Stan Van Gundy’s long-term goal is positioning the Pistons for NBA championship runs. The foundation on which he’ll build out his blueprint starts with a top-10 defense. The Pistons have been anything but over the past six games.
The 2015-16 Pistons aren’t likely to suddenly call to mind the ’04 champions at the defensive end. So can they win enough games with their suddenly potent offense over the season’s critical final 12 games to outrace Chicago for the East’s final playoff berth?
“No,” Van Gundy says, no time needed to ponder the possibility. “Nope. We will not be able to.”
It’s improve on defense or bust, Van Gundy believes emphatically.
“I think for us to make any kind of serious push for a playoff spot, we’re going to have to defend a lot better than we have been. If we’re not going to defend, we’ll get a win here or there, maybe, but we’re not going to get enough to get ourselves into the playoffs. I really think for us, it’s either we defend or we’ll bow out of that race fairly quickly.”
The physical traits scouts covet in players as they project them to NBA-level defenders might vary by position, but it essentially boils down to athleticism and length for the position. Van Gundy, in charge of personnel for the first time in his three NBA stops, surely would endorse that philosophy.
But he has an even deeper conviction – that any NBA team committed to becoming a sound defensive team can do so. He certainly believes a Pistons team with the length and athleticism embodied by Andre Drummond, Tobias Harris, Marcus Morris, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Reggie Jackson has the stuff to be more than just adequate defensively.
“Yeah, but I think that of just about anybody. But certainly we do,” he said. “But we’re just not doing things well enough – certainly not on a consistent basis to be good enough defensively right now.”
The Pistons went into Saturday’s game with Brooklyn having allowed a troubling 115.8 points per game over their last five, going 2-3 with wins over Philadelphia and Sacramento. They made it to 3-3 with a 115-103 win over the Nets, but Brooklyn – the league’s 27th-ranked offense playing without its most accomplished player, Brook Lopez – became the fourth team over those last six games to shoot more than 50 percent. They also scored 25 or more points in three quarters, making it 21 such quarters over the past 24.
“It’s every night,” Van Gundy said after the game. “Going into tonight, over the last five games, we were dead last defensively – the worst defensive team in the league. And we weren’t much better tonight until the fourth quarter. So it’s disturbing, but I don’t know what the answer is. We got out with a win, so we’ll be happy with it and we’ll move on. And we’ll hope at some point that we can get some guys to start playing some defense.”
Good defensive teams, Van Gundy says, have something more important in common than the physical attributes scouts covet. It’s the elimination – or the minimization, at least – of points created by lapses in coverage or turnovers or other correctable errors.
“It’s not just being able to go out there and play your man and lock people down,” he said. “It’s the number of mistakes that you make.”
And to prove his point about building a top-10 defense that includes players who wouldn’t make any scout’s list of ideal defensive prospects, he cites an example from his past.
“I had J.J. Redick in Orlando – not a real athletic guy, not great size for his position,” he said. “People could score on him some one on one, but I always felt like he was a really good defender and you could have a really good defensive team with him because he made almost no mistakes. It was so rare for him to make a mistake. Wherever he was supposed to force his guy, he did it. He didn’t give up layups because he didn’t rotate. Those are the kind of guys you can build a really good defense around. We’ve got to be better in that area.”
When they scored 114 against Atlanta but lost by four, Van Gundy said he found about 26 or 28 points the Pistons could have prevented by not throwing careless passes, allowing deep offensive rebounds or preventing cuts to the basket. After Friday’s 115-108 win over Sacramento, he guessed before watching the videotape that he’d find at least 16 or 18 similar points.
“More than that,” he said after rewatching the game. “We’ve just got to be more attentive and focused.”
The Pistons get two more lottery-bound teams up next, Milwaukee and Orlando, before the schedule stiffens again. Three of the four teams in the games to wrap up their nine-game home stand are in the playoff field and the fourth, Washington, is 1½ games behind the Pistons.
“I know we’re capable of more. I know we need guys to put a lot more into it,” Van Gundy said. “We’ve still got a tough stretch here next week. Milwaukee’s been playing well and then we’ve got Orlando and then Charlotte and Atlanta. So it’s not going to be an easy week and we’re going to have to compete harder at the defensive end of the floor.”