One of the abiding missions of the Pistons season is to expose their five rookies and host of young players to as many learning experiences as possible. They’ll have to struggle to figure out what the lesson from Saturday’s thumping at the hands of the Golden State Warriors might be, but maybe it’s as simple as this: In the NBA, life comes at you fast.
Forty-eight hours after scoring a 15-point win over the defending NBA champion Lakers – using a late 16-0 run to do it – the Pistons fell behind by double digits less than five minutes into the game at Golden State and never made a run.
“The day was off-kilter with the double (coronavirus) testing. First couple plays of the game, I knew something wasn’t right,” Dwane Casey said after the 118-91 loss. “It’s no excuses in this league. Once you do make an excuse, teams will embarrass you and that’s what happened tonight. If you don’t bring the right mental approach, no matter what happened in the last game – good or bad – teams will take advantage of it and that’s exactly what Golden State did to us tonight.”
Other than Jerami Grant, who scored 18 points and hit 5 of 8 shots, it was a particularly brutal night for Pistons starters. The other four combined for 18 points and made just 5 of 23 shots.
To graphically illustrate the night-and-day difference of Thursday’s euphoric win and Saturday’s lifeless loss, look no further than Wayne Ellington’s line. Ellington came into the game the NBA’s hottest 3-point shooter and knocked down 6 of 9 from the arc to spearhead the win over the Lakers. He took the first Pistons shot at Golden State and missed it – then missed his last five shots, too. He’d scored 15 or more points in seven straight games, a career high for him – and finished scoreless at Golden State.
“We were off rhythm from the get-go,” Casey said. “A lot was their talent, their speed. We knew that. We talked about it all day today – how fast they play and how fast you have to make decisions, offensively and defensively, and we didn’t do that. We missed some shots we normally make and so that’s when I got that feeling something was off.”
Casey’s second unit gave the Pistons a brief jolt of energy, but even they struggled to make shots as the deficit kept swelling. The Warriors were ahead by 12 after a quarter and by 19 at halftime, eventually leading by as many as 35.
“It’s always disappointing when you lose a game, no matter by how many points,” said Josh Jackson, whose 17 points off the bench provided at least a ray of sunlight. “I can’t quite put my finger on what it was today. I don’t feel like we really had the energy we normally have. A couple things we went over in walk-through, we didn’t execute.”
“Thank goodness he did give us 17 points. We were just having trouble generating shots and making plays,” Casey said. “It was good for him to hopefully get a rhythm back. I thought his energy, Isiah’s (Stewart) energy, Derrick’s (Rose) energy, the second unit gave us a little life. But we missed some defensive assignments, not being where we’re supposed to be. I thought ‘it’s going to be a long night’ and it was.”
It was the rare game where the Pistons weren’t competitive into the fourth quarter this season – the only loss that came by more than 15 points and only the third by more than 10 points. The first extended road trip of the season with so many inexperienced players and amid the restrictions on interactions due to COVID-19 protocols surely added to the challenges of trying to carry over momentum from big home wins over Philadelphia and the Los Angeles Lakers, but Casey knows none of those things ultimately matter.
“We can make all those excuses,” he said. “We didn’t show up. We tend to get emotionally drunk off of big wins and we did, I guess. You add the travel and today was a little bit off – at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of excuses.”