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Award-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.
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The Cavs completed the season sweep of the Pistons, beating them for the third time in 16 days and fourth this year after sweeping them out of last year’s playoffs, with a 104-79 win that saw the Pistons – briefly healthy en masse for Friday’s game at Indiana – again forced to alter their active list when Ben Wallace, after reaggravating his knee injury against the Pacers, couldn’t go against Cleveland.
Cleveland, continuing the Pistons’ recent trend of sputtering road starts, stretched its lead to 19 points by the midpoint of the third quarter, but the Pistons cut it to 12 by halftime and eight early in the third quarter before the Cavs again turned it up a notch on a night LeBron James never had to extend himself, finishing with 15 points, three boards and seven assists in 31 quiet minutes, taking only nine shots and getting to the foul line only three times.
Stuckey and Wallace both participated fully in Thursday’s practice and John Kuester said that while they haven’t concluded yet that both will play Friday, “there’s a very good chance for both of those guys,” he said.
Kuester had said earlier this week that the Pistons were expecting to hear by Thursday morning whether Stuckey would be fully cleared. It was reported that he had worn a heart monitor for about one week with daily consultations with the medical team at the Cleveland Clinic, where Stuckey was first admitted and observed overnight after collapsing in the third quarter of the March 5 loss to the Cavaliers.
In that same perfect world, Charlie Villanueva wouldn’t have pulled a hamstring and missed most of training camp, had his nose broken in November, been afflicted with plantar fasciitis in December and fought back spasms in January. If he were an automobile, Charlie V would be declared as totaled by the insurance company, yet he’s managed to miss fewer games than Gordon, Tayshaun Prince, Rip Hamilton, Will Bynum, Ben Wallace and Rodney Stuckey.
It’s been that kind of year, where evaluating the team and even individuals through the lens of constant injury and disruption has been a daily reality and a formidable challenge. So Joe Dumars isn’t paying much heed to the fantasy experts condemning his forays into free agency last summer.
The Pistons and Cleveland arrived at mid-March sprinting in opposite directions, the Pistons coming off consecutive blowout losses to Eastern heavyweights and headed toward the lottery, the Cavs running away from the pack for the No. 1 playoff seed with the expectation of an NBA title and the uncertainty of LeBron James’ pending free agency hanging over their every move.
It could have been the 2007 playoffs all over again, when James broke open a tight game with a series of highlight-reel plays down the stretch of a fourth quarter stamped with his imprint – 15 points, four assists and three rebounds on his way to 29, 12 and 12.
But one of those highlight plays cost the Pistons two points and a chance to position themselves for the upset on a blocked shot that wasn’t. Trailing 104-101, the Pistons saw Will Bynum chase down a long rebound of a rare LeBron fourth-quarter foible – he missed a 3-point attempt – and streak in for a layup to cut their deficit to one. James, trailing the play, went in for the type of block he seemingly executes every game. But replays clearly showed Bynum’s layup attempt coming off the backboard before James’ right hand swatted it away. It should have been goaltending and a one-point game. Instead …
He’s been seen the least of the Pistons’ three impressive rookies this season, but player development coach Steve Hester – who spend the bulk of his time working with the three rookies – sees a future for Summers just as bright as those of Daye and Jonas Jerebko.
We looked at Jerebko and Daye through Hetzel’s eyes the past two days on Pistons.com. Here’s his take on Summers.
DaJuan Summers – Pistons personnel director George David said one of the things that first struck him about Summers came at the end of Summers’ sophomore season at Georgetown when he was an instructor at the LeBron James Skills Camp. During the post-practice pickup games among camp counselors, Summers wound up matched up against James. It’s not that he played James to a standoff, necessarily, but that Summers looked physically comfortable with the challenge of guarding him.
Tayshaun Prince, who hadn’t missed a game due to injury in his first seven NBA seasons, is likely to sit out with his third separate injury on Tuesday night when the Cleveland Cavaliers – no, the schedule doesn’t cut them any breaks, either – visit The Palace.
Prince, who missed 26 games with a ruptured disc early in the season and six more with a left knee injury shortly after returning, suffered another back injury early in Monday’s 119-93 loss when Jason Maxiell inadvertently kneed him in the back as Prince, after driving to the lane and shooting, stumbled and fell into Maxiell’s path.
After writhing in pain and being administered by Arnie Kander on the court, Prince limped to the locker room and didn’t return. It apparently is unrelated to the disc injury and early reports projected no structural damage, merely intense pain. With the Pistons now sitting at 23-44, there’s no urgency to rush him back into the lineup until he’s comfortable.
The Pistons fell to 7-26 on the road, losing their seventh straight away from home, on a night Boston put seven players in double figures and shot .622.
Austin Daye – While Daye’s playing time is more sporadic than Jonas Jerebko’s, Hetzel is more often now seeing the same ability in Daye to translate what they constantly work on in their sessions over to games.
“I think Austin is the most efficient offensive player of the three,” he said. “His skill set is right there with like a Ben Gordon. If you put him in drills and he’s going to get to his one-dribble pull up or make three in a row, he’s going to do it and do it well.”
While many NBA draft experts thought Daye ranked right behind Stephen Curry as a perimeter shooter in the 2009 class, his 3-point shot has been erratic, connecting on slightly less than 30 percent. Not to worry, Hetzel said. The predraft analysis was correct.
“We talked about how we had to get longer and bigger on the perimeter,” said Steve Hetzel, the video coordinator for the Cavs at the time and now player development coach for the Pistons. “We felt our smaller guards rotating out to Orlando’s shooters hurt us. If we’re having to double Dwight (Howard) in the post and rotate out with a 6-foot guard, they were just shooting right over us.”
Whatever advantages the Cavs have over the Pistons – and the list certainly starts with a certain No. 23 – perimeter size isn’t one of them. At least not among the players with whom Hetzel works most closely, the three rookies Joe Dumars snagged from the 2009 draft – Austin Daye, DaJuan Summers and Jonas Jerebko, all of them given first-round grades by the Pistons.
Hetzel wouldn’t be one to challenge that assessment, not after spending the past eight months working with them since being handpicked by John Kuester, then an assistant on Brown’s staff, to accompany him to Detroit.
“We already have that length here, just waiting,” Hetzel said. “Now we’ve just got to find the time for them to get better. They’re going to make rookie mistakes right now, but it’s been a really good year for me, getting to work with all three of those kids.”
Over the next three days, we’ll look at each of the three rookies through Hetzel’s eyes.
Last season it was the 26-point fourth quarter that set a franchise record, and Friday night it was a 20-assist performance that was the first for a Piston since Thomas dished out 21 – also against Washington – on April 12, 1985 as the Pistons beat the Wizards 101-87 at The Palace to sweep the season series against the team now coached by Flip Saunders.
“It means a lot, especially growing up watching a lot of Isiah,” Bynum said after his 20-assist, three-turnover performance that gives him 33 assists and just five turnovers in his three starts. “Watching him in the summer league, seeing him come back and play in the city, it means a lot to me. It’s a great accomplishment.”
Bynum registered eight assists in the first quarter and had 10 before taking his first shot and it was in that first quarter when he already began thinking of the franchise record of 25, shared by Thomas and Kevin Porter, each of whom did it twice.
He’d missed the first day of workouts, awaiting clearance from FIBA on a contract technicality. When the OK came about 30 minutes into the second practice, Pistons personnel director George David took the call and Jerebko, in his workout gear and shooting baskets by himself off to the side, was rushed right into practice.
Within the next 30 minutes, Jerebko made a handful of plays that spoke to his potential, his readiness and his basketball IQ. When Pistons assistant coaches Darrell Walker and Pat Sullivan called practice to an end, David turned to Dimitris Itoudis, assistant coach for Greek powerhouse Panathanaikos, and asked him, “Dmitri, which one of our players would you take first for your team?”
The string of misery reached 10 games on Wednesday, when the Pistons put up a good fight for one quarter and led 29-28 heading to the second. But with Rodney Stuckey and Ben Wallace in street clothes, when John Kuester went to his bench to start the second he had to rely on rusty and little-used veterans Chucky Atkins and Kwame Brown in addition to rookie Austin Daye.
And it only took Utah – coming off a 132-108 road blistering of Chicago the previous night – 2:33 to go on a 10-0 run against Kuester’s bench, extending it to 14-0 after he quickly ushered Will Bynum and Tayshaun Prince back into the game. By halftime, the deficit had ballooned to 20 points, 63-43. Against a team pushing hard to overtake Denver and Dallas for the West’s No. 2 seed behind the Lakers – and, indeed, with an outside shot at overhauling Kobe Bryant’s suddenly sputtering bunch – that was a hole too deep.
“Nothing in this game is fair sometimes,” Kuester said, “and what I mean is that you go up 29-28 after the first quarter, they go on a 14-0 run in the beginning of the second quarter, and from that point on you’re just working uphill. You’re trying to get close, you’re trying to get close … and we don’t have a large margin for error at this stage.”
“Everything is good,” he said. “They took a lot of tests – blood tests, heart stuff. Everything came back good. As long as I’m healthy, that’s all that matters. I’m just listening to the doctors and whatever they say. If they’re saying I’m healthy, I’m healthy.”
Stuckey said the feeling, as he sunk into Arnie Kander’s arms on the bench following a late third-quarter timeout, was very similar to what he experienced on Nov. 9, 2008, when he sunk to his knees on The Palace court just before halftime of a game against Boston and tapped his chest. Stuckey didn’t accompany the team on its West Coast trip the next day, sat out two games while undergoing a similar battery of tests and checked out fine then, too.
“It was (similar), but it was kind of worse (this time),” Stuckey said. “But I’m feeling fine now, so that’s all that matters. The doctors are doing a good job and I’m getting a lot of rest.”
Over the final 17 games, Bynum averaged 14.2 points and 4.5 assists in 24 minutes a game and made slightly more than half his shots, a percentage relatively few guards achieve.
Among his notable performances were the 32-point career game against Charlotte in which Bynum set a franchise record with a 26-point fourth quarter, a 25-point and 11-assist game against the Lakers, and a 22-point and six-assist performance against the Clippers.
That Clippers outing came in the 68th game of the season when Rodney Stuckey sat out due to illness, but it was Bynum’s performances in the three previous games, starting with the 65th – when he averaged 13.7 points and 3.7 assists – that emboldened Curry to trust Bynum with the start and the 44 minutes he would earn that night.
Fast forward to a year later, when Stuckey sat out the 63rd game of the season Sunday after his frightening collapse on the bench in the second half of Friday’s loss to Cleveland. In his second career start, Bynum gave the Pistons 12 points and 11 assists against only one turnover while playing 42 minutes.
The Pistons shot 55 percent through three quarters and turned the ball over a mere seven times. They’d made six 3-point shots in 10 tries and outrebounded Houston by four. That sounds like a 15-point lead. And it might have been – if the anchor of the Pistons’ interior defense and the guard John Kuester says has as much defensive potential as any perimeter player he’s coached had been in the lineup.
But with Ben Wallace in street clothes and Rodney Stuckey not in the arena, the Pistons – despite all those gaudy offensive numbers – somehow trailed Houston by four, 86-82, heading to the fourth quarter. It would grow to eight and was still at six with 1:31 to play, leaky defense pointing the Pistons to their seventh straight loss.
Then, out of nowhere, they turned into 2003-04 Pistons, holding Houston scoreless on its final four possessions of regulation and limiting the Rockets to five points – and only one basket – in 10 possessions of overtime to produce one of the most satisfying wins of a season laden with disappointment and, for a frightening stretch of Friday, on that flirted with tragedy when Stuckey slumped over on Detroit’s bench and needed emergency medical treatment.
It’s much the same story as unfolded on Nov. 9, 2008, when Stuckey fell to his knees just seconds before halftime at The Palace in a game against Boston. After a few moments, he rose to his feet and walked unsteadily toward the locker room, but needed to sit in a hallway before getting there. He didn’t accompany the team the next day as it headed to California to begin a four-game road trip, missing two games while also undergoing the gamut of medical tests in which his heart function and everything else checked out normally.
Stuckey was released from Cleveland Clinic on Saturday afternoon, where he had spent the night, accompanied by Pistons trainer Mike Abdenour and Ryan Hoover, director of player development. A brief statement released by the Pistons said Stuckey would undergo further testing in Detroit. Contrary to initial reports, Stuckey did not suffer a seizure and never lost consciousness.
It was a fairly nonsensical position even at the time, but one that became downright laughable last July when the NBA released figures for the 2009-10 NBA salary cap, which came down by $1 million from the previous year, while simultaneously issuing an ominous warning that the cap number for 2010-11 would plummet much more dramatically.
The Pistons had just days earlier come to agreements in principle with Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva, which struck some Pistons fans with visions of LeBron James and Chris Bosh donning Pistons blue as deflating news.
Now that Gordon and Villanueva are bumping along at numbers not only well off their career norms, but in many cases approaching or undercutting career lows, the view that Dumars should have sat on his money last July is gaining steam.
With Wallace sidelined with a bruised right knee suffered in Tuesday’s loss to Boston, the Pistons’ defense dissolved in a flurry of layups, dunks and uncontested jump shots as they allowed a season-worst 128 points in a 24-point loss to New York.
“We lost our edge tonight – there’s no question about it,” John Kuester said. “I was disappointed. We’d been playing some pretty good basketball up until tonight. ... Losing a major cog in Ben Wallace, your defense has a different look. That’s where everybody has to do a really good job of understanding where they’re supposed to be at what time. We had so much slippage throughout the game. They were able to get layup after layup and then to get looks when we tried to overcompensate.”
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“Of course you miss Ben Wallace,” said Jonas Jerebko, who had another double-double with 15 points and 13 rebounds. “(Jason Maxiell) and Charlie (Villanueva) did a good job, but of course we miss Body.”
The Knicks had Tuesday off while the Pistons were pouring their energy into a well-played game against Boston at The Palace, and without the gritty resolve of the player the Pistons admiringly call “Body” to will them through a back-to-back, the Pistons simply didn’t have anything approaching the necessary defensive edge.
That’s a dangerous formula against a good-time team like the Knicks, who score in bunches when the opponent is willing to trade powerhouse punches instead of putting in the dirty work of body blows that sap the legs and the willpower.
They got clues to some of those questions Tuesday in a 105-100 loss to Boston on a night they were done in by turnovers (18) and a huge disparity in 3-point shooting (3 of 20 for the Pistons, 9 of 18 for the Celtics).
But the rookies are a large part of every question that pertains to their future, and for all those Pistons fans dying to see more of them, Tuesday was one of the best nights of the season, the loss that dropped the Pistons to 21-39 notwithstanding.
All three of them had their moments, even DaJuan Summers – playing in just his 25th game of the season, and for only 25 seconds. Here’s a look at the rookies who gave the Pistons a glimpse of their future on a night the Pistons helped give more than $400,000 to Michigan families as part of the third annual Pistons Cares Telethon to benefit the Food Bank Council of Michigan.
But Brian Hill, with three stints as an NBA head coach, knows exactly how the constancy of injuries has bedeviled Kuester in his first chance at sitting in the first chair after two decades in the NBA as somebody’s assistant – including a turn under Hill in Orlando.
“It’s the most frustrating thing you can go through as a head coach,” Hill said Monday after running the Pistons through practice while Kuester returned home to Richmond, Va., to attend the memorial service for his father, John, who died Feb. 20 at 89. “You plan your season, you look at your pieces and what you think you can do – how you organize a team offensively, what schemes you can use defensively – and all of a sudden that all gets thrown to the wind when you start losing guys.
Posted Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Bench Bludgeoning
Whenever Joe Dumars gets the Pistons back to the NBA Finals, he can only hope Jerry Sloan will have retired and the Utah Jazz will be operating under a different organizational imprint. Because even some of the best Dumars teams of the past decade haven’t had much luck against Sloan’s Jazz, and the current injury-battered Pistons hardly register as one of the best entries of the Dumars decade.
Posted Tuesday, March 9, 2010
'Everything is Good'
Rodney Stuckey attended Pistons practice Tuesday, four days removed from being whisked by ambulance to Cleveland Clinic, saying he feels just fine – but has no idea when doctors will clear him for a return to basketball.
Posted Monday, March 8, 2010
Deja Will
Whether it’s irony or coincidence or somewhere along the continuum, the situation isn’t lost on Will Bynum. It was right about this point last season when Michael Curry, amid a season buffeted by the dysfunctional waves thrown off by the Allen Iverson experience, entrusted Bynum with a larger role and was rewarded with what amounted to the most pleasant surprise of the Pistons season.
Posted Sunday, March 7, 2010
Suddenly Stingy
On Oscar night, Jason Maxiell and Will Bynum deserved best supporting actor awards.
Posted Saturday, March 6, 2010
Happy Homecoming
The Pistons know Rodney Stuckey is OK. What they don’t know is why he was so suddenly not OK in the middle of Friday night’s second half at Cleveland, why he collapsed into the arms of Arnie Kander and why he needed to be taken by ambulance to the Cleveland Clinic, where the battery of tests administered at one of the nation’s most respected hospitals revealed no obvious cause of Stuckey’s distress.
Posted Thursday, March 4, 2010
A Cautionary Tale
From the time Joe Dumars traded Chauncey Billups to create cap space for the chance to reinvent the Pistons, there was a faction of support for the notion he hoard the money for a year to position himself to strike in the Summer of LeBron.
Posted Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Body Blow
A constant refrain amid a Pistons season filled with a barrage of misfortune has been this: Where would they be without Ben Wallace? After getting through 60 games with Wallace standing tall in every one of them, the Pistons found out where they’d be when he finally had to sit one out: in trouble.
Posted Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Silver Lining
What’s left of this season, down to its final 22 games, isn’t only about the rookies. In fact, it isn’t foremost about the rookies. The priority, forestalled time and again through the disruption caused by waves of injuries, is to see what these Pistons are at their core – how tough they are, what type of defense they can play, how their many offensive weapons can blend and complement one another.
Posted Monday, March 1, 2010
Voice of Experience
The only thing stiffer than Tayshaun Prince’s back or the swollen ankles of Rip Hamilton, Ben Gordon and Will Bynum through the season’s first half was John Kuester’s upper lip. He might have felt like punching hotel mirrors in cities across the NBA, but you couldn’t get the embattled first-year Pistons coach to cave to frustration in his public utterances.
