LOS ANGELES – A week ago in Portland seems like a month ago. Maybe a year.
Seven days after Reggie Jackson led a stunning comeback, scoring 26 of his 40 points in the fourth quarter as the Pistons beat Portland to take their record to 5-1, he was benched in the fourth quarter for Spencer Dinwiddie as the Pistons lost their fourth straight game to fall to 5-5.
So the Pistons went 0-4 in California and the elation they felt as they got to San Francisco last week … well, whatever the opposite of that is what they felt leaving Los Angeles.
“It was awful,” Stan Van Gundy said of the six-game trip. “You lose four in a row, there’s no other way to put it. It was awful.”
“It wasn’t a successful trip,” said Jackson, who shouldered the blame after committing five turnovers against just three assists and 4 of 11 shooting in his 24 minutes.
Spencer Dinwiddie got a chance to back up Reggie Jackson and wound up matching Andre Drummond’s 17 points to lead the Pistons.
The Pistons held their biggest lead of the game – three points, at 72-69, with 9:50 left after Anthony Tolliver’s corner triple off a Dinwiddie feed – when Jackson re-entered. On his first possession, he dribbled into congestion in the paint and lost his dribble for a turnover. On his second, miscommunication between Jackson and Tolliver ended in Jackson’s pass sailing out of bounds. On his third, he dribbled until he was out of options and launched a badly errant 3-point shot.
The Pistons scored only one basket on Jackson’s 10 fourth-quarter possessions – his drive and lob to Andre Drummond for a dunk – and when Jackson air balled a tough corkscrew jump shot, Van Gundy had seen enough. Dinwiddie replaced Jackson with 4:55 to play and the Lakers leading 80-74.
“His decision-making was terrible,” Van Gundy said. “He’s trying to go behind his back in the middle of the lane. He’s up in the air. He just had a really bad night. The guy has had a heavy workload on this trip. Two wins we got were largely him taking over late in the game. And I think he’s a little worn down and today, whatever, I think mental fatigue, too. He was a little bit out of it today and his decision-making was bad, but guys are going to have bad nights and he had an awful one tonight.”
“I played too poorly, probably, for us to get over the hump,” Jackson said. “Dug us a hole. It’s kind of hard to battle back when your starting point guard plays that bad.”
Van Gundy said watching Dinwiddie play in post-practice three-on-three or four-on-four games with players who need extra work inspired him to give the second-year point guard a crack at the backup job that has been Steve Blake’s so far this season.
“Back to back (games), he and Reggie Bullock in there, trying to get some fresh legs in the game, that was number one,” Van Gundy said of his thought process. “When we’ve played after practice, Spencer’s played well. Guys don’t think that stuff means anything, but I’m watching and I liked the way he was playing and I thought it was a good opportunity to play him and he stepped up and played really, really well.”
Van Gundy told Dinwiddie he’d get his shot during the morning walk through at the team hotel, a happy coincidence given the son of Los Angeles had family in the crowd.
“It’s not easy at all (to be thrust into games after long idle stretches),” Dinwiddie said. “Any basketball player will tell you that. But our job is to be professionals and what makes you comfortable is your coach having confidence enough to play you and also your teammates just tell you to gout there and do what you do in practice.”
Dinwiddie hit 6 of 9 shots and turned the ball over just once in his 24 minutes while dishing out four assists on a night the Pistons again didn’t get much in the way of ball movement, registering assists on only 16 of their 35 baskets while shooting 36.5 percent overall and 25.9 percent from the 3-point arc.
“I thought we played hard tonight,” Van Gundy said. “I didn’t have a problem with the effort. I thought other than fouling them a lot, our defense was good. Our defensive rebounding was good. We’re just, offensively, we’re a little bit of a mess right now. And we’re not making any shots. I don’t think we’re getting enough quality shots. But we’re also not making the ones we get.”
The challenge – besides flushing the four-game losing streak from their system, flying cross country and finding the Cleveland Cavaliers awaiting them in their Tuesday homecoming at The Palace – is to maintain their fighting spirit and not let all the momentum of their encouraging start dissipate.
“Everybody understands we have to play better,” Dinwiddie said. “A lot of it has to do with hitting shots. Stan even said, our defense is solid. It’s not spectacular like it was in the beginning of the season, but you’ve got to hit shots to win basketball games. We’re holding guys around 100 or under 100. You do have to make shots. That’s something that is an emphasis for us right now. That’s about it.”