On a night the Pistons scored 114 points, two lapses in productivity cost them. On a night Atlanta grabbed only eight offensive rebounds, second chances for the Hawks proved critical.
That kind of night. That little margin for error.
Stan Van Gundy’s body language would have been bleeped after the 118-114 loss to the Hawks. And the locker room was downright funereal, as somber as it’s been all season.
But the reality is if the Pistons play at the level they mustered Wednesday night over the final 14 games, they’ll be fine.
Yeah, their defense was gashed. But the Hawks, a playoff team the past eight years and gunning for home court in the first round, played their A game when A-minus would have gotten them beat. And they knew it.
“They came out firing. They really played well tonight,” Atlanta’s Al Horford said after his 21-point, 11-rebound game.
“They were playing amazing,” said teammate Kent Bazemore, who hit 2 of 4 from the 3-point arc and finished with a 15 and 10 double-double. “Both teams played really well tonight. You can say defense wasn’t played, but there were a lot of great shots out there.”
Atlanta’s calling card this season has been its defense. The Hawks rank No. 2 in the league behind San Antonio and it’s been especially sharp lately. In their five wins amid a 5-1 stretch coming into Wednesday, they’d given up 83.4 points a game.
But the Hawks pose perplexing challenges offensively and especially when they’re hitting 3-point shots which can come from all five positions. Of the 10 Hawks who played, eight made at least one 3-pointer.
The biggest? The one Horford – the center, mind you – hit with 3:40 left in the third quarter. The Pistons had just spurted to an 11-point lead, the biggest either team had all night, and coaxed a missed 3-pointer out of Dennis Schroder. But Horford got the long rebound and 13 seconds later drained the triple. That launched a 16-2 Atlanta run as the Pistons endured a stretch of one score in seven possessions that started when Mike Budenholzer ordered the first of many intentional fouls of Andre Drummond.
“Long rebounds where we didn’t come back to the ball,” Van Gundy said, citing one of the areas where the Pistons were hurt by what on balance were minor transgressions. “Very frustrating.”
Up 104-103 at the same point of the fourth quarter, the Pistons hit their second sketchy offensive stretch. Over five possessions, they committed two turnovers and missed three shots and the Hawks went on a 10-0 run.
“The ball wasn’t going in the basket. Some tough turnovers,” Reggie Jackson said, lamenting the critical closing stretch. “They won the fourth quarter. That was the game, right there.”
There was no shortage of big numbers and positives worth grasping. The Pistons had three players with double-doubles and one of them wasn’t Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who scored 24 points and held sharpshooter Kyle Korver to four on 1 of 5 shooting.
Drummond went for 18 and 18. Tobias Harris had 19 and 11 rebounds plus five assists. Jackson had 17 points and 10 assists.
But Atlanta had dazzling numbers, too, including three more with double-doubles (Horford, Bazemore, Paul Millsap). And their best players might have been guards Schroder and Jeff Teague combining for 40 points and 16 assists.
But the 118 points might as well have been emblazoned on Van Gundy’s forehead in neon as he continues to be vexed by defensive lapses.
“We just … we just … I can’t find any answers,” he said. “We’re just not guarding anybody. Their point guards killed us – 40 points and 16 assists. We can’t have Pope guard everybody. Somebody else has got to be able to guard someone on the court.”
But the 118 might be a tad misleading, too, in a game that generated extra possessions in large measure due to the intentional fouling of Drummond. Atlanta wound up shooting 43.8 percent, not an especially alarming figure on its own.
They just made too many big shots and got too many big stops.
“It was tough, man. We played hard tonight,” Drummond said. “Just a couple of mental mistakes down the stretch of the game and they capitalized on it.”
“We played great, but the result didn’t come out how we wanted,” Caldwell-Pope said. “Continue to play better offensively, keep moving the ball, and then – this home stretch – we’ve got to get better defensively.”
The Pistons get four lottery-bound teams next, starting with Sacramento on Friday. They understand the stakes.
“They’re important,” Caldwell-Pope said. “We’ve got to take the next four games and we’ve got to take them real serious. We can’t play down to our opponent.”