TORONTO – If you polled the Pistons about the guy they’d want taking a game-winning 3-point shot on a night he’d missed 10 of his 11 attempts leading to that do-or-die moment, the result would be overwhelming – and perhaps unanimous.
“It would be Pope,” Ish Smith said. “Pope does a good job, no matter what. Pope kept shooting it with confidence. All his shots were looking good. I wasn’t worried. I was going to keep finding him.”
When he found Kentavious Caldwell-Pope with a little less than 15 seconds left in a game the Pistons had trailed since midway through the second quarter – and by 16 points to start the fourth quarter – the Pistons somehow found a way to win a game that looked beyond reach.
The 102-101 win required the Pistons to survive a 17-foot winning attempt from DeMar DeRozan, a shot he makes with the frequency of layups against most and especially against the Pistons. The last time the Pistons saw him – the 2016-17 season opener – DeRozan dropped 40 points on them.
“I will admit, every time he shoots that pull-up, I think it’s going in,” Stan Van Gundy said after a win that gave the Pistons the same 26-29 record as the Chicago Bulls, the teams currently occupying the final two playoff spots in the Eastern Conference. “Even that last one, I’m like ‘Ohhhhh, (expletive).’ ”
He might have had nearly the same degree of confidence in the result when Caldwell-Pope rose up for his corner triple in front of Toronto’s bench that put the Pistons ahead with 13.2 seconds to play. Caldwell-Pope has something of a history of hitting clutch jump shots even on nights he’s otherwise struggled. It’s a trait Van Gundy hopes rubs off on his teammates – not the result so much as the mindset.
“The thing that you’ve got to like about Pope is there’s no fear,” he said. “The situation of the game, I mean, it doesn’t faze him. So he took the one before and missed” – with the Pistons down five and 1:20 to play – “and came right back, got the one in the corner and knocked it in.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to get to. You’re open, shoot the ball. And 12 threes for him even though he wasn’t shooting it well – and then the one to win it.”
“Just hope it goes in – that’s what I was thinking,” Caldwell-Pope said. “I had a rough night shooting the ball from field and from three. Every time I came out of the huddle, even at halftime, everybody was just like, ‘keep shooting, keep shooting; don’t let it get you down.’ Just kept shooting and I had to be due for the game-winning shot.”
Caldwell-Pope’s shooting woes aside – he finished with 21 points, hitting 8 of 22 overall and 2 of 12 from three – he was Van Gundy’s best starter by acclimation on a night the bench saved them.
Especially good were Ish Smith (15 points, five rebounds, five assists, one turnover) and Tobias Harris (24 points on 9 of 13 shooting), which explains why they played the last 19-plus minutes straight. What explains why they – along with Aron Baynes and Stanley Johnson – were in the game as early as they were in the third quarter, at the 7:19 mark, was the lack of productivity from Van Gundy’s starters.
Reggie Jackson finished with six points and one assist, Jon Leuer with two points and zero rebounds. Andre Drummond played a strong fourth quarter after relieving Baynes with five of his 10 points and eight of his 18 rebounds and Marcus Morris had a huge defensive stop when he forced DeRozan’s last miss – and did it without fouling against a guy who gets to the line nearly nine times a game and had already taken seven free throws.
“That’s a shot he makes a lot, but Marcus was right on him,” Harris said. “Didn’t go for any of the pump fakes. That makes the shot a lot harder. He usually likes to get to the free-throw line. When he got up there, I was just hoping it was off, basically.”
DeRozan, who was hit with a technical foul when he argued for a call as the first half ended, threw his hands in the air as Drummond grabbed the rebound off his miss and the buzzer sounded, clearly expecting to be sent to the line.
“It was a play we have run in the past for DeMar,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. “He pump faked. I need to see on film if he got contact or not. Usually he vaults up and makes that shot, but the defender did a good job of staying on his feet.”
It would have been a devastating loss after the Pistons poured that much into the comeback, one Van Gundy kinda, sorta saw coming even down 16 after three quarters.
“Even at the end of the third quarter, when we were down 16 and we were struggling, I said to our assistants, ‘Our guys are playing hard. They’re fighting,’ ” he said. “They fought and fought and fought. And it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t one of those runs where you hit three or four threes in a row. It was just grind it out, grind it out, get it down to a manageable number and get a couple of big stops and a great shot down the stretch.”
It remains to be seen if it’s a springboard win that sparks a run or merely a critical notch in the win column in a season where every one of them feels precious. But it left a pretty happy locker room.
“It means a lot. We battled all night,” Harris said. “We kept fighting and we stayed positive throughout the ups and downs. We really pushed through and that’s a really good sign for us.”
“I think that’s what Coach is trying to instill in us,” Smith said. “That’s why we had a tough training camp. Tonight, I hope he’s proud. I think he’s proud and I hope we’re proud of each other. We just kind of continued to fight and stay with it and got a huge win against a really good team.”