NEW YORK – Perhaps no one appreciated what Reggie Jackson did in the game’s final two minutes quite like Brandon Jennings. Jennings has been in Jackson’s shoes plenty, the point guard charged with making critical decisions with a game on the line. Tough under any circumstance, the weight can be oppressive on nights like the one Jackson endured for 46 minutes at Brooklyn.
He was 5 for 17 and the Pistons trailed by three. He’d spent Saturday night in a Toronto medical center getting pumped with fluids to battle the dehydration he’d been fighting for the past two games. Jackson took a Kyle Lowry knee to his left thigh that night, too, and it stiffened on him at halftime Monday and caused a quick hook in the third quarter. He jammed his right thumb early against the Nets.
And then, on the game’s final four possessions, Jackson did this: Tie the game with a 3-point basket; put the Pistons ahead by scrambling Brooklyn’s defense and lasering a pass that produced an Andre Drummond – pretty big himself with 21 points and 18 boards – dunk for the lead; duck inside again for a mid-range jump shot to push the lead to four; and again dent the paint for a floater to essentially seal the win with 15 seconds left after Brooklyn had scored to pull within two.
“It’s just confidence,” Jennings said. “There’s going to be nights like that. You’ve just got to keep going, keep making plays.”
Jennings almost was put in the position to be the one making them. Stan Van Gundy was that close to pulling Jackson as he watched him labor through his litany of ailments.
“I was about to take him out before that stretch at the end because he just looked like he was about dead,” Van Gundy said after the 105-100 win that snapped a two-game losing streak amid a tough stretch of the schedule. “I was about to take him out and then he made every play down the stretch.”
“Just got to live in the moment,” Jackson said. “I think I do a pretty good job. If I missed or made a shot, just moving on to the next play. Something I’ve been trying to get better at and I think I’m getting to a point where I’m doing well with it. Still have lapses where you’re battling yourself out there, but you’ve got to trust that you’re putting the work in. Just have faith in all the work that I’ve put in throughout the season, have faith in my teammates and just continue to attack and be myself.”
It was a loss the Pistons couldn’t afford to absorb, not after the weekend back-to-back against the East’s top two teams, Cleveland and Toronto, that produced two tough losses to teams at the top of their games. Not with another road game against one of the teams they’re battling in the East up next, Boston, to start another back to back.
“We really needed this one,” said Jackson, who scored seven of his 19 points in the final 2:04. “We wanted to redeem ourselves. We want to be one of those bounce-back teams. We don’t want to drop two in a row, don’t like to drop multiple games at all. Trying to find a way to get a streak (going). The biggest thing is trying to increase one-game win streaks. Just go one game at a time. We were able to come out victorious tonight. We probably didn’t play our best game.”
Not defensively, for sure. Brooklyn, 29th in scoring at 95.4 points a game, ran up 57 points in the first half and scored 25 or better in every quarter except the third. The Pistons went on a 17-2 run midway through the quarter, tightening the screws defensively. But they struggled again when the Nets went to their bench, especially with the pick-and-roll wizardry of point guard Shane Larkin, who amassed 14 assists in only 22 minutes and spoon fed Andrea Bargnani a series of his bread-and-butter mid-range jump shots.
“We’re not playing defense. We’re just not,” Van Gundy said. “We played eight minutes, nine minutes of pretty good defense today. It’s frustrating. I’m not happy with it. I’m angry about it. But it’s not changing. I don’t know what we’re going to have to do, but we’re not a good defensive team right now.”
Van Gundy dismissed the crutches of youth and the scarcity of practice time.
“We’ve had plenty of practice. We went over stuff today,” he said. “There’s absolutely no excuse. There’s just a big lack of really being willing to do the hard work. I don’t think there’s anybody that doesn’t want to defend, but not quite willing to make the extra effort to get it done right now. We came out of the locker room from halftime energized and then as soon as we got the lead and got up 10, we just went back to playing bad defense again. That’s sort of where we are right now.”
On a night Jackson was less than sensational at winning time, it almost certainly would have condemned them to losing. But he was perfect, going 4-for-4 in pulling the right strings on the four possessions that decided the outcome.
“I don’t know what happens, but he’s been a really, really good closer,” Van Gundy said. “He knows the ball’s going to be in his hands then. He wants that responsibility and we’ve had nights where he wasn’t able to get it done. He can move on from that, which is what you have to have. Because it’s not going to go all the time.”
But when it had to go, on a night the Pistons had to have it, Reggie Jackson got it done in a city accustomed to that other Reggie Jackson rising to embrace big moments.