Stan Van Gundy used a great economy of words to describe the 93-83 loss to Brooklyn and none of them came from the “compliments” department.
“I thought our defense was mediocre and our offense was far below mediocre. We deserved to lose,” he said. “They played the game the way the game is supposed to be played and we played it exactly the opposite of the way it’s supposed to be played.”
The Pistons committed – cover your eyes – 18 first-half turnovers, a number that would raise the hair on the neck of any coach worth his salt if it were to come over the game’s full 48 minutes, never mind 24.
You could come up with a handful of legitimate reasons why something like that might happen: it’s the second preseason game; the Pistons are incorporating two new starters into the lineup and more than twice that into the rotation; Reggie Jackson missed most of the last week due to injury, just for starters.
“We could probably make a lot of excuses for our guys,” Van Gundy said. “No. We were selfish and we forced plays.”
Selfish?
“Yeah,” Kentavious Caldwell-Pope said without hesitation. “We didn’t pass the ball. We didn’t move it from side to side. We didn’t move the defense. We didn’t have any space on the floor to even attack or get open shots.”
Jackson committed four of the 18 first-half turnovers and six of the final total of 22. Many of them came right around the rim as he forced penetration.
“They crowd the paint,” Jackson said of the Nets, the formula coach Lionel Hollins used to great success in crafting one of the NBA’s stingiest defenses in Memphis. “They really try to make us have to beat them by moving the ball. We didn’t do so. We’ve got to get better at that, get better at trusting each other and just finding a great shot for the team each and every possession, no matter who’s the one taking it.”
The Pistons were significantly better offensively in the second half, scoring 51 points after being held to 32 over the first two quarters, and it would have been even better had they knocked down 3-pointers at a more typical rate than the 2 of 12 clip they managed. The right guys were taking them for the most part, too, but Anthony Tolliver finished 1 of 4, Caldwell-Pope 0 of 2 and Jodie Meeks 1 of 3 in the second half.
Another sign of the better ball movement after halftime? Their 10 offensive rebounds, including four apiece for Ersan Ilyasova – all in the third quarter, three of them converted into baskets – and Andre Drummond, who scored all 14 of his points after halftime.
“In the third quarter, we just got the ball moving,” Jackson said. “Once you get bodies out of position, you can take advantage of it.”
Van Gundy liked what he saw from Ilyasova, who had a nine-point, seven-rebound third quarter.
“Ersan’s third quarter was good and I thought Spencer’s (Dinwiddie) second-half stint was good,” Van Gundy said of his backup point guard, who’d struggled for the first 1½ preseason games but scored on two nice drives in the second half when he scored seven points with three assists and two rebounds. “So there’s always positives. I thought those two guys did a good job. I’m going to have a hard time getting to a third one. But we got two there.”
While Jackson, Caldwell-Pope and the players who dressed around them in the locker room agreed wholeheartedly with Van Gundy’s blunt assessments of their performance, they were already looking to move past it.
“Forget about what?” Jackson said when asked if it was a night he’d like to forget.
“The team performance,” came the reply.
“Like I said, forget about what?” Jackson said, before getting serious. “No, we’re going to have to watch film and get better from it, but we’ve got to move on.”
“You’ve got to have amnesia. So you forget about this one,” Caldwell-Pope said. “We played terrible. We’ve got to forget about it and just get ready for the next one.”