If you were curious as to why Troy Weaver has maintained throughout his restoration project that it was critical to sprinkle a handful of veterans among the wave of young draft picks, the past two games serve as foundational evidence.
If you were struck by Monty Williams’ stated desire to have the current handful of Pistons veterans split among the starting and bench units to guide the ascendant young stars who constitute the franchise’s future, same.
The Pistons had a 15-point lead midway through the third quarter on Wednesday against Portland, but when the Trail Blazers found a hot hand, Shaedon Sharpe, to suddenly whittle their deficit, the screws tightened – and so did the Pistons. On Thursday night in New Orleans, the Pistons opened 7 of 7 but got caught up in a shootout – and when their shots stopped dropping but the Pelicans kept the scoreboard churning, again the Pistons lost their moorings.
The Pistons focused intently on becoming a better defensive team throughout training camp and put that on display through the first three games, holding teams to 101.3 points on average. But young teams are prone to turnovers and bouts of offensive dysfunction and in those stretches everything else, defense and focus included, starts to unravel.
It's in those moments – the inevitable dips when your team is on the wrong end of a run – where the veterans for whom Williams scripted roles over off-season strategizing sessions are leaned on to stabilize matters. To prevent 6-0 runs from becoming 16-0 landslides. To remember to keep running offense instead of devolving into street ball. To block out every external distraction and double down on defense and fundamentals.
When adversity strikes, a young player’s instincts tell him to do something to pull his team out of a tailspin. And “something” usually means something off script. That’s when small cracks become gaping chasms.
It was a 14-0 New Orleans run in the first quarter that was the turning point on Thursday and even if the Pelicans were also missing two dynamic players – Zion Williamson and Brandon Ingram – they had two bellwether veterans, C.J. McCollum and Jonas Valanciunas, to ground them.
McCollum scored 25 points, Valanciunas 12 and seven rebounds in the first half to put their team far enough ahead that even when the young Pistons exhibited the resilience that Williams has extolled, they couldn’t come any closer than eight points.
“We had a number of guys out there that just said, ‘Enough. We’ve got to guard the ball. We’ve got to do our stuff harder,’ ” Williams said after the Pistons outscored New Orleans 67-53 after halftime. “That was the standard we have to start games with and play with for as close to 48 minutes as we can. I know it’s a back-to-back. I know guys are tired. But we showed what we can do and be in the second half.”
The Pistons veterans, the guys they would have gone to down the stretch to protect the lead against Portland and the ones they would have sent out to halt the bleeding early against New Orleans, aren’t just journeymen who’ve lasted as long as they have in the NBA because they’ve earned reputations as great teammates and reliable players. They’re all of that, but much more than that.
Give the Pistons Bojan Bogdanovic, Alec Burks and Monte Morris and you’ve got three players who are crafty, efficient scorers who stretch defenses and make life so much easier for the players at their sides. Isaiah Livers provides 3-point shooting, size, defensive versatility and a high basketball IQ. They and veteran sniper Joe Harris are the only five Pistons 25 or older. The first four are out.
Bogdanovic, Burks and Morris are especially good at exploiting a defense’s vulnerabilities. Modern-day NBA defenses, the ones run by veteran teams, can be suffocating but all of them have some areas that can be exploited by those with the smarts and skills to do so. The Pistons are missing an awful lot of smarts and skill without those three.
The Pistons miss those guys for more than their savvy and their shooting. Weaver put the roster together with an eye toward building depth and prioritizing defense and the attributes common to good defenders – length, athleticism, tenacity. But when you lose four key players – four guys who ranged from dead-solid locks to highly probable to be part of their rotation – the depth takes a whopper of a hit. And with diminished depth comes diminished defense.
In their absence, the Pistons are leaning heavily on those still standing. Ausar Thompson comes with 220 volts of electricity flowing through his every fiber and he’s already stamped himself as a building block, but he’s still in his infancy in understanding game flow. When the Pistons were groping to find anything to slow New Orleans during the 14-0 run, Thompson – left so wide open you can only assume it was a bullet point on the game plan to exploit his underdeveloped jump shot – launched four 3-pointers and missed them all.
If Bogdanovic or Burks had been available, surely one or both would have been on the floor at that time. For a young team that’s been badly dinged by turnovers, Morris – allergic to mistakes – would be a panacea.
If there’s a silver lining here, it’s the experience being logged by young players getting extended minutes and learning how to respond to failure and situations they’ve never experienced. Marcus Sasser, the other rookie, is grasping opportunity with both hands. He scored 19 points, all in 13 second-half minutes while missing just one shot and not committing a turnover, and Williams said something to make the ears perk up after the game: “He’s starting to look like a good complement to Cade and Killian. Those three guys, they played well tonight.”
It's been a perfect storm so far for the Pistons, getting six games in nine days with three separate road trips already in the books and doing so with the veterans that had Weaver and Williams believing they were poised to sprint out of the gates mostly unavailable.
The Pistons get two days now to catch their breath. They’ll need it. Next up: back-to-back games against the star-laden Phoenix Suns and Golden State Warriors.