BOSTON – Nobody knows exactly how high the bar is set in the Eastern Conference, so every win scratched out in January is one less that will be necessary in the closing rush of April if it comes to that – as it certainly looks like it will in a playoff race that shows no signs of loosening anytime soon.
“This game almost counts double,” Reggie Jackson said after scoring nine of his 24 points in the last six minutes to help the Pistons erase a 13-point deficit late in the third quarter and win 99-94 at Boston. “A team like this, very good team, they’re going to be in the mix at the end of the year. Any time you’re playing those teams, you really want to hold the tiebreaker. We just knew this one was double. We needed this one.”
The Pistons came out of the game with a 20-16 record, snapping a three-game road losing streak and handing Boston its third straight home loss to inch ahead of the Celtics in the standings and finish the night in the No. 7 playoff spot, only 1½ games out of third.
“It’s a great win – a great, great win,” Stan Van Gundy said. “But we do still have to play more consistently throughout the game. One of the things my brother said to me probably three weeks ago when we were in the middle of a pretty good stretch, where we won like eight out of 11, is a mature team – which we’re not yet – but a mature team can learn even while they’re winning. They don’t have to wait to lose to learn. And that’s what’s got to happen with our guys. They’ve got to learn from this game and not just be happy. They can be happy with the win, but not just be happy with the win and move on – they’ve got to learn and get better.”
One thing they could learn from this one: using a different formula down the stretch.
Two members of Van Gundy’s rapidly coalescing bench finished the game, rookie Stanley Johnson for Eran Ilyasova because the Celtics downsized and Aron Baynes for Andre Drummond because Baynes was on a roll and Van Gundy wanted to avoid the heavy use of the intentional fouling tactic Celtics coach Brad Stevens has shown he will employ.
Both Johnson and Baynes were huge. Johnson finished with his second career double-double, scoring 11 points and grabbing 10 rebounds and hitting the biggest shot of the game – a corner three with just under a minute to play to put the Pistons ahead by four points. Baynes played 18 typically physical minutes, contributing six points, six boards, four assists and a blocked shot and draining two pressure-filled free throws with 30 seconds left to put the Pistons ahead by four.
“We’re confident with everybody in this locker room,” Jackson said. “We feel like everybody comes and competes each and every night. Coach trusts the guys and at that moment Aron was playing great, as well as Stanley.”
Johnson had been whistled for an offensive foul on the previous possession, but it didn’t cow him seconds later with the game on the line.
“I made a mistake before that, so I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again – that would be insanity,” he said. “If I didn’t take that shot, I think my teammates would’ve killed me. It was almost no choice. When you step into a shot knowing you’re going to shoot it, you have that confidence. It makes everything a lot easier for me. I’ve got to be more attentive to that, knowing my spot’s in the corner. So if I get it in the corner, I’ve probably got to shoot it.”
The Pistons outscored Boston 33-19 in the fourth quarter, holding the Celtics to 33 percent shooting. It was a far cry from the first quarter, when Boston shot 61 percent and scored 33 points. Over the final three quarters, the Celtics shot 34.4 percent. With Andre Drummond first limited by early foul trouble and then coming up with a limp after a hard takedown by ex-Piston Amir Johnson, Van Gundy was more than comfortable riding Baynes at crunch time.
“We knew when we signed him that he was a very good player,” Van Gundy said. “We had great confidence in him and we also knew that we needed a guy who could play in these situations because of Andre’s free-throw shooting problems. What’s he averaging? Thirteen minutes a game? Even though it’s not a huge minutes thing, the value is higher because there are going to be a lot of games where those minutes are played like tonight – down the stretch in a close game – and he’s a guy you can count on.”
The fourth-quarter clutch play of Jackson and the 1-2 bench combo of Baynes and Johnson obscured a brilliant two-way game from Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, without whom the Pistons might have been run out of the new Garden long before the rally was possible.
Caldwell-Pope hit four first-half triples, including three in a little more than a minute to kick start the offense and slice into Boston’s first double-digits lead in the second quarter. He finished with 20 points, but he was also the primary defender on Isaiah Thomas. Thomas got rolling late, scoring Boston’s last 15 points, but he was 1 of 15 from the field before making his last five shots with the Celtics setting an endless series of picks that forced the Pistons to switch other defenders onto Thomas to get him away from Caldwell-Pope.
So a little of this, a little of that. By any means necessary might as well be the subtitle of the season so far.
“I told our team yesterday there’s two things I really like,” Van Gundy said. “I love their work ethic in practice. That’s been good all year. And I love their resilience. We’ve had a lot of these types of games. The problem with it is we’ve done this so many times, I think we’re starting to fall into ‘We don’t need to play until the fourth quarter.’ And that can be dangerous.”
So far, the year of living dangerously is working out pretty well for a young Pistons team. And if it can actually mature enough to learn while winning, as their coach hopes, they might get to April with enough of a cushion yet in this crazy Eastern Conference playoff race.