That’s where he found himself Tuesday night when – Rip Hamilton’s 15-point first quarter aside – all four of the players he considers All-Stars were uncharacteristically sluggish in what became a three-point loss to a Portland team that came in on a five-game losing streak.

After Wednesday’s practice, Saunders called it, “for us, in this arena, as bad a loss as we’ve had.”

Saunders anticipates his team, which, more than most, seems to ebb and flow emotionally based on the opposition’s stature, will have its full attention riveted on Dallas for Thursday night’s TNT national game. “That will happen naturally,” he said, “especially when you know last year you got beat by 40 in there.” But if it doesn’t, expect a quicker hook.

“We talked this morning,” he said. “Here’s the thing: The people here know about ‘the (off-on) switch.’ With Rasheed, many times he hasn’t done anything and he hits a shot in the fourth quarter and scores 12 straight. You have a tendency, when players have done that as many times as they’ve done it, especially last year, to have a little longer leash. Now, because we’ve gone two straight games where they haven’t done it, the leash is probably shorter now and you’re probably more apt to take them out to go with some other guys to make sure you do keep energy. Plus, we’d won eight in a row. It’s not like we were struggling.”

Saunders played both Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton the entire second half, Tayshaun Prince for all but 2:37 and Rasheed Wallace for all but 4:13. Billups blamed himself for poor decision-making down the stretch, though he would not fall back on fatigue as the excuse. Billups, in fact, said when he’s struggling he prefers to play his way out of it.

“He asked me if I wanted to come out at the start of the fourth and I was like, ‘Nah.’ We had tied the game up and I felt like we needed to try to win the game. I like to play through it, myself. If he did take me out, that’s fine. It’s his call. But I thought we were right there. A couple of bad decisions at the end of the game cost us.”

“We have to cut his minutes,” Saunders said. “Cut all our guys. I was talking with (strength coach) Arnie (Kander) the other day and he said it feels like we’ve played 41 games. Our schedule now compared to where we were a year ago has been brutal. And it’s not going to get any better over the next week. Chauncey is one of those guys, when he is a little bit either physically or mentally fatigued, he’s not as sharp. He needs to make sure he has that rest going into that last five minutes.”

Saunders reviewed the Portland tape and said that of Detroit’s final 16 possessions, on only one of them did more than two Pistons touch the ball before a shot was taken.

“The strength of our team has been our ability to move the ball, high assists,” he said. “Our assists are not as high as they were a year ago. When you’re taking shots off no passes or one pass, you’re not giving the defense the chance to … make a mistake.

“When things go bad and you’re not playing well, when you have players like we have – four All-Star type players – they all want to take it upon themselves. ‘I’m going to be the guy who gets us going.’ And so you start playing more individually. Not because you’re being selfish, but because you think that’s what needs to be done in order for this team to be successful. That mentality is very common, and you have to throw that out.”

“That’s what happened a few times last night,” Billups said. “Everybody was kind of feeling like they had a mismatch and you start going to that. The ball stops moving. Once you struggle you say, ‘All right – where’s the mismatch,’ and attack that. Everybody else is standing around, getting out of rhythm a little bit.”

After losing back-to-back games to Charlotte and Portland, both almost certainly lottery bound, the Pistons back a brutal Thursday-Friday menu of road games at Dallas and Orlando, who hold a combined record of 27-10.

“We could play our butts off and get beat,” Saunders said. “Charlotte and Portland were games we could win and we went in from the standpoint that (Dallas) would be a very good matchup game. Now we’ll find out a little bit where we’re at.”