MILWAUKEE – A season filled with “what ifs” ran headlong into a game crammed with even more of them. And though it ended the way the season looks almost certain to now – in bitter disappointment – it at least gave Stan Van Gundy reaffirmation of the character he felt he’d stocked on his roster.
“It’s killing me, the losing,” he said after the Pistons overcame a 22-4 deficit in the game’s first six minutes, lost a 10-point lead in the final five minutes of regulation and then couldn’t corral a defensive rebound that cost them the chance to win in overtime of a 108-105 loss.
“But the one thing you come away with at least, as a coach, is you regain some faith in the character of the people in the locker room and the fact that they want to fight and want to play and everything else. I don’t think we could’ve played any harder.”
In the NBA, they call what the Pistons faced a “scheduling loss.” It was their fourth game in five nights, their seventh in 11, on the road, against a surging opponent. Then Milwaukee made five straight 3-point shots to rocket to that huge 18-point lead.
But the Pistons started chipping away, a turnaround that began when Van Gundy went to his bench of Beno Udrih, Tobias Harris and Aron Baynes. Udrih, serving as backup to Ish Smith over the past four games with Reggie Jackson idled by Van Gundy, was superb, registering season highs of 16 points on 7 of 10 shooting with eight assists and one turnover in 21 minutes.
��He played really well,” said Harris, who led the Pistons with 23 points on 10 of 14 shooting. “That’s his game – come off the pick and roll, get to the mid-range and he opened it up at that point and was able to get into the lane and to the basket and dish off for open shots. We got a lot of good ball movement with him out there and he created a lot of separation (between) the defense and himself.”
“Beno is a veteran,” Marcus Morris said. “Old school. Moves the ball well. He dribbles to open spots (and) he gets shots, great looks and he’s always communicating and talking. One thing he did a very good job of is getting the ball to the weak side and getting guys open shots.”
Van Gundy pulled Udrih with 4:30 left and the Pistons ahead by seven after Udrih had played the previous 11-plus minutes in his fourth game in five nights after rarely playing since Jackson returned in early December. There was no question Udrih needed a rest, but Van Gundy second guessed himself for not coming back to him to start overtime.
“Beno was tremendous,” he said. “And Ish was good, but I think he got tired at the end, too. Maybe I should’ve given him a blow to start the overtime and gone back with Beno for a couple of minutes there, at least, but Beno was outstanding. The whole second unit was good. I do think getting Tobias back on the bench has helped the second unit get going again, but obviously the start of the game was so bad.”
Van Gundy saw fatigue affect the Pistons after Kentavious Caldwell-Pope’s triple with 5:09 to play gave the Pistons a 91-81 lead. Smith tried to probe the defense, but if that went nowhere he’d kick it to the wing and the Pistons basically devolved into one-on-one action. Their only two baskets in regulation after Caldwell-Pope’s triple were a Baynes layup off a Smith setup and a Harris tip off Smith’s missed jump shot.
The Pistons had a chance to take the lead with under 15 seconds left, but Morris – isolated against Tony Snell – slipped as he rose for a jump shot.
“If I didn’t slip, that was good,” Morris said. “I had him. Got to the spot I needed to get to. Slipped.”
The Pistons fell four points behind to start overtime but got consecutive Smith buckets to tie at 99, then got a Caldwell-Pope triple with 1:22 left to tie again at 102. The dagger was a Khris Middleton triple off an offensive rebound with 41 seconds to play.
“It’s a killer,” Van Gundy said. “We talk about that all the time with the long rebounds. You can’t run out; you’ve got to be coming back and we didn’t do it. Again, all those mistakes get magnified in close games at crucial parts of the season. But again, with them in the locker room, I tried to really focus on the positive. I thought our guys fought very, very hard.”
They did, of course, and that provoked a final what if.
“There’s no moral victories, but it’s something to take from this game, something we can learn from and build on,” Harris said. “As we said in the locker room, this should’ve been the energy and the focus that we had 10, 15 games ago. We showed a lot of fight out here, especially the fourth game in five nights and seven in 11. It’s something that needs to be consistent.”