Not only did the Pistons do the Chicago Bulls a huge favor, they also saved them a little spare change. The thank-you notes the Bulls owe them don’t need to be mailed. They’ll surely be waiting in the visitor’s locker room Saturday night at United Center.
Four days after a win at Chicago seemed like it was destined to be a Pistons luxury, it’s now as close as it gets to a necessity. With the Bulls winning road games at Indiana and Houston to snap a four-game losing streak, the Pistons’ 98-89 loss to Dallas allowed Chicago to pull within 1½ games of them with the chance to pull even in the loss column with a win Saturday – which would also give the Bulls a big edge in winning the tiebreaker between the teams should it come to that to determine a playoff spot.
“We needed to get this one and we didn’t,” Stan Van Gundy said after the Pistons rallied once from 15 down but couldn’t muster another comeback from 11 down against the short-handed Mavericks, in their own desperate playoff race in the West. “So it’s going to be difficult. Now we are going to have to beat good teams on the road. That’s the only way we’re getting in now.”
To be sure, if you’d have ranked the Pistons’ final seven games in order of likelihood of victory, surest to least, the game with Dallas would have been the leading contender for No. 1. Not only did the Pistons have home-court advantage, they also played Dallas without two of its top three players (Chandler Parsons and Deron Williams) and a key reserve (Raymond Felton).
But J.J. Barea, starting after staying behind in Dallas to attend the birth of his daughter and coming to Detroit earlier in the day, scored 19 in the first half as the Mavericks built a 15-point lead and 10 in the fourth quarter to repel the Pistons’ second comeback.
“Barea played well,” said Marcus Morris, who scored a season-high 31 points to go with 12 rebounds but saw his teammates shoot 29 percent on a night he hit 12 of 17 and 6 of 8 from the 3-point arc. “He’s a proven veteran in this league. A lot of guys out for Dallas and he stepped up and played well.”
Pistons starters other than Morris made 17 shots in 52 attempts, but for all of their struggles it was the first five minutes of the second quarter when Dallas outscored Van Gundy’s bench 15-0 that set the tone for the night. The bench shot 2 of 12.
“As bad as the night was, you look at most of our starters and we are in the plus column,” Van Gundy said. “But our bench got obliterated tonight. They’ve actually been playing really, really well. Tonight was just a bad night for them.”
And it was a very bad night to have a very bad night. If the bench had held its own, the brilliant stretch of basketball the Pistons played to open the third quarter – a 22-7 run – wouldn’t have merely tied the game, it should have been the impetus for a runaway victory to cap a nine-game home stand that finished 6-3 instead of the 7-2 that seemed within their reach.
The Pistons tied the game at 58 with 4:55 left in the third quarter on a Morris triple, but then Dallas got stops on four straight possessions – misses from Reggie Jackson (started 0 of 8, finished 3 of 15), Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (3 of 9), Andre Drummond (5 of 15) and Tobias Harris (6 of 13). Should Morris have gotten a shot in that stretch?
“We’re a team, so at the end of the day we need guys to take open shots,” Morris said. “I’m not here to shoot the ball every time, even when I’m hot. I’m here to make plays and make the right plays, just continue to play basketball. It’s times where I’m not shooting well and the ball still has to move, no matter who’s hot, who’s not. We’ve still got to play winning basketball.”
Van Gundy didn’t have an issue with Morris not getting shots, but he didn’t like the ones the Pistons wound up taking. After rallying to tie with stiffer defense and crisp ball movement leading to open shots, the Pistons wound up with quick shots on those four straight trips.
“We got back in the game by guys moving the ball, two or three passes, and getting open shots,” Van Gundy said. “Then we got to 58-58, we didn’t pass the ball. The guy came off the pick and roll and came off and shot it. We were playing home-run basketball instead of moving the ball. It’s not the way we are going to get in, guys trying to do it themselves.”
When the Pistons pulled within two in the fourth quarter after falling behind 75-64, making it 77-75 on another Morris jump shot, Barea answered with a big triple. The Pistons later pulled within three, but never had it to a one-possession game with the basketball again.
So now they take their precarious lead to Chicago, where the United Center figures to recall the chaos of the old Chicago Stadium, the original Madhouse on Madison.
“This game more than anything, we need this one,” Drummond said. “This is a really important game and we can’t blow this one. We cannot blow this one. We need this one tomorrow. We’ve got to come out with incredible effort and energy on both ends of the floor and just ready to play.”