Can the Pistons Rebound From Their Spring Swoon?

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Few teams entered the offseason on a lower low than the Detroit Pistons. Detroit had soared during the regular season, winning a team-record and NBA best 64 games. They started out so strong — winning 37 of their first 42 games — that they provoked comparisons to the greatest teams of all time. After breezing through the first round and the first two games of the second, it all fell apart. Then the Pistons struggled mightily to oust an inferior Cavalier team, and they were easily dispatched by the Miami Heat in the Conference Finals.Then, in the first days of the offseason, their best-known player, center Ben Wallace, left the team to accept a four-year deal with the rival Chicago Bulls.

Joe Dumars, Detroit’s team president, is widely regarded as one of the best personnel directors in the league, but his response so far — signing journeyman center Nazr Mohammed and guard Flip Murray — seems like an insufficient remedy to the situation. The sense that the Pistons were caught in an inexorable decline went far beyond panic-struck callers to Motor City sports-talk radio.The Pistons are an old team; their rotation consists of only one player, forward Tayshaun Prince, who has yet to reach the prime of his career. Forwards Rasheed Wallace and Antonio McDyess turn 32 just before training camp opens; point guard Chauncy Billups will turn 30 in September as well. Guard Richard Hamilton turned 28 in February. Could the age factor combined with losing Wallace, the defensive player of the year, end Detroit’s four-year run in the Eastern Conference Finals and start a slow descent into mediocrity?

The additions of Murray and Mohammed alone won’t fix all that ails Detroit, but they should help. First of all, although Wallace was the Pistons’ bestknown player, and his block against Shaquille O’Neal in Game 2 of the Conference Finals is immortal, Big Ben was a liability to the team in many ways that Mohammed won’t be. The former Knicks pivotman (and by the way, just imagine for a second if the Knicks had kept Mohammed and Jackie Butler and spent the money being paid to Eddy Curry and Jerome James elsewhere) is a good shooter from medium range and that ability will keep defenses honest. With Wallace in the lineup, teams often defended five on four against Detroit. Mohammed’s adjusted plus/minus last season was a solid plus 5.5 points per 100 possessions, so the Pistons will likely take a small hit defensively and gain on offense.

The Pistons’ major problem last year was the lack of depth. The starters played too many minutes; no Piston starter averaged fewer than 34.7 minutes a game, and no other NBA team started a five who played more than the 14,000 minutes logged by the Pistons, which at their age, caught up to them. By the Miami series, this looked like a tired team. Murray’s 44.8% shooting during his stint last year with Cleveland was better than all but one Detroit perimeter reserve, swingman Maurice Evans. All too often last season the Detroit starters would run out to a big lead, then sit and watch the reserves fritter it away due to a collective inability to score. Coach Flip Saunders would have to cut someone’s rest short to restore order. Besides giving the Pistons a monopoly on guys in the league named Flip, Murray’s addition also weakens a rival as the Cavaliers must now shop for more bench scoring.

Detroit’s lack of depth highlights the next thing on Dumar’s summer to-do list: create an environment to develop in-house talent better. When Detroit began their run of Conference Finals appearances, they had two rookies, Prince and pivotman Mehmet Okur, making major contributions. Since then — and in basketball years, 2003 was a long time ago — the Pistons have failed to turn any of their young talent into productive NBA players. Most famously they failed to do anything with the no. 2 pick in that year’s draft, Darko Milicic. He was little more than a human victory cigar for two and half seasons before getting traded to Orlando where he averaged 14.6 points, 7.8 boards, two assists, and four blocks per 40 minutes of action. If the Pistons had that kind of production coming off their bench, we might be talking about their prospects for a three-peat.

Teams that develop their talent, like San Antonio, Dallas, Phoenix, and the Los Angeles Clippers (it’s no coincidence that those are the four best teams in the Western Conference) have portions of their coaching staff devoted to that responsibility.Steve D’Antoni in Phoenix, the brother of coach/team president Mike D’Antoni, helped turn Leandro Barbosa from a turnover prone backcourt reserve into a sixth man who keyed the Suns’ thrilling playoff run. The Pistons have raw talent in swingman Carlos Delfino, and forwards Amir Johnson and Jason Maxiel. The team must commit to develop them or else the sands will quickly run out on their run as an elite team.

Last season the Pistons won 12 more games than the next best Eastern Conference team, Miami, and the Heat are also long in the tooth. So, barring a major injury to a starter, it is unlikely the cracks in the foundation will impact the Pistons immediately, but that’s no reason for complacency this offseason.The additions of Murray and Mohammed assure the Pistons another run as a title contender, but the difference between contender and champion will depend on how well they nurture the players at the far end of their bench.

mjohnson@nysun.com


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