No Retreat

It was a style that often intimidated opponents (to this day, the overriding memory of Scottie Pippen in Detroit isn’t the six championships but the “migraine headache” that gripped him on a Game 7 Sunday at The Palace) and made some cringe, but it delighted Pistons fans who reveled not merely in their success but in their swashbuckling machismo.

It felt good to be the bully of the block.

If anyone is mindful of that history, it’s Joe Dumars, a central figure in all three NBA titles, the first two as a player and the most recent as the architect.

So to suggest Joe D is drifting away from the franchise’s roots because he acquired players who know how to find the basket without a road map or hired a coach his last employer trusted to draw up plays during timeouts touches his funny bone.

I’ve gotten a healthy dose of those questions this summer: Is Joe D abandoning the defensive principles that enabled the Pistons to win their three NBA titles? So I put it to him this week, and you can read his full responses on Friday when we post Part II of our Q&A on Pistons.com.

But here’s a slice of his answer: “I don’t think you ever lose the mentality that for us to win, you have to stop people. You have to play good defense. … Lest people forget, Chauncey and Rip didn’t come here as these great defenders. They came here as offensive players. They won a championship because they made a commitment to try to defend people. Just because you address the need to score more doesn’t change your mind-set to have to stop people.”

Kuester comes to the Pistons fresh off his stint as the man entrusted by Cleveland coach Mike Brown to run the LeBron James-led Cavs offense, so it’s fresh in fans’ minds that Kuester is an offensive specialist. Kuester laughed that one off before I could put the question to him in Las Vegas and assured me that he’s as vigilant in his regard for the value of stout team defense as you would expect a Dean Smith-Larry Brown disciple to be.

And Joe D drew another parallel that should quell the fears of Pistons Nation, too. Remember Rick Carlisle? During his time with the Pistons, with a roster that wasn’t exactly dripping with potent scorers, he became known as an ultraconservative offensive coach who practically ordered his team to pull up even when it had numbers in transition. He became even more buttoned-down during his time with Indiana.

“When Rick Carlisle came here,” Dumars pointed out, “he came under the exact same umbrella (as Kuester) – as Larry Bird’s offensive guru.”

True enough. Carlisle, Bird’s old teammate with the Celtics, was charged by Bird – who jumped into the head coaching job with zero experience – with running Indiana’s offense while Dick Harter, who was Chuck Daly’s lone assistant during his early days with the Pistons, ran the defense.

It’s not so much that the Pistons became any less proficient offensively in the waning years of the Goin’ to Work bunch’s life. They could still run their half-court offense under Chauncey Billups with relentless precision and knock down 18-foot jump shots often enough to win a lot of games. But the evolution of the NBA game that’s accelerated each year since the 2004 title, won by a team that remarkably held five straight opponents to under 70 points, demanded a different tack.

The Pistons won the 2004 title while averaging 90 points a game. Even if time hadn’t begun to erode the skills of players like Ben and Rasheed Wallace and Joe D had kept the ’04 title team intact despite the challenges of the salary cap, those 90 points a game would get them beat comfortably most nights in today’s era.

So prudence steered Joe D to punch up his offense with players who can launch bombs from the other side of the 3-point line and make plays for themselves off the dribble. When the Bad Boys won their first title in 1989, they took fewer than five 3-point attempts per game; last season, Orlando’s Rashard Lewis took seven a game by himself. If you can’t spot yourself 18 to 21 points a game from the 3-point line, you’re going to have a tough time winning consistently.

Ben Gordon gives the Pistons one of the league’s top 3-point marksmen, a career .415 shooter – better than Reggie Miller, widely considered the best in NBA history. Charlie Villanueva is that increasingly valued commodity – a power forward who forces defenders away from the rim out of respect for his 3-point ability. All three of the 2009 draftees, Austin Daye in particular, show great promise from the arc.

None of that means the Pistons have decided defense no longer matters. It just means they understand that along the offense-defense continuum, the better you are at scoring gives you that much more of a cushion on defense.

“All we’re doing is saying we recognize that we have to score more and to recognize that doesn’t mean that you’re abandoning the mind-set that you have to stop people,” Dumars said.

The NBA average in 2003-04 when the Pistons won it all was 93.3; last season it was 100.0 on the nose. That’s roughly an 8 percent scoring surge in five years and there’s no indication that the trend is about to reverse itself.

You can be assured that Joe Dumars and John Kuester are acutely aware that teams that play lax defense will struggle to qualify for the playoffs and won’t last long should they make it. It should also give Pistons fans comfort to know they’re equally cognizant of the need to put the ball in the basket with greater efficiency than they’ve seen around The Palace the last few seasons.