AUBURN HILLS – It comes a few weeks deeper into the season and it comes at The Palace instead of on the road. But the 106-101 win over Cleveland on Thursday also comes with the same hefty feel as a February 2016 win at Quicken Loans Arena.
Last season’s win came with the Pistons reeling out of the All-Star break, two games under .500 at 27-29 and in peril of falling out of the playoff race. They’d lost the day before. And Stan Van Gundy moved Tobias Harris into the starting lineup. Against long odds, the Pistons closed strong to beat the conference-leading Cavaliers by eight points.
Thursday’s win came with the Pistons also coming off a loss the previous day and also sitting at two games below .500 at 31-33. In a similarly jumbled Eastern Conference playoff race, the Pistons were a mere half-game ahead of the teams in ninth and 10th places, Miami and Milwaukee. And Van Gundy again moved Harris into the starting lineup after he’d come off the bench for more than two months.
“It was a great win for us,” Andre Drummond said after a 20-point, 16-rebound game in which he shot 10 of 13. “We showed a lot of fight. They threw a lot of punches at us. We took ’em and we kept coming. We didn’t stop.”
“It’s probably the happiest our locker room’s been all year,” Van Gundy said. “And it wasn’t just getting a win and it wasn’t just beating Cleveland. It was sort of the way we did it. We really, really had to fight.”
Last season��s win was the springboard for a 16-9 finish that clinched the franchise’s first playoff berth since 2009. With 17 games left this season, the hope is Thursday’s win – in which the Pistons overcame a 15-point first-half deficit, led by 10 in the third quarter and then trailed by seven to start the fourth – serves as a similar launching point.
Despite that seven-point deficit to start the fourth, the door was ajar for them because LeBron James began it on Cleveland’s bench. When he sat for less than six minutes of the first half, the Pistons outscored Cleveland by 10 points. The Pistons shoved the door wide open while James sat for the first 3:32 of the fourth quarter, outscoring Cleveland 13-0 to take an 86-80 lead they would never yield.
“It’s a pretty amazing stat,” Van Gundy said. “Thirty-nine minutes he plays, they’re plus-18 with him on the floor, which means in the nine minutes he was on the bench – only nine minutes – we outscored ’em by 23.”
The Pistons opened the fourth quarter with a unit that’s rarely played together: full-time starters Reggie Jackson and Drummond, reinstated starter Harris and Stanley Johnson and Reggie Bullock off the bench.
Jackson, who scored 14 fourth-quarter points in Monday’s comeback win over Chicago in the last home game, scored 12 of his 21 in the fourth quarter against the Cavs and added four assists. Drummond had eight points and six boards in the quarter.
“I didn’t necessarily think I had the legs,” Jackson said. “All of us out there felt a little tired, but (teammates) just kept telling me, ‘Keep going downhill. Keep being aggressive.’ ”
During a fourth-quarter timeout, the coaching staff told Jackson Cleveland was going to start doubling him up high and to be ready to get the ball out of his hands.
“I told Coach I was ready and something I had pride and wanted to do well,” he said. “I haven’t done so well with it throughout the season, so I wanted to do well with it tonight and let my guys make plays.”
“Making plays for other people. He got people shots,” Van Gundy said. “He was content to make the pass. I thought it was a very, very mature game on his part and he finished it up very, very well.”
It might have been over before it started if not for the tongue lashing Marcus Morris administered during a first-quarter timeout with the Pistons trailing 27-12 after a barrage of Cleveland dunks.
“He just put his hand on my shoulder,” Van Gundy said, “and he said, ‘I got this.’ And he really went after guys.”
In a game with no shortage of candidates as turning points, maybe that was the biggest. The Pistons, dragging after their loss at Indiana and just 2-9 in back to backs this season against a Cleveland team that hadn’t played since Monday, looked like long shots to win before tipoff and looked ready to pack it in with 1:55 left in the first quarter when that timeout came.
It was all very reminiscent of last February, when another Pistons team playing another back to back found its footing with a win against Cleveland. No wonder that was such a happy locker room Van Gundy entered.
“It was a great for us, just the way we battled back, the effort we got from everybody and the way we just kept fighting the whole night,” Harris said. “We just really just played an all-around solid game. It’s very satisfying for everybody in the locker room.”