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SVG on minimum goal for next season’s Pistons: middle-of-the-pack playoff team

AUBURN HILLS – The Pistons were 27-18 in games Reggie Jackson played in a season that ended one spot short of the playoffs. That’s a winning percentage of .600. Over 82 games, that would have wedged the Pistons between No. 4 seed Cleveland and No. 5 Indiana in the playoff field.

And that’s the minimum expectation Stan Van Gundy set for the Pistons as they held their last meeting of the season Thursday morning about eight hours after their flight from Chicago touched down following their rout of the Bulls in game 82.

“We’ve spent three years basically hanging around the middle of the pack in the East – eight, nine, 10, right in there,” Van Gundy said. “How do you climb out of that and get up to the middle of the playoff pack, at least? Those are the things we talked about – about what needs to be done.”

The sample size is perilously thin, but with all three of Jackson, Blake Griffin and Andre Drummond in the lineup, the Pistons posted a 3-1 record with the only loss coming in overtime on the road against Houston on a night the Pistons endured a 4 of 36 night from the 3-point arc until making two meaningless ones in the final 20 seconds.

That .750 winning percentage would have netted the Pistons the No. 1 seed in the East.

They��ll need as many things to go right on the fortune front as went wrong in 2017-18 to make the leap to a team that wins three of every four games, but Van Gundy – while hoping for something close to full health – understands the organization as a whole has to be prepared to weather injuries better than they managed to do this season.

He points to Boston and Miami, two other teams that dealt with their share of injuries yet persevered, as examples and identified the ingredient that allowed them to get beyond their misfortune.

In offensive rating, the Pistons finished right between the Celtics and Heat – Boston at 18, Detroit at 19, Miami at 20. In other words, all three teams fielded below-average offenses.

“The difference that set them apart with the injuries – because that’s what’s going to happen to your offense when people are hurt – Boston was the (top-ranked) defense and Miami was (seventh).”

The Pistons weren’t far off, finishing 11th in NBA.com defensive ratings.

Yet “we were mediocre defensively; they were great,” Van Gundy said. “That’s how you overcome injuries is a full commitment there.”

Van Gundy will meet with Pistons owner Tom Gores next week to learn his fate, but he’s under contract for next season and his mindset is business as usual until informed otherwise. That means sometime over the next several weeks he and his staff will meet individually with all returning players – and the Pistons have an atypically small number of pending free agents – to determine summer to-do lists.

The general theme delivered Thursday: get yourself in optimal physical condition and focus on improvement in one or two specific skills.

“The approach, at least in my estimation,” Van Gundy said, “is you’ve got to really focus in on one or two areas. You try to do everything and you get nothing done.”

It won’t be easy to watch the weekend playoff openers for a team that feels it should be part of the field and Van Gundy wore the frustration as plainly as anyone as the losses mounted through the injury absences. But he took a moment during Thursday’s speech – between discussing the reasons beyond injuries they fell short this year and what they’ll need to do better next season – to express gratitude, as well.

“I thanked them,” he said. “There were some really good things in terms of guys’ attitudes and their approach. They’re all really good people. I think our character is high. We didn’t quit when things got tough, either in the middle of the season or here at the end.”