It’s not like the Pistons did everything well. Or even most things well. But when you shoot 1 of 19 from the 3-point line, you need to do almost everything else flawlessly to give yourself a chance. Of all the things the Pistons were on Saturday night in Oklahoma City – 24 hours after their best win of the year over the 14-2 Los Angeles Clippers – flawless was not one of them.
Stan Van Gundy found flaws – plenty of them. The ones involving defense, focus and effort topped his list.
“I don’t even care about (the 3-point shooting),” Van Gundy said after the 106-88 loss at Oklahoma City snapped a two-game winning streak and dropped the Pistons to 1-8 on the road. “Our defense was pathetic. We didn’t compete. It’s mind-boggling how different we are at home and on the road.”
The Pistons rank in the top five defensive teams in the league at home, but exactly the opposite on the road.
“We’ve just got to go back and look at the film and see what we did wrong – which was a lot of things,” Ish Smith said. “We’ve got to figure out these road woes, because we’re like a totally different team at home. We’re going to figure it out. That’s a must. We have no choice.”
The Pistons got on the board first, getting a Marcus Morris jump shot to fall on their second possession for a 2-0 lead. Then they went scoreless on 11 straight trips. The Thunder got off to their own slow roll offensively, but when the Pistons finally scored again about seven minutes into the quarter they were already down by double digits.
They never led after that 2-0 start, but – against all odds, and without benefit of any boost from the 3-point line – they made it interesting. After trailing by 18 late in the first half, they scored the last eight points of the second quarter and the first two of the third.
They pulled within three at 65-62 past the midway mark of the third quarter and it looked like they were about to have Tobias Harris at the line to complete an and-one for a chance to tie the game. But the whistle went against the Pistons, Harris called for a wipeout with his left hand while posting up on Russell Westbrook – an iffy call at best. Instead of three points to tie, the ball went the other way and Jerami Grant’s corner triple put the Pistons down six.
It was back to nine after three quarters and then Westbrook gave them a heavy dose of pick-and-roll wizardry in the fourth quarter to give the Pistons no chance at another rally.
Westbrook finished with another triple-double – 17 points, 13 rebounds, 15 assists – and, despite a mere 8 of 22 shooting line, dominated the game. But Anthony Morrow, not even a regular part of OKC’s rotation, scored 21 points to lead the Thunder and got most of his points against little resistance.
“Russell Westbrook’s great. You’re going to have trouble with him,” Van Gundy said. “But Morrow got going. Against our defense, it’s really surprising the way we defended tonight that they didn’t have 150.”
The Pistons were outrebounded by 11 and gave up a whopping 62 points in the paint to OKC, which won at Denver in overtime on Friday – eliminating for Van Gundy any talk of fatigue as a crutch for the Pistons after their emotional win over the Clippers.
“I thought they played last night, too,” he said.
It doesn’t get any easier for the Pistons, who play three Eastern Conference heavyweights – Charlotte, Boston and Atlanta – on the road over four nights starting Tuesday.
“We’ve played nine road games and we’ve really only competed near the level of what we bring athom in terms of intensity and focus twice,” Van Gundy said. “San Antonio and Denver. The other seven games, we’ve really brought nothing to the table at the defensive end.”