CHARLOTTE – Needing to scrape up every win they can find during Reggie Jackson’s absence – which, by all appearances, is coming mercifully close to an end – the Pistons secured a very big one, accomplished mostly without Andre Drummond.
It sure didn’t look like it at the time, but Drummond’s departure – a flagrant two foul for an elbow to Roy Hibbert’s head he denied intending – signaled a turning point in the Pistons’ favor. Their early 11-point lead gone as Kemba Walker’s triple creased the net with 4:09 left in the second quarter, the Pistons responded to Drummond’s ejection at exactly that moment in a way that might eventually be recalled as a turning point for more than just one game.
The Pistons outscored Charlotte 9-2 to close the half and dominated the second half against a leg-weary team playing its fourth game in five nights. In the process, the Pistons pushed back against a number of troubling trends, including lousy defensive performances on the road that explained their 1-8 record away from The Palace and a punchless 3-point game.
The 112-89 win was fashioned on a defense that limited Charlotte to 11 second-half field goals, on the strength of a season-best 12 made triples, on a gang rebounding performance that saw four players besides Drummond grab seven or more boards and on Stan Van Gundy’s off-season personnel moves.
Additions Ish Smith and Beno Udrih – the former added on the first day of free agency, the latter 48 hours before the season opener in response to Jackson’s void – combined for 20 points and 10 assists. Jon Leuer had 12 points and seven rebounds in 32 minutes, shifting to center to start the third quarter.
“Coach has done a great job in the off-season bringing in Jon and Boban (Marjanovic) and I think Aron’s (Baynes) a starting center, so our front line is pretty good,” Smith said. “It’s a blow whenever you lose an All-Star like Andre, but we plugged it right in and kept pushing. So that was a good win.”
Van Gundy took pains to point out that his former assistant and close friend Steve Clifford’s team was at the most extreme scheduling disadvantage the NBA presents, but delighted his team showed graphic evidence that its curious road lethargy wouldn’t be a season-long albatross.
“Give them their due. Four games in five nights, that’s awful difficult in this league,” he said. “But, still, we did what we were supposed to do and it was important for us to do that.”
It helped that the Pistons got off to a hot start, getting early triples from Tobias Harris and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, the night’s co-stars with Harris scoring 24 points while attempting only 12 shots and Caldwell-Pope augmenting his 18 points with seven assists and seven rebounds.
Harris cited a resolve that began long before Drummond’s ejection raised the level of urgency another few notches.
“We came in here before the game, in shootaround, we set out a bunch of goals we needed to do to be better on the road and we came out and pretty much crossed everything off the list we needed to do. We stuck to the game plan. It was great that everybody contributed.”
The bullet points were being especially vocal with defensive communication, having five players sprint back after every missed shot and move the basketball with purpose on offense.
The Pistons held Charlotte to 40 percent shooting and just 11 second-half baskets, outrebounded the Hornets by four despite getting just 13 minutes from Drummond and shot 49 percent with only 12 turnovers. Nobody had a bigger smile in the locker room than Drummond.
“They played great,” he said. “They came out and they held the fort down. As a collective group – without me – they played well.”
Drummond was surprised at his ejection, as was everybody on the Pistons side, given the nature of the play. Replays showed his elbow grazing the back of Hibbert’s head and the NBA is always likely to err on the side of caution with any contact above the neck.
“I don’t make the rules, I just play the game,” Drummond said. “They felt like I did something maliciously. Everybody who knows me knows the way I play. That’s not the type of player I am, but at the end of the day it wasn’t my call. I just took the consequences and walked off the floor.”
And then the Pistons picked themselves up off of it and won a road game against one of the teams ahead of them in a conference race that gets more real for them the second Reggie Jackson returns.
“We’ve been struggling with the road games, so for us to come out and play with the resolve we played with tonight was definitely a great victory for us.”