Into the Fire

The Pistons open the 2009-10 season at Memphis on Oct. 28. Their home opener - marking the first Pistons appearances at The Palace for newcomers Ben Gordon, Charlie Villanueva, Chris Wilcox and a group of four rookies - will come two nights later against Oklahoma City.

The schedule features 23 sets of back-to-back games and the home schedule is typically loaded on weekends with nine Friday, five Saturday and nine Sunday dates at The Palace. On the road, the Pistons play 11 Wednesday games and nine more on Tuesday. Overall, 41 Pistons games - half the schedule - will be held on weekend dates.

Orlando, with trade addition Vince Carter joining Dwight Howard, opens a busy November by coming to The Palace on Nov. 3. Later that month, Kuester will face a challenging four-game road trip to the West Coast that begins with a back-to-back set against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers followed by a date in Portland against Brandon Roy’s Trail Blazers. The Pistons wind up that trip with another back-to-back at Utah and Phoenix.

When they return from out West, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers will open the traditional Thanksgiving weekend set - games Wednesday, Friday and Sunday that will also feature visits from the Los Angeles Clippers, featuring No. 1 pick Blake Griffin, and the Atlanta Hawks, No. 4 seed in the East last season.

December opens and closes with games against Central Division rival Chicago, on the road Dec. 2 and at home for the traditional New Year’s Eve matinee, the first meetings for Gordon against his former team.

Ex-Pistons coach Flip Saunders takes his new team, the Washington Wizards with a healthy Gilbert Arenas, to The Palace on Dec. 6. Chauncey Billups and the Denver Nuggets will be in town two nights later. Bryant and the Lakers drop in for a Sunday visit five days before Christmas, which will be bracketed by games on the 23rd and 27th by games against Toronto, fortified by free-agent addition Hedo Turkoglu and lottery pick DeMar DeRozan.

The new year will open with a daunting back-to-back at Dallas and San Antonio. Among the highlights of January’s home schedule are visits from Chris Paul and New Orleans on Jan. 15 and a visit from Rasheed Wallace and Boston on Jan. 20. The Pistons will close January, in fact, with six straight home games, capped by matchups with Dwyane Wade’s Miami Heat and Orlando on the final weekend.

February, broken up by the All-Star break, will be a road-heavy month for the Pistons as they’ll be at The Palace for only five games. And even though the Pistons play fewer games in February, 13, than any other full month, it features their most back-to-back sets, five. Antonio McDyess and San Antonio, which also picked up Richard Jefferson this summer to go with the Spurs’ big three of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, is due in Auburn Hills on Feb. 21. The Pistons close the month with another four-game West Coast swing highlighted by a game at Denver on Feb. 26.

March opens with another visit from the Celtics. The Pistons will get a heavy dose of Cleveland and James during the month, facing them three times in a 16-day span, including a March 15 game at The Palace. They’ll close the month with home games against Chicago and Miami.

Two of the Pistons’ eight April games come against Atlanta in a five-day span. The month opens with a visit from Phoenix, led by Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire. The home finale is set with Toronto on April 12. The Pistons conclude the regular season at Minnesota on April 14.

Thirty of the Pistons’ 82 games will be played against Western Conference teams - they meet each of the 15 teams from the opposite conference once each, home and away. Another 16 games come against Central Division rivals, meeting them four times apiece, two home and two road. The Pistons play 18 games against teams from each of the two other divisions of the Eastern Conference. They play three of the five teams in each division four times and play the remaining two of the five from each division three times each.

The four Eastern Conference teams the Pistons play only three times are Charlotte and Miami of the Southeast Division and Boston and New Jersey of the Atlantic. Miami and Boston both come to The Palace twice; Charlotte and New Jersey visit just once apiece.