D-troit Basketball

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.

“Our main focus has been our field-goal percentage,” John Kuester said. “We’re making sure we keep people down. Now if we start doing a good job of not fouling people and putting them on the line, we’ll be in good shape. All these things are taking time, but they’re starting to gear in to what I want to get accomplished defensively. We’re still going to have nights where it’s not going to be as pretty, but if we can start getting the mind-set that we can get stops, boy, that’s going to be huge for our team in the future.”

“We’ve been preaching defense every day and never really got a chance to see what we were going to be like offensively, because guys went down so fast,” Kwame Brown said after Tuesday’s practice with a Wednesday home game looming with Charlotte – the league’s lowest-scoring team at 85.3 points a game.

“I think we got a glimpse of it in the Memphis game, when guys were coming off and hitting so many shots, but guys went down right away. We’ll know when they come back offensively.”

The Pistons have done an admirable job of treading water while they adjust not only to their new moving parts but to the absences of the two holdovers from the six straight conference finalists, yet their record could be 6-1, instead of 3-4, but for three hideous defensive quarters. They came, one apiece, in losses to Milwaukee, Toronto and the second of two meetings with Orlando. In those three quarters, the Pistons surrendered 120 points, an average of 40 per quarter for a team that is giving up 22.9 points per quarter overall and 20.9 points in the 25 other quarters they’ve played this season.

“Two of those three teams” – Toronto and Orlando – “are very high-powered offensive teams,” John Kuester said. “You’ve got to make sure you come out locked in defensively the way you want to play. We’ve got to make sure we’re going to stop people from the very beginning.”

“Orlando just came out on fire,” Rodney Stuckey said. “I think they hit their first five 3s and they got up a lot. In Toronto as well, they came out shooting pretty well. And in Milwaukee, that third quarter they came out on fire. Other than that, we’ve been holding teams to 20 points. If we can limit those – teams coming out and scoring 40 points – we’ll be fine.”

Was there a pattern to the bad quarters? Not really. Milwaukee’s came in the third, Toronto’s in the second, Orlando’s in the first. Prince played the Milwaukee game before getting hurt, so it can’t be traced solely to his absence. Defensive anchor Ben Wallace started in the quarters when Milwaukee and Orlando went crazy but was out to start the second at Toronto.

All three teams did, however, hurt the Pistons badly from the 3-point arc. Milwaukee was 3 of 5, Toronto 4 of 5 and Orlando 5 of 7. Combined, they shot 72 percent overall and 70 percent from the arc. The Pistons for the season are allowing teams to shoot just 28 percent from the 3-point line. Throw out the three quarters in which they were torched and opponents are shooting .223 from the arc.

“I would say we just didn’t focus on the small things,” Will Bynum said. “It’s not any one person. It’s all five guys and it’s the bench. The bench has to be into it, telling guys different coverages, different assignments, the plays the other team is running. It’s a total team thing and I think those three quarters, we weren’t into it defensively as a team.”

It certainly can’t be traced to the play of rookie Jonas Jerebko, who has held up well individually at Prince’s small forward spot after spending all of his preseason minutes in the mix at power forward. Jerebko’s first four games have matched him against Vince Carter, Hedo Turkoglu, Matt Barnes and Thaddeus Young, running the gamut of explosive athletes, cagey veterans and deadly perimeter shooters.

“Shocking,” Brown said when I asked him to assess the fill-in job Jerebko has turned in. “Nobody knew you could get a rookie that could defend like that, especially early on against guys like Vince Carter. He did a great job. Hopefully, he can stay in there and keep it going until Tayshaun comes back.”

“He’s worked extremely hard,” Kuester said. “As has Austin (Daye), and DaJuan Summers has really picked up the pace the last couple of practices, but it’s not only them. It’s a lot of the veterans we have with us for the first time, understanding what we want to get in our system itself, and they’re starting to, at times. But keeping that field-goal percentage (down) and understanding they can get stops is huge for us.”