey struggling to find the range amid a 3 of 15 outing.

Enter Flynn, who needed only the first half to match his season high of 17 points. By the time the third quarter had ended, Flynn had soared past his previous career high, 27 points set in May 2021 as a Toronto rookie, with 31. Then he scored 19 more in the fourth quarter to join George Yardley (twice), Dave Bing, Kelly Tripucka, Jerry Stackhouse, Rip Hamilton, Blake Griffin and Saddiq Bey in the Pistons 50-point club.

“I think right now it’s a little tougher because, at the end of the day, you want to win. That’s my main goal,” Flynn said afterward. “But it definitely feels good. The guys congratulated me in the back; that also feels good to take in the moment. But I’m sure a couple of days from now, it’ll feel a little bit better.”

Flynn didn’t get to 50 because of any gimmicks or any gunning, either. He hit a remarkable 18 of 25 shots, including 5 of 9 from the 3-point line and 9 of 12 free throws. His six rebounds also shared the team lead and he led the Pistons with five assists and three steals.

“He just works on his game,” Monty Williams said. “He’s in the gym every morning, pretty much an hour before practice, maybe more. He works on his game. You saw that tonight. All those shots he made were shots I see him work on every day. It wasn’t just that. He had some timely passes. That tells you a lot about him as a player. When he saw guys open, he got off of it.”

Flynn got to 50 with his easiest basket of the night, an uncontested layup that came off a Chimezie Metu steal with 31 seconds left to pull the Pistons within five. He’d tripled with 51 seconds left to get to 48 points. Flynn hit 8 of 12 shots in the fourth quarter and 3 of 5 from the 3-point line.

Flynn, 25, was the 29th&nbsp;pick of the 2020 draft out of San Diego State. He spent his first three-plus seasons with Toronto and then was traded twice in a 40-day span, going from Toronto to New York in a deal headlined by O.G. Anunoby, R.J. Barrett and Immanuel Quickley and from New York to Detroit in the deal that sent veterans Bojan Bogdanovic and Alec Burks to the Knicks with Quentin Grimes and draft capital coming back to the Pistons.

It's been a revolving door for the Pistons all season with Jaylin Nowell, signed to a 10-day contract earlier Wednesday, becoming the 31st&nbsp;player to suit up for them this season and tie an NBA record set recently by Memphis, another team beset by a horrific run of injuries this season. Through it all, Williams has consistently expressed his admiration and gratitude for the way Pistons players have persevered and maintained an esprit de corps.

“I think we’ve got a great group of young guys,” Flynn said. “Everybody’s welcomed me in. I think we’ve got like seven new guys, maybe more. We all hang out, have fun, practice, play around with each other, joke around with each other. That’s just who we are as a group and it starts at the top, from Monty to the players to the management. I think it’s one collective good group.”

“That’s not going to go anywhere,” Williams said of the team’s resolve and chemistry. “I’ve said it all year, I’ll continue to say it – these guys come in the gym every single day to get better, to hear the game plan, to get some of the wisdom that we may have to share with them. It starts with our players. They bring it every day. If you’d seen our shootaround this morning, you’d have thought it was the first week of training camp.

“I just told them, it’s an honor to coach a group like that. They’re not looking for excuses. They’re not victims. They want to win games and they know what we’re doing here. We’re building for this year, going forward and the future. All of these guys are really impressive to be around, not just the shot-making but the spirit and what they bring to the program every day.”

Flynn will be a free agent at season’s end, though the Pistons could make him a restricted free agent if they extend a qualifying offer by the end of June. He certainly gave them something to think about with the ninth 50-point game in Pistons history and the first since Bey scored 50 against Orlando two years ago. It was only the third 50-point game in NBA history by a player coming off the bench. Nick Anderson and Jamal Crawford had the others. It was the first time Flynn had scored 50 points at any level.

“I almost had it in high school,” he grinned. “My coach took me out.”

flynns-50-piece-picks-up-the-pistons-on-a-night-they-needed-a-boost

Flynn’s 50-piece picks up the Pistons on a night they needed a boost

The Pistons are now approaching the team they envisioned as the season began five months ago – with a roster that they would barely recognize from those days. They sat at 6-43 as the trade deadline neared in early February and a four-game Western Conference road trip awaited ahead of the All-Star break. Somehow getting even younger after four trades in 30 hours that overhauled half the roster – seven players remain from the team that began the season – the Pistons are 6-10 since that time.

They wanted to win with defense this season and Monty Williams set vaulting up from the 27th-ranked unit they were last season to middle of the pack as the goal. They’re 13th&nbsp;in defensive rating since that time at 113.0; they were 29th&nbsp;at 120.5 before that.

They’ve won two in a row and three of their last four after Wednesday’s 113-104 win over Toronto. The Raptors nearly became the third team held under 100 points in the last 15 days but a spate of late turnovers – four in the final 1:01 – helped the Raptors to score 10 points in the final 1:13.

Holding a team to 104 points in a season where scoring has soared to a 114.8 average is still an achievement. And when you hold a team to 104 while turning it over a whopping 22 times, that’s a remarkable achievement. Turnovers have been a season-long issue for the Pistons, one the roster turnover hasn’t fully addressed for a simple reason: The guys handling the ball remain the same and they are all young ballhandlers in a league that generally eats the young.

But even there, the backcourt of Cade Cunningham (22), Jaden Ivey (22) and Marcus Sasser (23) has shown they’ve absorbed lessons. If you could quantify turnovers, the Pistons aren’t making as many of the killer variety these days, the ones that lead to easy buckets the other way. A traveling violation or an illegal screen isn’t the same as getting stripped in the paint or firing a cross-court pass into traffic. Over the last seven games, the Pistons have committed 19 or more turnovers three times – but 12 or less four times.

The Pistons gave up savvy scoring and 3-point firepower at the trade deadline, but ended up with a roster better equipped to compete at the defensive end – the area general manager Troy Weaver and Williams consistently assert is the place where the turnaround of the Pistons must be launched.

To that end, the Pistons really won Wednesday’s game at the start of the fourth quarter with a second unit on the floor that included Sasser, newcomers Quentin Grimes and Simone Fontecchio, Stanley Umude and James Wiseman. They didn’t tear it up on offense – they’d scored 14 points in 6:39 when Williams brought back Isaiah Stewart and Jalen Duren, a 100-point pace for 48 minutes – but they extended a four-point lead to 11 by holding Toronto to seven in that time, a 50-point pace.

Cunningham was about to join them when Sasser hit the second of his consecutive 3-point buckets with 4:26 to play to push the lead to 14, but he told Williams to let Sasser roll.

“Hats off to the second unit tonight,” Stewart said. “They continued to build on the lead until the starters got back on. Sasser was hot, so Cade was a great teammate and told Coach to just let him finish out the game.”

The Pistons won on a night they didn’t shoot very well, 44.3 percent, and gave up 22 possessions via turnover. But they held Toronto to 44.1 percent. They outrebounded them by a dominant 58-37 count and shot 31 free throws to 19 for Toronto, categories that skew toward the more physical teams, and those numbers surely delight both Weaver and Williams.

A physical, defense-first team is where they’re trying to go. Duren played above the crowd from the opening tip and finished with 24 points and 23 rebounds in just 28 minutes. Wiseman, himself a new player since about the time of the trade deadline, added six points, 10 boards and three blocks in 19 minutes. Stewart scored 15 points, hit all three of his 3-point attempts and was cited at halftime by Williams for his stout defense.

“He was the one guy putting his chest on the ball,” Williams said. “Got a blocked shot, stayed in front of the ball, forced tough shots. He just does his job and he’s one of the best in the league. A lot of people talk about guarding one through five; he’s certainly one guy in that category. Defensively, he’s an anchor for us every single night.”

The pieces are emerging. The pieces fit in a way they didn’t before February’s upheaval. Stewart, Duren and Wiseman give the Pistons a trio of young big men who bring a smorgasbord of length, rim protection, physicality, lob dunking power and toughness. Ivey and Ausar Thompson, who missed a second straight game due to illness, provide otherworldly perimeter athleticism and above-the-rim sizzle. Grimes and Fontecchio are grinders who’ll settle in as energetic 3-and-D rocks. Sasser throws off some Vinnie Johnson vibes for the way he comes off the bench and changes the game’s texture. And Cunningham stitches it all together with elite basketball IQ, big-moment aplomb and a star’s aura.

The season got sideways on them in a Murphy’s Law kind of way. Whatever could go wrong – injuries that couldn’t have been timed worse or been more wickedly distributed – did for the first few months. But Williams maintained throughout the depths of their travails that he saw an unbreakable spirit with a team more suited age-wise for the Big Ten than the NBA. The proof is in the pudding. If the Pistons had let hard times defeat them, their recent turnaround would not have gotten off the ground.

“It sounds crazy, but we felt like we gained momentum during the losing streak,” he said. “Because of the way our guys approached every day. Nobody’s listening, but I told people who would listen I’ve never seen anything like it. Our guys came in every day and were ready to compete. Everybody wants to win, but there’s steps to it. You go through those steps to gain that momentum. We’re clear about not skipping steps in this organization and that’s what we want to do through the end of the season.”

It ends a month from today. It’s a month the Pistons intend to milk for every ounce of momentum it can provide to carry into a future worth embracing.

pistons-better-suited-now-to-be-the-defense-first-team-they-envisioned

Pistons better suited now to be the defense-first team they envisioned

detddelfuoco

photos-pistons-120-hawks-126

Photos: Pistons 120 Hawks 126

photos-pistons108-bulls-119

Photos: Pistons108 Bulls 119

photos-pistons-106-76ers-114

Photos: Pistons 106 76ers 114

photos-pistons-118-bucks-120

Photos: Pistons 118 Bucks 120

photos-pistons-109-warriors-120

Photos: Pistons 109 Warriors 120

If you were curious as to why Troy Weaver has maintained throughout his restoration project that it was critical to sprinkle a handful of veterans among the wave of young draft picks, the past two games serve as foundational evidence.

If you were struck by Monty Williams’ stated desire to have the current handful of Pistons veterans split among the starting and bench units to guide the ascendant young stars who constitute the franchise’s future, same.

The Pistons had a 15-point lead midway through the third quarter on Wednesday against Portland, but when the Trail Blazers found a hot hand, Shaedon Sharpe, to suddenly whittle their deficit, the screws tightened – and so did the Pistons. On Thursday night in New Orleans, the Pistons opened 7 of 7 but got caught up in a shootout – and when their shots stopped dropping but the Pelicans kept the scoreboard churning, again the Pistons lost their moorings.

The Pistons focused intently on becoming a better defensive team throughout training camp and put that on display through the first three games, holding teams to 101.3 points on average. But young teams are prone to turnovers and bouts of offensive dysfunction and in those stretches everything else, defense and focus included, starts to unravel.

It's in those moments – the inevitable dips when your team is on the wrong end of a run – where the veterans for whom Williams scripted roles over off-season strategizing sessions are leaned on to stabilize matters. To prevent 6-0 runs from becoming 16-0 landslides. To remember to keep running offense instead of devolving into street ball. To block out every external distraction and double down on defense and fundamentals.

When adversity strikes, a young player’s instincts tell him to do something to pull his team out of a tailspin. And “something” usually means something off script. That’s when small cracks become gaping chasms.

It was a 14-0 New Orleans run in the first quarter that was the turning point on Thursday and even if the Pelicans were also missing two dynamic players – Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram – they had two bellwether veterans, C.J. McCollum and Jonas Valanciunas, to ground them.

McCollum scored 25 points, Valanciunas 12 and seven rebounds in the first half to put their team far enough ahead that even when the young Pistons exhibited the resilience that Williams has extolled, they couldn’t come any closer than eight points.

“We had a number of guys out there that just said, ‘Enough. We’ve got to guard the ball. We’ve got to do our stuff harder,’ ” Williams said after the Pistons outscored New Orleans 67-53 after halftime. “That was the standard we have to start games with and play with for as close to 48 minutes as we can. I know it’s a back-to-back. I know guys are tired. But we showed what we can do and be in the second half.”

The Pistons veterans, the guys they would have gone to down the stretch to protect the lead against Portland and the ones they would have sent out to halt the bleeding early against New Orleans, aren’t just journeymen who’ve lasted as long as they have in the NBA because they’ve earned reputations as great teammates and reliable players. They’re all of that, but much more than that.

Give the Pistons Bojan Bogdanovic, Alec Burks and Monte Morris and you’ve got three players who are crafty, efficient scorers who stretch defenses and make life so much easier for the players at their sides. Isaiah Livers provides 3-point shooting, size, defensive versatility and a high basketball IQ. They and veteran sniper Joe Harris are the only five Pistons 25 or older. The first four are out.

Bogdanovic, Burks and Morris are especially good at exploiting a defense’s vulnerabilities. Modern-day NBA defenses, the ones run by veteran teams, can be suffocating but all of them have some areas that can be exploited by those with the smarts and skills to do so. The Pistons are missing an awful lot of smarts and skill without those three.

The Pistons miss those guys for more than their savvy and their shooting. Weaver put the roster together with an eye toward building depth and prioritizing defense and the attributes common to good defenders – length, athleticism, tenacity. But when you lose four key players – four guys who ranged from dead-solid locks to highly probable to be part of their rotation – the depth takes a whopper of a hit. And with diminished depth comes diminished defense.

In their absence, the Pistons are leaning heavily on those still standing. Ausar Thompson comes with 220 volts of electricity flowing through his every fiber and he’s already stamped himself as a building block, but he’s still in his infancy in understanding game flow. When the Pistons were groping to find anything to slow New Orleans during the 14-0 run, Thompson – left so wide open you can only assume it was a bullet point on the game plan to exploit his underdeveloped jump shot – launched four 3-pointers and missed them all.

If Bogdanovic or Burks had been available, surely one or both would have been on the floor at that time. For a young team that’s been badly dinged by turnovers, Morris – allergic to mistakes – would be a panacea.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s the experience being logged by young players getting extended minutes and learning how to respond to failure and situations they’ve never experienced. Marcus Sasser, the other rookie, is grasping opportunity with both hands. He scored 19 points, all in 13 second-half minutes while missing just one shot and not committing a turnover, and Williams said something to make the ears perk up after the game: “He’s starting to look like a good complement to Cade and Killian. Those three guys, they played well tonight.”

It's been a perfect storm so far for the Pistons, getting six games in nine days with three separate road trips already in the books and doing so with the veterans that had Weaver and Williams believing they were poised to sprint out of the gates mostly unavailable.

The Pistons get two days now to catch their breath. They’ll need it. Next up: back-to-back games against the star-laden Phoenix Suns and Golden State Warriors.