CHARLOTTE – If it wasn’t the most frustrated, most disappointed – verging on angriest – that Dwane Casey’s been yet, it certainly was in the running.
“Our give-a-crap level was very low for a very important game,” Casey said after the Pistons lost 98-86 at Charlotte, falling to 0-3 for the season against the Hornets and seeing them go from a half-game behind to a half-game ahead of the Pistons in the standings. “When you’re a winner, you come out and take this game and be ready to fight.”
The Pistons hit 9 of 13 3-point shots, scored 40 fourth-quarter points and erased a 14-point deficit to win in overtime at Minnesota two nights earlier. They got no bounce from that game, though. Their shooting again plummeted – the Pistons hit just 8 of 34 from the 3-point arc and shot 39 percent overall – and Casey traced it all to playing dispassionately.
“We were cutting like we were cutting through mud, going slow,” he said. “They were beating us to the spot. They were blowing plays up, busting through screens. We’ve got to do things with pace, with force. And if you don’t, a team that’s hungry to make the playoffs, they’re going to take it away from you.”
The Pistons scored just 24 points in the game’s first 18 minutes and trailed by 16 when they went on a 10-0 run and trailed by just five, 45-40, at halftime despite matching their season low for points in a first half. But Charlotte blew the lead out to 14 in less than three minutes of the third quarter, eventually to 15, mostly because the Pistons kept losing Marvin Williams at the 3-point line.
Williams hit four triples in the first six minutes of the quarter, finishing with 24 points – 21 of them via 3-pointers, hitting 7 in 11 tries.
“It was breakdowns,” Reggie Bullock said. “He’s a pick and popper. We’ve got to be able to rotate to him quick. He got a lot of open looks and he shoots them pretty quick.”
“If you’re not locked in, playing hard and focused, you’re not going to stop anybody,” Casey said. “We did not do that tonight. As good as I thought we were against Minnesota, we were the opposite tonight. I’m not a psychologist, but I do know basketball habits and we have not gotten there yet. Until we do, we’re going to get our hearts broken every other night.”
Bullock, coming off a career-high 33 points at Minnesota, didn’t get as many opportunities, hitting 3 of 8 from the arc – and Casey would tell you that’s because Charlotte did a better job of adhering to its game plan and playing hard to keep Bullock in check. And Bullock got precious little help. Until Jose Calderon hit a 3-pointer midway through the third quarter, Pistons other than Bullock were 0 of 14 from the arc.
“They were really mixing up the coverages,” Langston Galloway said. “We were trying to make adjustments on the fly, but we just couldn’t get it going. … It was very disappointing. We had a lot of great looks and just wasn’t knocking down shots tonight. Our bench – myself included – we struggled tonight. We didn’t help the starting unit out at all.”
Blake Griffin scored 23 points – he missed all four of his 3-point tries – and Andre Drummond, playing through the illness that’s afflicted the Pistons for the past week, finished with 17 points and 16 rebounds, though he appeared to tire, going without a point or rebound after coming back with 6:26 left in the game.
The Pistons pulled within three shortly after Drummond returned as Charlotte missed its first nine shots of the fourth quarter to open the door to another comeback win. But then the Hornets went on a 9-0 run as the Pistons went four straight possessions without a point on a night they seemed to lack the force to get over the hump.
“It’s frustrating, but like everybody on the team said, we’ve just got to continue to fight together,” Bullock said. “This is a team that we’re fighting for playoff position, so we have to have our hard hats on to be able to go out and compete every possession against them.”
“How bad do we want it?” Casey said. “How bad do we want to stay in the playoff hunt and be known in this league as a hard-playing team? Every night when you come to Detroit, you’re going to play against a hard-playing, executing team. Not every other night. We’ve got to do that every night.”