An Honest Assessment

The titillating potential that fell short of the envisioned product. The warrior spirit that waned with alarming regularity. The rookie head coach who bore responsibility for both failings, though neither entirely of his own doing.

The Pistons president of basketball operations saw it all, right along with the fans. And while Dumars rightly focused his remarks Wednesday on an active off-season, continuing the transition he began on Nov. 3 by trading Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson, he didn’t shy away from acknowledging that the bold swap didn’t deliver the short-term payoff he had hoped for.

“In terms of what I expected this year I knew it was a roll of the dice for one season but I wasn’t committing to five years of this,” he said. “It was a roll of the dice one season, bigger picture is we can transform who we are going forward now.”

But there’s no debate as to who got the better of the deal in the present. Wednesday, Dumars addressed the media following a Pistons campaign that halted streaks of 50-win seasons (seven straight) and conference finals appearances (six). That evening, Billups had 13 points and 11 assists for the Nuggets, who advanced out of the first round for the first time in 15 years.

When Iverson is enshrined to the Naismith Hall of Fame in the coming decade, there will be a scant mention of his Pistons stint. He suited up for Detroit 54 times, averaging 17.4 points in 36.5 minutes per game, both career lows.

Dumars cast Iverson as the star who could draw fouls in playoff games and keep the Pistons from falling into prolonged scoring droughts. But to be that player, Iverson simply needed more of everything – minutes, shots and possessions – than Michael Curry’s offense and personnel permitted. Iverson’s 41.7 shooting percentage for the Pistons wasn’t far off his career mark (42.5 percent), or that of his MVP-winning season in 2001 (42.0). But he averaged 14.6 shot attempts, nine fewer than his career average of 22.1, according to basketball-reference.com.

“I think more than anything else, it was just a new experience for him and for us, for style of play. We’ve been more of an executing, strategically attack you type team and his free spirit, free style, just never got on track with us,” Dumars said.

“And that’s the roll of the dice that you’re doing as a GM - for six months, let’s see if we bring these two together for six months, and at times we had a couple games here, and then it falls back. And so I think his situation was a microcosm of the whole year - one step forward, two steps back. It never clicked like we hoped it would for that short period of time.”

Indications of a roller-coaster course were evident early. A night after a thrilling win at Golden State, the Pistons went into the Staples Center Nov. 14 and gave the Lakers their first loss, 106-95. With Rasheed Wallace and Iverson scoring 25 points apiece, the Pistons were rolling at 7-2. Nine days later, the Pistons suffered their third loss in four games, a 26-point home defeat to the lowly Timberwolves.

The next 69 games followed a similarly chaotic pattern. The Pistons stretched a season-high seven-game win streak into 2009, then followed it in February with an eight-game skid that ended when Rip Hamilton replaced Iverson in the starting lineup.

“This was literally a season of ‘one step forward, two steps back,’ from November to last week,” Dumars said. “Never could get any traction, never could get on a five, six-game roll. I think we had one seven-game winning streak. You’ve got to put together at least three runs of five or more games. We had one this year – that tells you right there you don’t have consistent play going on and that was tough.”

In a less eventful season, such uneven play would put the heat on Curry, but Dumars called it a “non-issue” when asked if he would be back next season. “It was a rocky year for him, up and down, too,” said Dumars, who announced Curry’s hiring less than a year ago. “It was a learning experience for him as well, too. The fact that we made so many changes for a first-year coach, I had to step back and be a little more patient than I had been.”

That patience was tested in April. Including the first-round series with Cleveland, the seven consecutive losses to end the season were the most since 13 straight in 1994 – Isiah Thomas’ last season. Several players shared their frustration following Sunday’s Game 4 defeat. Dumars empathized, “But I didn’t have those high emotions of ‘Wow, I’m embarrassed, it’s a waste of time.’ For me it’s more a long-term vision. For those guys [playing], they should feel that way because they’re there in the pit. They’re in there fighting.”

The team’s fighting spirit also came under scrutiny, as the Pistons failed to hold double-digit leads and couldn’t protect leads late in games. Though Dumars doesn’t prescribe to the theory that the Pistons had a “built-in excuse” because of the trade, he admitted, “it opens the door for stuff like that to happen. There’s not as much continuity.”

The brief engagement with Iverson didn’t produce the desired results on the court. But that disappointment might offer Dumars something more valuable than another 50-win season, something he could use this summer – an affirmation of faith in the values that made the Pistons NBA champions.

“I think, first and foremost, I think I’ve always prided us on being a team that whenever we stepped on the floor every single night we were going to battle to win and going through this transition this year that wasn’t the case and that bothered the hell out of me,” he said.

“We weren’t that team that battled ever night like I thought we should. Before anything else can happen we have to get back to that. We have to be a team that’s going to battle the hell out of you every single night and never give in.”