DETROIT – If you’d have known before tipoff that the Pistons would get off 19 more shots than Charlotte, hold a plus-16 margin on the offensive glass and only turn the ball over 10 times, you’d probably have felt safe placing a friendly wager on a win for the home team.
“I would have expected a huge blowout win,” Langston Galloway said. “But tonight the ball wasn’t falling for us.”
The Pistons got up 104 shots and took down 22 offensive rebounds, but after thinking they were in for a torrid run after turning their fortunes with 20 made triples in a rout of Atlanta two nights earlier the early-season pattern of flailing away from the arc resumed. The Pistons made only 12 of 45 triples and shot 36.5 percent overall in a 113-103 loss to Charlotte.
“A lot of the same looks that we’ve had,” Dwane Casey said. “The analytical people say we had four bad threes. That still leaves us 41 (quality attempts). It’s one of those games. They’re a good defensive team. I’m not taking anything away from them. They did what they had to do. But we’re our own worst enemy in certain situations.”
Blake Griffin was showered and gone before reporters hit the postgame locker room or he might have had a different idea of just exactly who represented the enemy. His frustration over calls not made as he was ganged up on near the rim bubbled over late in the third quarter when he was whistled for a flagrant-2 foul and ejected for leaning in with his shoulder to Malik Monk’s thigh as he went airborne for a layup attempt.
“I could sense (Griffin’s frustration) a little bit,” Reggie Jackson said. “I think we all were. We were getting a lot of negative and I think it just built up. Unfortunate it happened to anybody but he was the one that took the brunt of it. He’s been getting beat up all season. I really hope people take it in mind, watch film and watch how he plays. He’s bigger than most. He’s a load, but it has to be fair for our bigs down there.”
Griffin finished with 10 points, six rebounds and five assists on 4 of 16 shooting. He missed all five of his 3-point attempts. But the number that probably jumps off the final stat sheet for Griffin is the “3” under free-throw attempts.
“I think he’s getting hit on a lot of shots,” Casey said. “I’ve got to go back and see it. The frustration builds up. He’s had a lot of load on himself – bringing the ball up the floor, handling the basketball, being a point forward, then going down in the paint and battling down there. Officials are not going to change the way they’re calling it, so we have to adjust. But I do think he’s getting banged up and hit down there. I’ve got to go back and watch the film and send it in.”
The atrocious shooting numbers and the Griffin frustration/ejection overshadowed two brilliant individual performances for the Pistons: Andre Drummond registered his fifth 20-20 game in 12 outings – and he came one rebound shy of a sixth in last week’s win at Orlando – with 23 points and 22 boards; and Reggie Bullock set a career high with 23 points and hit half of the team’s 12 3-pointers in nine attempts.
Drummond’s nine offensive rebounds were three more than Charlotte’s total. He also had three steals, two assists and two blocked shots and hit 5 of 7 free throws while shooting 9 of 16. Take away Drummond and Bullock, and the Pistons shot 30 percent overall and 15 percent from the 3-point arc.
As further evidence it was more the Pistons’ shooting than Charlotte’s suffocating defense, only six of their 104 shots were launched in the area between the paint and the 3-point arc – the mid-range shots that Casey’s “shot spectrum” is designed to eschew.
“I think we played hard and played the right way,” Jackson said. “When we brought energy, I think we got good shots. Just didn’t go in. But I think it was too much up and down with our energy. That was the biggest thing. We’ve just got to find a way to be consistent for 48 minutes.”
The most glaring gaps for the Pistons came to start the third and fourth quarters. A first half that saw no team lead by more than four points took an abrupt 180 when Charlotte went on a 7-0 run to open the third quarter. The Hornets expanded the lead to 15 before the Pistons pulled within eight to start the fourth quarter – when Charlotte scored on its first four possessions in an 8-0 run.
Point guards Kemba Walker and ageless Tony Parker scored 24 apiece for Charlotte, hitting a combined 20 of 35 shots while committing just three turnovers.
On another night, the Pistons would have had enough firepower to overcome those numbers by sheer volume of their 3-point attempts. But not this time. Getting that many more shots only helps if you don’t struggle to make more than a third of them.