OAKLAND, Calif. – The Pistons picked a bad night to have a bad night.
A season-high 20 turnovers, another starter lost to injury and another chapter in the ongoing saga of opponents who make 3-pointers like they were layups chased them from Oracle Arena with a second straight loss, dropping them to 18-23 at the season’s midway point.
“We didn’t play well enough,” Stan Van Gundy said. “We made too many defensive game-plan mistakes where we weren’t doing what we were supposed to be doing and we didn’t get back in transition and matched up and we turned the ball over. You do those three things against a team like that, you’ve got no chance.”
Not without Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who ran into the impenetrable fortress known as Zaza Pachulia and sacrificed his left shoulder at its altar. Caldwell-Pope recoiled in pain as Van Gundy called timeout four minutes into the game to get him off the court. He sat slumped on the bench while Pistons medical staffers examined him, then walked slowly to the locker room after a few minutes holding his left arm immobilized with his right hand.
X-rays taken at Oracle Arena proved negative, but Caldwell-Pope – who hurt the same shoulder last week in a game at The Palace but returned after a visit to the locker room – will have an MRI on Friday in Salt Lake City, where the shorthanded Pistons play the rested Utah Jazz later in the day.
“Any time we lose Pope, that’s tough. That’s a tough loss,” Reggie Jackson said. “He’s a competitor. Stretches the floor for us. He’s generally on the best guard, defending them, and he’s the aggressor on defense. We ask him to do a lot and that’s my man. To see him have to walk off the court, that hurt. That hurt the team. That hurt me personally.”
Golden State came out hot from the 3-point line – the Warriors finished 15 of 29, upping the three-game totals for Pistons opponents on their road trip to 43 of 88 – but the Pistons hung in. They trailed by nine early in the second quarter after the Warriors closed the first on an 8-0 run, but by just two at halftime.
The game got away with a 10-0 run in about two minutes, ending at the midway point of the third quarter, to give Golden State a 13-point lead. It swelled to 24 by quarter’s end.
“They’re a weird team, to be honest,” Jackson said. “They score so much and, the same time, they do give up some easy baskets and allow you to score with ’em. And then – we talked about it; I talked to our guys – there’s going to be a stretch where they lock in, they have about a four- to eight-minute window – that they really lock in defensively.”
So after shooting 53 percent in the first half and scoring 58 points, the Pistons shot 37 percent in the third quarter and were outscored 41-19.
“The second half is when they really got comfortable,” Tobias Harris said. “First half, I thought we played (well) offensively; we gave them a lot of fast-break points defensively. It was still a pretty close game. But in the second half, every mistake we made they made something out of it. They got their hands on a lot of basketballs. We were trying to make plays in gaps where there were a lot of guys there.”
“I thought they were terrible decisions, forcing the ball,” Van Gundy said. “We’re dribbling in the middle of the lane on five guys. We draw the second defender and then try to take it even deeper. I thought they were mainly poor decisions.”
Without Caldwell-Pope, with Reggie Bullock tending to family issues (he’s due to rejoin the Pistons on Friday in Utah), with rookie Michael Gbinije still out with a forearm injury and with Stanley Johnson needed up front to soak up minutes while Jon Leuer remains sidelined by injury, Van Gundy’s options on the wings – the deepest position on the team – have suddenly dried up.
“We have two right now – two actual wings,” Van Gundy said. “We’re down in numbers now. KCP, Jon, Reggie Bullock, Gbinije – yeah, we’re down. But that had nothing to do with it. We were good enough to play a lot better than that. We weren’t focused. I wasn’t happy with the way we played.”
“It is what it is,” Harris said. “That’s the name of the game in the NBA. There’s going to be ups and downs. We got a couple of guys down right now, but we expect whoever’s next into that spot, coming in, just has to be ready to go and ready to contribute.”
If there was a bright spot for the Pistons, it was another productive performance by Boban Marjanovic, who finished with 13 points and 11 rebounds in 16 minutes.
“He played well in the second quarter and he played well offensively,” Van Gundy said. “But he was another guy, just made too many defensive mistakes when he was in there. Not focused on what the heck we were supposed to be doing.”
For now, though, it appears the backup center spot behind Andre Drummond belongs to the 7-foot-4 Serbian.
“I like what Boban’s been doing,” Van Gundy said, “so I’m going to stick with him for a little bit here.”