WASHINGTON – Coaches get uncomfortable when they start to feel comfortable. That’s another way of saying what Chuck Daly would mutter about not trusting success.
But it’s clear the Pistons have figured out the ways of winning on the road in a manner that eluded them for most of November. After going 1-8 in their first nine road games this season, the Pistons are 5-1 in their past six.
And they’re not exactly pulling out a bunch of white-knuckle wins, either. The average score of those six games: Pistons 107.2, Other Guys 91.7. Their only blemish was an 87-77 at Charlotte on Dec. 7 when the Pistons were playing a back-to-back set and their third game in four nights against a team that hadn’t played the previous night.
So what’s changed?
“Just played better,” Stan Van Gundy shrugged today after conducting the walk through for tonight’s game here. “We haven’t done anything to change anything dramatically. We’ve just played better. I don’t really have an answer for it.”
Several players – Marcus Morris, Tobias Harris, Andre Drummond, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope among them – mentioned things like “focus” and “mindset” among the issues that led to the 1-8 start. And it’s been cited again as a reason for the turnaround – no surprise to Van Gundy.
“That’s usually what it comes down to – better effort, better mindset,” Van Gundy said. “It’s certainly nothing that we���ve done as a coaching staff. We’ve tried to prepare the same way. It’s been them.”
The most obvious answer to why the Pistons have turned the corner is defense. They’ve cut their yield by more than 13 points per game from an average of 105 in those first nine games, when the only win came at Denver on Nov. 12 to end a four-game road trip.
But Van Gundy is acutely aware that remaining strong defensively requires vigilance with a young team whose players in almost every case got to the NBA because of their offensive prowess.
“There’s a lot of guys here who understand, hey, I’ve got to get better defensively,” he said. “I think our guys understand that even now – our defensive numbers are good and I still think we’ve got a group of guys that knows they have to get better defensively. Because we’ve still had our nights where we haven’t been tuned in. Other than (Kentavious) Caldwell-Pope and Aron Baynes, maybe, we don’t have a group that it’s just natural. So they’ve got to be very focused on the defensive end or they can very quickly drift back into just being offensive players.”
The Pistons – even with those first nine road games comprising one-third of their 27 games played – rank No. 2 in defensive to Memphis. They’ve held their last four road opponents to an average of 86.8 points.
“Even the Charlotte loss, I thought we competed really, really hard. I think that we’ve played much better on the road,” Van Gundy said, scanning the gym as players got up shots. “But I don’t necessarily sense it here the morning. I just see it at night.”