AUBURN HILLS – LeBron James didn’t play and Cleveland was coming off an intensely played Christmas showcase win over Golden State. But the Pistons knew if the Cavs were in position to win in the fourth quarter, their championship pedigree and one-on-one scoring punch from Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love would make it tough to snap the onerous five-game losing streak they lugged into the game.
And it was getting dangerously close to being the type of game that would convince Cavs coach Ty Lue to empty his holster and run his stars heavy minutes again. The Pistons led by four points with five minutes to play in the third quarter and the frustrations of the past 11 days weren’t far from bubbling to the surface.
But then a lineup built around three players off of Stan Van Gundy’s bench led a seven-minute stretch, ending two minutes into the fourth quarter, that saw the Pistons outscore Cleveland 17-4.
“Tobias (Harris), Ish (Smith) and Aron (Baynes), I thought that was the lineup,” Van Gundy said after the 106-90 win that perhaps gets the Pistons back on track. “We were switching pick and rolls and we were switching Aron onto Kay Felder, who’s a little quicker than Aron. But go back and look at the job Aron did.”
“Aron Baynes was really good defensively,” Jon Leuer said. “We had a lineup out there where he had to switch on to some guards and he moved his feet and stayed in front of them. That was big.”
With Baynes anchoring the defense and Smith pushing the ball in transition, it was Harris’ job to provide the unit’s half-court scoring offense. In his second game coming off the bench since Van Gundy elevated Leuer into the starting lineup in an effort to bolster the defense and get the Pistons off to better starts, Harris again led the Pistons in scoring with 21 points.
“We were on the bench in the third quarter, me and Aron, talking about when we get out there, we’ve really got to push the pace and keep it moving,” Harris said. “That’s what we were able to do. We knew they were a little tired from the back to back, so we wanted to get out and really push the pace and get some stops and get out in transition, try to get some open looks. We got some open threes that were able to fall and we were able to build some momentum from there.”
Harris hit one of his three triples in the first minute of the fourth quarter to give the Pistons a 15-point lead. They hit 16 of 28 from the 3-point arc and got threes from seven players, including two or more from five players. The three forwards – Harris (3 of 6), Leuer (2 of 3) and Marcus Morris (3 of 6) – combined to hit eight triples and scored 49 points.
Morris was mired in a 7 of 40 shooting slump until he hit his last three jump shots of the game, finishing with 15 points.
“He needed to see a couple go in the basket,” Van Gundy said. “I thought that was really, really good.”
But it was his team’s defense – so suddenly and alarmingly leaky after it carried the NBA’s No. 2 rating when the losing streak began with a Dec. 16 loss at Washington – that most pleased Van Gundy.
“It’s amazing what you can do when you’re locked in mentally and you really make a great effort and those guys really did,” he said. “I was really happy with our defense today. I thought we worked hard.”
Van Gundy ticked off the particulars of the defensive effort: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (18 points, 4 of 6 from the 3-point line) containing Kyrie Irving (18 points, 8 of 20 shooting); the switching the Pistons engaged in without giving away points in mismatches, Baynes especially; a knifing steal by Stanley Johnson, praised by Van Gundy for anticipating a play that could only have been accomplished by absorbing the game plan; Marcus Morris recognizing Ish Smith getting caught in a bad matchup and coming to help; Reggie Jackson sacrificing himself to take a charge.
“We did some things that we haven’t consistently done,” he said.
“It was good that the shots were falling, but even if shots aren’t falling we have to know as a team that our defense needs to fuel our offense and keep us moving from there,” Harris said.
The Pistons made up one game after falling a season-worst four games under .500 with last week’s loss to Golden State. They know they need to do more than tread water from here on out.
“We dropped I don’t know how many in a row,” Jackson said. “We dropped the last two, very tough, against Memphis and Golden State. Felt like we played well.”
“We lost some ground in that losing streak,” Leuer said. “So we know we have to string some together now. It’s just about one game at a time. We got a win tonight and that was big, kind of get that taste out of our mouth. Now it’s about moving on to the next one and trying to get a streak going.”