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Sign up for E-newsJoe Dumars Q&A - Part II
KEITH LANGLOIS: In the Washington game, Michael Curry made a change in the starting lineup in addition to the team still learning how to play with Allen Iverson. That seems like a way to get your five best players on the floor when you add Rodney in there. As you look at that lineup, what do you like about it?
JOE DUMARS: I like the versatility of that lineup. I like the energy of that lineup to start games. Especially with Stuckey, Iverson and Rip out there together. I like the fact that your five best players are stepping on the floor to start games. I like all those things – the versatility, the energy that group can bring, the potential to be an attacking first team, and, quite simply, having your five best players out there to start games and having other teams matching up with those guys.
KL: You and Mike I’m certain talked at some length about this before doing it. Did you at some point play devil’s advocate with him and say, “But what about, but what about …” and can you share any of those “but what abouts?”
JD: I won’t share them, but we did have some “OK, but look for this, look for this.” We talked about matchup problems. He and I talked about how you have to attack with a starting five like this. I will say this. We did talk about being careful not to have this starting group become a first-quarter, all-jump-shooting team and not having a postup presence. And I think that’s why you saw a concerted effort to go to Sheed in the post. My point was if you don’t make a concerted effort and let everybody in the starting lineup know we have to get something inside, post up, you could easily find yourself shooting 18- to 20-foot jump shots the whole first quarter with that group. Because now Tay has fours guarding him; it’s not like posting up threes. That was kind of the stuff we talked about. This is the time where Sheed, OK, you have no choice. You’ve got to get in the block and give us a postup presence to start the game because we’ve got enough people now on the perimeter.
KL: Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute then. This is something I’ve seen raised and I’ll go back in history here and recall that Jack McCloskey for years tried to find the antidote to Kevin McHale because he knew he had to go through Boston. If you look at the East right now, Cleveland and Boston are both pretty big and physical teams. Can you play them with this lineup and be successful or do you say how do they guard us?
JD: Well, if you had to play for 48 straight minutes with this starting lineup, yeah, that probably would be a problem. But the fact that they’re going to sub and we’re going to sub, what you’re talking about is the first eight, nine minutes before you see a sub coming in. We don’t feel like we’re going to get overwhelmed in eight, nine minutes of the game. And we pose matchup problems ourselves for them. If you’ve got to play the whole 48-minute game, yeah, they’re probably too physical. But the fact you can go do Dice or Maxy or Kwame or Afflalo and bring some toughness off the bench, you’ll be OK.
KL: And you do force Boston to make a decision, too. If they guard Prince with Garnett, say, then all of a sudden Garnett isn’t in the lane any more as that presence.
JD: Right. And if he is in the lane, Tayshaun is wide open at 15 feet to knock down shots.
KL: Allen is averaging just over 14 shots a game since he’s been here. He’s averaged 23 for his career. Everybody knew he wasn’t going to average that here, but can he be the guy you traded for and can he take this team where you envisioned the trade leading if he’s taking 14 shots a game?
JD: I don’t know yet. I don’t know. I mean … it will be interesting to see. We’ve won some big games with him on the floor and I don’t know what he’s shooting in those games. Trying to make a judgment after 15 games or so is a little tough. He’s a guy that, listen, we probably don’t need him to take 25 shots a game but we also need him to be as close to Allen Iverson as he can be in this setup that we have. That’s one of those balancing acts you try to find along the way. That’s why I say there’s no way I’m going to put a number of games. We may need all 82 games and coming down the stretch say, OK, now we’ve got it. We know what it takes. To sit here and say 50 games, no. It may take those last 25 games, too, to figure out what’s best. And we will. He will. We will. We’ll get it. It’s been a month and it’s not going to click in a month. It’s just not. Especially at that position.
KL: I keep getting deluged with Pistons Mailbag questions from people wanting to know why the Pistons won’t let Allen Iverson play like Allen Iverson. For the record, no one’s told him to tone it down, right?
JD: Uh, no. You can be certain to let your readership know that from the coaching staff to Mike to myself, everyone is saying, “Go. Don’t look back. Don’t hesitate. Go. Do your thing.” He’s trying to fit in and make it work. It’s more him trying to work his way through it. But from our side, we’re telling him to attack. To go. To be Allen Iverson when you’re on the floor. He’s not going to be out there for 45 minutes like he was in other places. But the minutes he is out there – that’s 35, 40 minutes – attack. Always look to be on the attack. That’s what we want from him. We did not bring him here not to attack. We want him to put pressure on the defense non-stop. So, they can be sure, trust me, we’re not trying to hold him back.
KL: The good news from the past week is Antonio McDyess coming back. Mike talked repeatedly over the past month about all the various ways he was missed. Can you capsulize that for us and maybe in ways that weren’t anticipated?
JD: First of all, Antonio McDyess brings a very mature, calming effect to our team. This is beyond just basketball. Always the voice of reason. Always the guy that’s never going to do things off of pure emotion. The guy that from a coaching standpoint you can trust to battle every day and you know that he’s not going to get sidetracked with anything. From a coaching standpoint, I can see why Mike and the coaching staff are happy to have him back. He’s a guy that when you put him on the floor, you just feel a sense of calm based on how he’s going to approach the game. Doesn’t mean he’s going to play great every night. It does mean that you’ve got a grown man out there that’s serious about trying to win games. From a coaching standpoint and from an organization standpoint, it’s a really good feeling to have him back in uniform and with us.
KL: When the trade was made, you were frank in saying one of the considerations was the salary-cap flexibility it presented for you down the road. I know you can’t talk specifics about any of this stuff, but you will have decisions to make on a couple of guys whose contracts are expiring this year. Is that not a decision you will even come to until all the results are in, the playoffs are completed and you sit back and say, OK, now what do I do?
JD: Let me say two things. One, it would have been completely disingenuous of me not to state the obvious – that we’re going to have tremendous flexibility this summer. So it was just a matter of me not trying to be coy about something. You’re sitting there with 20-plus million dollars in salary-cap space, you can’t sit there and act like it’s not what it is. The second thing I would say is this. To make a full determination of things in the middle of a season before you even see how it plays out is not what you do. You let things play out and you see how they unfold and you allow the results to help you make a decision. You may have some thoughts in your head about the direction you want to go in, but part of those decision-making processes have to include how the season plays out. That has to be a part of it. To see how guys react. To see what happens as the season unfolds. That’s why you don’t sit here and make a decision 20 games into the season, 50 games into the season, whenever. That’s why you sit and analyze and let it play out. Over the next two years, we’ve got $22-plus million in cap space coming up, five or six draft picks in the next couple of years, so we’re doing a lot of stuff, a lot of transitioning on the move. We’re not shutting everything down. We’re not saying we’re going to be bad for two or three years. We’re trying to do it on the move and compete at the same time. When you’re doing that, it’s imperative that you let it play out and see how it goes.
KL: When you make a trade of the magnitude you made and the timing you made it, that’s always going to be tougher for a coach to have to integrate it during the course of the season. Mike, as a first-time head coach, maybe even a greater challenge. Beyond that, he hasn’t played it safe. He’s changed the starting lineup around a few times. Just tell me what you’ve seen from him during this process and how he’s handling some of the ups and downs.
JD: He’s doing exactly what I thought he would do and what you and I have talked about before. One of the things I said early on is that you won’t see him shy away from whatever challenges will be thrown his way. That’s not how you institute change and transition to your organization. There is a time to be safe and a time to be conservative in what you’re doing, and then there’s a time to take risk and take chances. Because that’s the only way you can make that kind of major transition you’re trying to make. You can’t make it going the conservative route all the time. Now, once you have things in place, a lot of times you step back and you don’t want to mess with it. You allow it to develop over time. But to get to that point, you have to do things sometimes that are unconventional. Mike understands that and that’s why you see him, as a first-year head coach, he’s not playing it safe or what the status quo is saying or doing. It’s irrelevant to success. It’s irrelevant what the status quo may say or do. That’s their choice. His choice is not to be that. That’s not to say that other people are wrong. It’s just not his choice to do that.
