NEW YORK – The Pistons have had a jarring road trip so far, losing three games by an average of 23 points heading into tonight’s finale at New Jersey, where Lawrence Frank returns to the place where he cut his teeth as a head coach. Nobody’s had it tougher than Brandon Knight, who has averaged six points, two assists and three turnovers while shooting under 25 percent. He doesn’t need to look far for comfort and advice. The next locker over will do.
“I just pulled him to the side and told him, ‘It was just one game,’ ” said Greg Monroe, last year’s Pistons rookie revelation. “ ‘You’re going to have to forget about this game, just come out and continue to play hard, whether the shots are falling or things are going your way. You just have to continue to play hard and everything else will fall back into place.’ ”
Monroe eased into the lineup a little more deliberately than Knight did, but started to play major minutes by late December as a rookie. Knight pushed back when asked about the rookie wall earlier this week, but Monroe smiles as he remembers going through similar growing pains.
“No rookie wants to hear about it, but it comes,” he said. “I was in denial, too, but it’s going to come. It’s a part of the game. You just have to find a way to get past it quickly. He’ll be fine. A couple of weeks before the All-Star break, I hit it. There were a few games and then I was fine.”
Monroe, who dresses next to Knight at The Palace and on the road and is his usual road-trip dinner partner along with Vernon Macklin and sometimes Rodney Stuckey and Jonas Jerebko, quickly took note of Knight’s work habits – and just as quickly offered some advice.
“I did try to tell Brandon, ‘You have to slow down a little bit. You don’t want to tire yourself out working out too much.’ You have to work on your game, obviously, but you have to dumb it down a little bit so you’ll be ready for games. The fact of the matter is you have to be ready for games. So I try to tell him to slow down a little bit.”