INDIANAPOLIS – No need for anyone else to sugar coat the way the Pistons played in the second half. They sure didn’t.
“I’ve been saying this all season,” Marcus Morris said after the Pistons saw a two-point halftime lead dissolve into a 21-point loss Saturday against division nemesis Indiana, 105-84. “When teams get aggressive like that, I feel like we take a step back instead of taking the challenge and getting right back with it. I just feel like we kind of get on our heels.”
The Pistons scored 58 points and shot 49 percent with four turnovers in the first half. They scored 26 points in the second half and their 30 percent shooting wasn’t their most glaring deficiency. It was their 17 turnovers – 11 of them in the third quarter.
“We got dominated,” Stan Van Gundy said. “We played a mediocre first half but we’re in the lead. And then we were awful in the second half. We were just awful.”
It was a sobering turn for a team that had won two straight at home and pulled themselves – with great help from Charlotte and its five-game losing streak going into Saturday’s game at Utah – into the eighth spot in the Eastern Conference playoff race. For all the defensive shortcomings the Pistons have exhibited since mid-December, their offense had been good enough to allow them to tread water of late.
But when Indiana ratcheted up its defensive intensity after halftime, the Pistons simply never found a counter.
“Disappointing,” Reggie Jackson said. “I think we’ve been playing well. We’ve been able to find good shots. This is one of the first few times in a while that we feel like we’ve been forced consistently into either bad shots or turnovers and then they made us pay. A team that’s been playing well of late and they definitely came out and were the aggressor tonight.”
It was a season-best sixth straight win for Indiana, which easily absorbed the absence of starting forward Thaddeus Young. Lavoy Allen slid into his spot and responded with 18 points and 11 rebounds. The Pacers put all five starters into double figures and got 13 points from Al Jefferson off their bench.
But it was their defense that won the game, transforming at halftime from passive to assertive and grinding the Pistons into submission. The Pistons agreed that they had a chance to counter and make the Pacers pay for their defensive aggression, but none of the things that were required were put into practice.
“More ball movement, more player movement to open up space and then you’re going to have to beat somebody off the dribble,” Van Gundy said. “We also needed to have much better screening and movement away from the ball to get people open and we didn’t have any of that. We tried to play out of our pick-and-roll game; we couldn’t get anything out of that. We didn’t play well and their defense was outstanding.”
“You play basketball. It’s fundamentals,” Jackson said. “Guys overplaying, you’ve got to back door. We’ve got to screen harder for each other. We’ve just got to find a way to all five be in sync and make guys pay for overplaying us.”
Van Gundy’s bench was very good in the first half with Stanley Johnson and Ish Smith both registering plus-10 ratings in their minutes. He lamented not going to them sooner in the error-filled third quarter – but only to a degree.
“In retrospect, I think I made a mistake not going to the bench quicker in the second half,” he said. “But when we did, the bench didn’t play well in the second half, either. Second half, we got dominated.”
The Pistons get three home games next week to again try to establish momentum. But Morris expressed concern that the same issue with demeanor keeps cropping up.
“It’s been concerning the whole year,” he said. “We’ve just got to be better. We’ve got to be the aggressor. We can’t keep allowing people to just come out and impose their will on us.”