How many times did the Pistons come down, create a shot just as Stan Van Gundy diagrammed it in his office back in August and September, get another near-sellout crowd on its feet anticipating the spurt to blow things open and ... clang!?
"We just couldn't make shots," Stan Van Gundy said, but he wasn't wincing. He wasn't exactly smiling, either, but he was happy.
The Pistons were playing their fourth game in five nights to cap a week that stirred the soul of a basketball city like it hadn't been stirred since the Goin' to Work crew was reaching six straight Eastern Conference finals. They had a lot on the line, these suddenly revived Pistons, so they laid everything they had left on the line.
"Coach said something after the game last night. 'We're not falling back into losing and going backward,' " Kyle Singler said after the 98-93 win over Brooklyn – one of the teams the Pistons must leapfrog if they're going to make a run at the postseason. "We knew Brooklyn was going to come in and play us tough and they put up a good game. But I thought as a team, we fought tough and we hung in there and we played well enough to win."
It wouldn't have been like starting over again had they lost to Brooklyn, but it would have dulled the memory of that seven-game win streak, taken some of the wonder out of the dramatic back-to-back wins at San Antonio and Dallas earlier in the week. Now they go to Toronto, another Eastern Conference heavyweight, for a Monday meeting having won eight of nine and feeling like they've found another way to win.
"It was a grind," said one of their premier grinders, Jonas Jerebko. "It was close, 47-47 at halftime, and then four, five minutes left we made a little run and we kept it. I think that shows strength."
Jerebko was a big part of it, playing the entire fourth quarter and hitting two big 3-point shots on a night perimeter shooting – with those dead, heavy legs – was a struggle. The Pistons – who averaged 11 made triples and shot 40 percent from the arc in cobbling together those seven straight wins – made 11 of 33 triples with Jerebko hitting 3 of 5 and Singler 3 of 4.
But Jodie Meeks missed all five of his triples and there wasn't a bad look in the bunch. Caron Butler was 0 of 4, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope 1 of 4.
"I know Jodie had some great ones and he's a great shooter," Van Gundy said. "He just didn't have any legs. But we hung in there, too. We didn't let them get opened up."
Greg Monroe, after playing 37 minutes against Atlanta, came back with 36 more against Brooklyn and put up 16 points and 17 rebounds. Nobody else got to 30 minutes as Van Gundy dug into his bench to find some combination that clicked. Butler, seeing his 3-pointers falling short, dribbled inside the arc to hit two big fourth-quarter jump shots. Caldwell-Pope turned to defense, coming up with two huge late steals to help the Pistons finally take a safe lead.
Those are the things teams that find themselves in the playoffs do on nights they're dragging – find other ways to win.
"You've got to keep battling defensively, keep yourself in the game and you hope you hit a spurt where you just make a couple of plays and that's really what it comes down to," Van Gundy said. "What team was going to get a little bit of a spurt? And we got it off of turnovers and getting out in transition enough to give us a little bit of a cushion."
Brandon Jennings gave them a little bit of a cushion, too, in the third quarter, scoring 13 of his 20 points – after a scoreless first half. He, too, came into the game eager to wash away the disappointment of Friday's loss and make sure the Pistons didn't exit the weekend with a losing streak on their resume.
"Knowing that we had to bounce back from last night, being on a seven-game winning streak," he said. "It was some faces that were down because we definitely wanted to win that game. When you're on a seven-game win streak, you want to keep it rolling. But we definitely fought hard, so (Van Gundy's) main thing was just to keep the positive energy and keep it going."
And so they did. It won't produce much in the way of fodder for the season highlight video, but in its own way it was just as satisfying a way to win for a team that now is beginning to believe it can get it done in any number of ways, with any number of candidates to take a star turn.
"It was two teams trying really hard and didn't have a lot there," Van Gundy said. "But we fought it out on the defensive end and we made some plays. We made enough plays to win. We got 13 wins, guys. I'm not going to complain about what happened in a win."