SALT LAKE CITY – The sun came up in Salt Lake City, though you had to take it on faith. When the Pistons awoke about 12 hours after digesting a bitter loss in Denver, it looked like they were standing in a bag of flour, so thick was the cloud cover and dense the snowfall outside their hotel windows.
A few hours later, after a spirited practice that had the walls of the University of Utah’s new $36 million basketball practice center vibrating, Stan Van Gundy and his team trod over fresh-packed snow on their way to the team bus – the heavy, wet kind causing tree branches to droop and perfect for making snowballs.
And so a team that stewed in a locker room about to boil over in frustration the night before made like a bunch of junior high boys and waged a snowball battle for the ages that left them sweat-soaked and laughing so hard they cried. Nobody was spared – coaches, teammates, training and support staffs treated as equally inviting targets. Fear not: injury was not a likelihood. As Anthony Tolliver joked, “We don’t have a lot of baseball players on our team.”
Reading a team’s mindset and mood isn’t for amateurs, but Van Gundy would have expected nothing less than the testy temperament in his locker room after the 104-101 loss to Denver marred by a third-quarter defensive implosion.
“I would actually be really concerned if we weren’t pretty frustrated and upset last night,” Van Gundy said. “Then you’d be really concerned. I’ve got faith in that the group really wants to do it. It’s a young group trying to prove themselves. They want to do it. We just at times are not willing to make the extreme effort it takes to get the job done in this league against other really good teams. They’re frustrated because they know how bad that third quarter was.”
For all of their defensive failings in the third quarter – Denver opened 11 of 12 and scored 39 points, the most the Pistons have allowed in any quarter this season – the Pistons still had a 50-50 shot, taking a one-point lead twice in the final 80 seconds and having two possessions in the final 24 seconds after Danilo Gallinari put the Nuggets ahead for good on a high-degree-of-difficulty jumper with the shot clock expiring with the ball in flight.
“The bottom line is if Gallinari misses that really difficult shot, we walk out with a win,” Van Gundy said. “That would’ve been nice, but hopefully it wouldn’t have obscured the fact that third quarter was ridiculous.”
The last two Pistons possessions – sandwiched around a sensational chase-down block by Kentavious Caldwell-Pope worthy of Tayshaun Prince – both ended the same way: Reggie Jackson drives into a congested lane and missed layups. On the last one, overhead replays seemed to indicate that Denver’s Nikola Jokic goaltended the shot, swatting it after it hit the backboard. And Jackson felt he got fouled, too, which had him seething in the locker room.
“I looked at it,” Van Gundy said about the goaltending possibility. “And then he might’ve gotten bumped. Quite honestly, it would’ve been great to win. It’s great that we fought back. Our guys always do. But it didn’t feel like we deserved to win. Even if you tell me that’s a foul, I didn’t leave the game feeling like we got screwed or it was the referees.
“We didn’t do our job in the third quarter, so that’s all I was focused on. Memphis (a similarly bitter loss in which the NBA admitted a foul should have been called to put Marcus Morris on the line in a tie game with less than 10 seconds left), I was upset. There’s been other games I’ve been upset where I think our guys have fought hard. But not last night.”
Because almost all of Sunday’s practice was devoted to four-on-four live drills to work on defense, Jodie Meeks – out since breaking a bone in his right foot in the Oct. 29 home opener – only took part in the first 10 or 12 minutes, Van Gundy said, which was focused on passing drills. “The next step, whenever it is, would be for him to get into some drill work and then the next step beyond that would be to get into some practice, five-on-five stuff. We won’t practice again until Thursday. Hopefully, he can get into it a little bit more.”
“The next step, whenever it is, would be for him to get into some drill work and then the next step beyond that would be to get into some practice, five-on-five stuff. We won’t practice again until Thursday. Hopefully, he can get into it a little bit more.”
