DETROIT – In a Pistons intrasquad game, the injured list guys probably would have been betting favorites over the players Dwane Casey wrote into the scorebook for Friday’s matchup with Memphis.
Blake Griffin, Andre Drummond, Luke Kennard, Bruce Brown and Tony Snell is a lineup that surely would have required more game-planning for Memphis than the unit Casey instead employed: Thon Maker, Sekou Doumbouya and Svi Mykhailiuk up front with a backcourt of Derrick Rose and Reggie Jackson.
Rose and Jackson comprise a more-than-credible NBA guard tandem, but – in a Pistons season shrouded in injury and misfortune – it’s more complicated than that. Jackson, who just returned from injury this week after missing 42 games over 13 weeks, is still on a tight minutes restriction.
And, more than anything, that minutes restriction bit the Pistons in Friday’s 125-112 loss.
Casey started Rose and Jackson because, well, with a frontcourt that featured two players who’ve been out of the rotation most of the season in Maker and Doumbouya and a third who only recently cemented his spot at the back end of it, Mykhailiuk, he needed all the scoring and playmaking he could muster in the backcourt.
But starting both Rose and Jackson meant the Pistons would have to survive some minutes without either one on the court. And when Rose followed Jackson to the bench with 3:48 left in the first quarter, well, the Pistons did not survive it. Memphis went on an almost immediate 14-0 run to take a 15-point lead.
“When we tried to sub out, we had nothing off the bench,” Casey said. “We can’t have that. Guys have a job to do when they go in there and you give up a lead and now the rest of the night we’re clawing from behind.”
The Pistons did claw back and were – somehow, some way – tied at 105 with 4:43 to play. But they were gassed and it showed in their inability to get stops or make shots down the stretch, getting outscored 20-7.
“We just had some breakdowns toward the end of the game that’s not supposed to happen,” Markieff Morris said. “They’re a quick, young team and they play hard. They play together and they’ve got some young, great talent.”
The two headliners are 2018 and ’19 lottery picks Jaren Jackson Jr. and Ja Morant. Jackson scored 24 of his 29 points in the first half and Morant closed with a flourish, scoring 10 of his 16 points in the fourth quarter when he also passed for three of his 12 assists.
“Eventually, one of ’em’s going to get going,” Casey said of Memphis young stars. “I thought we did a decent job of slowing them down in the third quarter, but that’s when Morant started getting to the rim, getting to the free-throw line, creating havoc as far as collapsing the defense and getting people open.”
Rose wound up with 22 points, running his streak of games with 20 or more points to 11, the longest of his career. He’s the 13th Pistons player in history with such a streak and the first since Rip Hamilton in 2006-07.
“D-Rose is special,” said Christian Wood, who played another strong game with 20 points and six rebounds in 28 minutes. “Actually playing with him, being on the court with D-Rose, I see some of the things that people talk about. He’s special when he gets downhill, the reverse layups. He’s an All-Star.”
Without Drummond – who missed his second straight game with facial injuries suffered in Monday’s game at Washington – the Pistons were outrebounded 49-37. Without Brown and Snell, both afflicted by the flu bug, the Pistons were without their two top perimeter defenders. The Pistons also shot just 5 of 17 from the 3-point arc in the second half, a figure Snell, Kennard and Griffin certainly would have buttressed.
“Making shots was a big part of it,” Casey said of the stretch struggle. “Our shooting, wide-open layups, easy shots we missed. (Also) our defensive mishaps down the stretch – not switching when we were supposed to, all the little things you can’t do against a quality team like Memphis.”
The Pistons, alas, had a quality team contained within their injury report. They don’t get much time to get healthy, either, with Brooklyn – which began the night two games ahead of the Pistons for the No. 8 playoff seed in the East – visiting Little Caesars on Saturday.
“At the end of the day, we’ve got another game tomorrow,” Morris said. “We’ve just got to keep going.”