It’s a pretty glaring coincidence that the Pistons are 4-0 since waiving Josh Smith after going 5-23 with him. And the Pistons aren’t just winning, they’re crushing teams – an 18-point margin of victory over their winning streak, three of them on the road. It doesn’t help take the focus off of Smith that Houston has gone 1-3 since adding him.
But Stan Van Gundy points to another reason, obscured from public view: practice. As in, the three straight days of it the Pistons got, starting with the Dec. 22 date that also marked Smith’s waiving. And the one they squeezed in between wins over Indiana and Cleveland and the other one they got before trouncing Orlando.
But practice will be at a premium in their immediate future thanks to a game-heavy January schedule that starts now. Over the 16-day period that began with Friday’s 97-81 win at New York, the Pistons are looking at fitting in two practices. Starting on Tuesday, they’ll play four games in five nights with a Tuesday-Wednesday back-to-back set at reigning NBA champion San Antonio and contender Dallas to get it going.
The Pistons play 17 January games – two more than their next-busiest month – and nine of them come on the road. They get five sets of back-to-back games in the month and have another stretch of four games in five nights awaiting them.
Van Gundy admits he’s an inveterate worrier – “I’m far from a wild-eyed optimist,���he admitted before Friday’s win at Madison Square Garden – but he’s especially leery about the effects of not being able to practice on a young team. And the Pistons are decidedly young with a starting five that’s longer in the tooth than only two others in the NBA, Utah and Minnesota.
“Particularly being as young as we are, that’s a challenge,” he said. “One of the reasons that we’ve played better, we got those three days after the Brooklyn game, right before Christmas. We’ve been able to get some work in. It’ll be interesting to me to see if we can continue to do things well when we can’t get back in the gym and work on a daily basis.”
Veteran teams, like the one he coached to the NBA Finals with Orlando in 2009, can squeeze what they need to glean from elsewhere when practice opportunities are limited, he said.
“You hope in your (game-day morning) walk-throughs that those are practices and learning even though you’re not going at it live and with a lot of contact,” he said. “You hope guys can tune in. I think veteran teams really can do that very, very well. Some of them are so good, they can just sit and watch film and make corrections. Other guys can walk through it. I think it’s harder with young teams. They haven’t had enough repetition to really pick it up that way, so it’s a concern.”
The good news is the Pistons are going into the meat grinder of their schedule playing very well offensively and better, at least, defensively.
“The ball’s going in the basket, but we have defended better, too,” Van Gundy said. “We’re just playing with more energy. We’re playing harder, a little bit more inspired, a little bit better together. Everything’s been a little bit better. .. The schedule does get really difficult. I think it’s sustainable that we continue to play better basketball. What that means in terms of results, that has a lot to do with how the other team plays, too. But, yes, it is sustainable to play good basketball.”
It can’t come in time to ease their jam-packed January, but Van Gundy is hopeful the NBA does something to make the schedule more equitable in the future. There is speculation that the league is exploring reducing the preseason schedule from eight games to four and spreading the 82 regular-season games over the extra 10 days or so that would free up.
“My only thing is, just even it up,” Van Gundy said. “Ourselves and Charlotte have the most back to backs in the league this year (with 22). Somebody has as low as 15, 16.”
Van Gundy thinks one way to make the schedule fairer is to work around the Thursday night exclusivity TNT has been granted, which gives about one-third of league teams a seven-day schedule as opposed to the six days available to everybody else.
“For teams like us that aren’t on TNT on Thursday, you take Thursday night out of our schedule, you add back to backs,” he said. “It’s not an equitable situation. That part should be changed and it would seem to me that with all the great things they do the league office could figure that out and we could all play equal amounts of back to backs.”