In case you were wondering what the difference was between Larry Brown’s last job and his current one, the contrasts between the two were made abundantly clear on Thursday night at Madison Square Garden. One of the greatest coaches in NBA history was forced to watch helplessly as the Detroit Pistons machine that he helped construct annihilated his Knicks, 105-79.

“It was like the JV against the varsity,” a shell-shocked Brown said afterward. “They could’ve beaten us by 50.”

Brown hasn’t been the only opposing coach left muttering those words. A night earlier, his former assistant in Detroit, Mike Woodson, saw his Hawks suffer through a 117-89 beating. “That was ugly,” was the best description Woodson could summon after the game.

Indeed, through nearly half a season, only four teams – Dallas, Washington, Cleveland, and Utah (twice) – have collided with the Pistons and lived to tell the tale. At 33-5, after last night’s win over the Rockets, Detroit is making a serious run at the Chicago Bulls’ vaunted 1995-96 mark of 72-10.

It’s interesting to watch Detroit chase the mark because the two clubs couldn’t be more different. That Chicago team, widely considered the greatest ever assembled, featured brand-name superstars like Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman. These Pistons, however, are an ensemble cast. Few can even agree about who their best player is – it could be defensive stalwart Ben Wallace, smooth point guard Chauncey Billups, or leading scorer Richard Hamilton – but nobody questions that as a group, this is the best starting five in basketball.

For that, credit has to go to the Pistons’ brilliant general manager, Joe Dumars. Nobody remembers this anymore, but three years ago, it was widely believed that you couldn’t win a championship with the kind of roster Dumars assembled. Conventional wisdom held that the only reliable way for a team to earn a ring was to nab a superstar and surround him with deferential role players who were willing to do the dirty work.

Recent history fueled this school of thought. In the previous decade, championships were the exclusive province of teams built around a dominant star – Shaq’s Lakers, Jordan’s Bulls, Olajuwon’s Rockets, and Duncan’s Spurs. Repeated near-misses by teams built on the “ensemble cast” model – like Indiana, Portland, and Sacramento – only reinforced this idea. You needed a “go-to guy” down the stretch, it was said, and not the confusion of having several players of roughly equal ability as the Pacers, Blazers, and Kings had.

But Dumars felt that perspective was wrong. Or rather, he knew it was wrong because he had been an integral part of a Piston team that won two championships with an ensemble cast in the early 1990s.This is largely forgotten in many circles because Isiah Thomas had a superstar career, but by the time Detroit was winning championships, Thomas’s star had waned a fair amount – in fact, it was Dumars, not Thomas, who was named MVP of their second Finals win. Instead of Thomas’s individual exploits, it was the strength of Detroit’s starting five and the quality of a few key backups that allowed the Pistons to outlast Bird’s Celtics, Magic’s Lakers, and (for a while) Jordan’s Bulls.

In retrospect, it seems silly that more people didn’t share Dumars’s outlook. But for one bad quarter, the Pacers and Blazers would have met in the 2000 Finals, guaranteeing one a championship. And two years later, the Kings were one shot away from the Finals and a near-certain romp over the overmatched Nets.

Nonetheless, Dumars was the only GM in the early part of this century to willingly walk down that path. In fact, he’s followed that blueprint so successfully that his team could match the record of those superstar-laden Bulls. Detroit is playing at a 71-win pace at the moment, which would rank second all-time, and as the consecutive routs of the Knicks and Hawks this week showed, they don’t seem to be losing any steam.

In fact, Brown’s replacement in the Motor City, Flip Saunders, thought nothing of his team’s blowout of the Knicks. “Kind of how we’ve been for 37 games,” he nonchalantly said afterward. “I think how we played tonight against New York is pretty much how this team has played through the first half of this season.”

And after two years together as a starting unit, Detroit’s fearsome quintet has taken it to another level this season. The Pistons were a mediocre offensive team under Brown, but this season they lead the NBA in Offensive Efficiency – my measure of how many points a team scores per 100 possessions. Their defensive numbers have slipped a bit, but as they showed in an 83-68 statement win over San Antonio 10 days ago, they can still shut teams down when it matters.

Still, they probably won’t go down as the best team ever. They have to keep winning at this rate just to match the Bulls’ 72-10 mark, and that appears unlikely for two reasons. First, the Pistons’ victory margin doesn’t match up with their win-loss record – they’ve been somewhat fortunate in close games, and that’s why they’re 33-5 instead of something like 30-8.

Second, and more important, their run of good health is reaching ridiculous proportions. Saunders has had the same starting five for all 38 games, and has yet to have an injury of consequence to any of his top nine players. In the NBA, that is absolutely unheard of. Eventually, one of the Detroit starters will turn an ankle, tweak a hamstring, or get suspended for jumping into the stands to check on a disturbance involving his wife, and the Pistons will lose a little wind from their sails.

Nonetheless, it’s hard not to appreciate the Pistons’ style of play. While Dumars assembled a group of talented players who put winning first, he couldn’t possibly have imagined that the whole would be so much greater than the sum of the parts. What stands out about the Pistons isn’t their individual excellence but their otherworldly cohesion, as if all five players are sharing the same brain.

Added to that is their single-minded focus on winning. If any of Detroit’s key players has an individual agenda, we haven’t heard about it. Try to think back to the last time you heard one of the Pistons complaining about a lack of touches, or whining about his contract, or knocking the coach because he wasn’t getting minutes.

So even if these Pistons won’t go down as the greatest team of all time, they can more legitimately stake a claim to another honor – the greatest team of all time. If you’re a basketball fan, you owe it to yourself to watch Dumars’s patiently assembled squad, and enjoy the show it while it lasts.

Mr. Hollinger is the author of the 2005-06 Pro Basketball Forecast. He can be reached at jhollinger@nysun.com.