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About Keith LangloisAward-winning journalist Keith Langlois, most recently lead sports columnist at The Oakland Press, joined Pistons.com as the web site editor on October 2, 2006. Langlois, who brings over 27 years of professional sports journalism experience to Palace Sports & Entertainment, serves as Pistons.com's official beat writer and covers the team on a daily basis. Questions and comments on Keith's posts can be submitted via the Pistons Mailbag. Click here to submit your question. |
What’s gone right is a longer list – a list that would be receiving far more attention if it wasn’t for the double-whammy of Prince-Hamilton injuries that have combined to mute the effects of What’s Gone Right.
Let’s air out some of the things that have unfolded as well as Joe Dumars could have reasonably hoped last summer when he was plotting the course of the franchise for the next generation.
They hung tough for much of the first half, hit a bad spurt late in the second quarter and saw a lot of good work unravel into a sudden double-digit deficit that put a shorthanded, schedule-disadvantaged young team into a hole that proved just a little too deep for their resources.
Until these last two games, the Pistons missed Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince mostly for the depth that two players of that caliber provide – players who eat up 35 minutes apiece and give the Pistons 35 points and 10 rebounds and rock-steady defense.
So the Pistons had a chance, a decent chance, even with Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince in street clothes.
What they couldn’t afford is what happened midway through the second quarter, about a 10-second interlude that tilted momentum 90 degrees on its axis and started a California mudslide rolling downhill at them.
Rip and Tay are day to day.
When they’ll play, who can say?
OK … On with the blog …
The current poll on Pistons.com asks fans how the Pistons will fare on their sadistic four-game Western Conference road swing – their annual Circus Trip, when the lions and monkeys take over The Palace – and, as of midday Monday, 2-2 was the runaway leader, garnering 44 percent of the vote, with fans close to equally divided between 1-3 (22 percent) and 3-1 (19 percent) and 4-0 (10 percent) getting twice as much support as 0-4 (5 percent).
Will Bynum brought the Pistons back from an early fourth-quarter eight-point deficit to tie Dallas, but already shorthanded without Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince, and gassed from a draining Saturday night win at Washington, and seeing Ben Gordon miss 15 of his 16 shots, and having Rodney Stuckey crumple midway through the fourth quarter with a calf cramp while Dallas was sinking a critical 3-pointer as he lay writhing …
Well, you get the idea. Close, but no victory cigar.
It wasn’t quite the way the Pistons wanted to embark on a four-game West Coast trip that must have been scheduled by the Marquis de Sade – back-to-backs against the Lakers and Portland first and Utah and Phoenix to close it out – but they left with their heads up, even if their batteries were down.
But they have even less margin for error in a seven-game stretch ahead that could go a long way toward determining their playoff viability. The Pistons will no doubt be Las Vegas underdogs in each of the seven games – five of them on the road and all against teams that expect to be in the playoffs.
The first six of those games are inconveniently packaged in three back-to-back sets and the seventh upon their return from the last of those back-to-backs – when LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers will be awaiting them at The Palace.
Joe D’s free-agent bounty got the Pistons a convincing Veteran’s Day win despite the fact the two veterans expected to have the most to do with Detroit’s success this season – Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince – were again unavailable with injuries, Hamilton for the seventh straight game and Prince the fifth straight.
Yet the Pistons squared their record at 4-4, and went to 3-2 in the five games played without both links to the six straight conference finals teams, by building a 35-point lead and cruising to a 98-75 win over a Charlotte team that came in with the same 3-4 record as the Pistons.
They got a combined 52 points from Villanueva and Gordon without playing either one in the final quarter, so thoroughly did the Pistons dominate both offensively and defensively. It’s the second half of that equation that raises eyebrows, by the way.
Injuries to Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince have put any definitive conclusions about the Pistons at either end on hold, but so far they’re holding up better than anyone could have reasonably expected defensively.
They came out of Monday’s games No. 2 in the league in field-goal percentage defense – the statistic most coaches look at as the most reliable defensive barometer – at .417, No. 2 in 3-point percentage defense and No. 7 in points per game allowed.
“I know all the pictures and everything in his office,” Bynum said after Monday’s practice, when this time it was Rodney Stuckey’s turn to get another lecture in Kuester 101. “All his Carolina stuff, Dean Smith. I’ve been in there a little too much.”
Actually, Bynum and Stuckey don’t mind at all. They both clearly enjoy their relationship with Kuester, who has struck a balance of unrelenting positivity with an eye toward critical review of every possession.
But sooner or later, good feelings have to be reinforced by wins.
Especially at home against one from the half-dozen or so teams that figure to be competing for the final four playoff berths in the East after Orlando, Boston, Cleveland and Atlanta, the consensus top four.
Which is why Sunday’s 88-81 win over Philadelphia left the Pistons feeling even better about themselves.
When you're an NBA player, expected to run up and down 94 feet several dozen times a night, get leaned on by 240-pounders for 2½ hours at a time, swivel your neck and twist your spine scores of times a game, and jump up and down with its resulting torque on the back upon landing, can a ruptured disc - large, small or medium sized - be anything but a serious injury?
Losing Prince for a matter of weeks, as appears possible, leaves John Kuester with one obvious lineup decision to be made upon Rip Hamilton's return from a sprained ankle, which doesn't appear likely for Sunday's matinee against the 76ers: start Hamilton at Prince's small forward spot and leave Ben Gordon in the lineup at shooting guard; or return Gordon to the bench and let the rookies - Jonas Jerebko, Austin Daye and perhaps even DaJuan Summers - continue to share Prince's position until he can get back in the lineup.
The RIP-ple effect of Hamilton, especially, being out of the lineup is perhaps most telling in Stuckey’s shooting numbers. One game isn’t a very reliable sample size, obviously, but in the 22-point win at Memphis to open the season a week ago, Stuckey shot 6 of 10. In the four games since then, Stuckey is 22 of 72. I’ll save you the math – that’s 30 percent shooting.
And perhaps more troubling than the shooting percentage is the number of shots Stuckey is putting up. Eighteen a game is a little high for a point guard – or, for that matter, for any player in an offense designed to spread the shots around.
But in losing a game, the Pistons gained a little more insight into their character and allowed John Kuester to cull a little more knowledge about some individuals that he wouldn’t have had the chance to glean without the double whammy of losing Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince to injury.
The blemish on the box score from Wednesday’s loss was the 44 points Toronto hung on the Pistons in the second quarter when their pick-and-roll defense sprung gaping leaks and they compounded their trouble with shaky offensive execution. They regrouped in the second half and had a chance to win, but the loss of two minutes-eaters like Prince and Hamilton atop the toll exacted by the fury invested in beating Orlando wore them down.
Seven seasons later, in a move born of desperation, with Orlando as the antagonist, the Pistons turned to a callow rookie and asked him to bail them out.
OK, they didn’t really expect Jonas Jerebko to bail them out. But just as they asked Tayshaun Prince to guard Tracy McGrady in the 2003 playoffs when no one else could slow him down, they asked the NBA’s first Swede to guard McGrady’s cousin, Vince Carter, in a game that probably was taken off the board in Las Vegas when news leaked about an hour before tipoff that Prince couldn’t play.
And this one turned out just like that one seven years ago did – with the Pistons winning and Orlando leaving The Palace muttering, like the Magic have so many times since.
“We have talked about it a lot as a staff,” John Kuester said after Monday’s practice with four games stretching out over the next seven days, including two against defending Eastern Conference champion Orlando, which visits The Palace on Tuesday. “Trying to make sure that we get them out in the right amount of time and make sure they’re comfortable getting a good warmup.”
The sample size is still too small to extrapolate meaningful conclusions, but it’s an obvious area of concern as the Pistons came out of the first week of the NBA season with a 1-2 record.
Maybe the most reliable statistical indicator so far for the Pistons is this one: record with Rip Hamilton in the lineup, 1-0; record with Rip Hamilton in street clothes, 0-2.
