BOSTON – The answer is somewhere between 13 and 24 when the question is: How big a deficit is too much for the Pistons to overcome at Boston? A month ago, the Pistons won after trailing by 13 points late in the third quarter. That’s about where they were late in Wednesday’s first half – behind by 12 points – when Kentavious Caldwell-Pope came down awkwardly, slipped on a wet spot near the Pistons bench and strained his right groin muscle.
That 12-point deficit ruptured to 20 in those last three minutes when Caldwell-Pope, who couldn’t walk to the locker room under his own power, had to exit the game and left his teammates a little dazed and confused.
The 20-point deficit became 24 early in the third quarter when the Pistons launced the type of rally that’s marked their season, but there are limits even to their powers of recovery.
“What is it? Fifty-three games? If the games started at 9, 9:30, we’d probably be 52 and 1,” Reggie Jackson said. Actually, they’ve played 50 games and now stand at 26-24, but the point stands. “We’ve got to show up from the beginning. Starters, we’ve got to get off to a better start and really impose our will on everybody else. Stop getting hit in the mouth and trying to come back later.”
“We weren’t ready to play again at the beginning,” Stan Van Gundy said. “They were right into us and we couldn’t handle their pressure at all. We couldn’t get good shots. It���s not like in the first half we were missing good, open shots. Their defense took us out of everything. They did a great job and we didn’t respond to it.”
The Pistons never led and fell behind for good when Boston went on a 9-0 run to break a 4-4 tie. The Celtics missed their first four shots but set the tone even in that stretch by getting rebound position twice to cause the Pistons to foul. The Pistons trailed by 11 after one quarter, Boston’s Marcus Smart hitting two 3-pointers in the final minute.
“They pushed the pace – the pace was fast tonight,” Brandon Jennings said. “We missed a lot of shots and they were just getting easy buckets. They kind of punked us in the beginning. That’s how I felt. They were into us. They weren’t letting us catch the ball easy.”
Van Gundy has been fretting his defense pretty much since the calendar flipped to 2016 even as his offense has been ascending in league rankings, but it was offensive inertia that created their issues against the Celtics.
“Our offense really hurt our defense,” he said. “But again, we’re in this habit – we don’t play until we’re behind. And there’s just too many times where we’ve got to dig out of holes and it’s not going to work all the time. We’re not ready. There’s very few games in the last few weeks where we’ve led at the half. We’re not coming with energy and intensity to start games and that’s got to change or it’s going to be really difficult.”
It gets more difficult if the Pistons are faced with the loss of Caldwell-Pope, their best perimeter defender, for an appreciable stretch of games. He’s admirably durable, playing in 208 straight games, but that’s likely where the streak will end.
“We’ll get an MRI tomorrow and then we’ll be able to tell you tomorrow night better,” Van Gundy said. “He’ll almost certainly be out tomorrow, but other than that we don’t really know.”
“Very scary. You just hold your breath,” Jackson said. “You just hope everything’s all right. It hurts to see him go down, somebody who plays so hard, a guy you want in the foxhole with you. He has nothing to say; he just comes out and competes each and every play, so to see him go down it definitely hurt me. You just want him back as fast as possible, but mostly you just want him to be fully recovered and want the best for him.”
The injury to Caldwell-Pope means bigger roles for Van Gundy’s two rookies, Stanley Johnson and Darrun Hilliard. Johnson becomes the starter at shooting guard, Hilliard the first wing off the bench, assuming Johnson’s role. It will cause Van Gundy to do a little more juggling, though, because Hilliard lacks Johnson’s positional versatility as a less physically imposing player who would face mismatch issues guarding most small forwards.
But the more pressing issue, perhaps, is pulling the Pistons out of the mindset that they can afford to spot leads to the other team and pull things out down the stretch.
“If we want to be a playoff team, we have to have that mentality like we did in the second half,” Jennings said. “We’ve got to play like that all the time. It doesn’t matter who’s scoring. We just need to get the win. That’s just the most important thing – and play hard every night.”