The Pistons have hit the halfway point of their season, but for the first time in six years there is legitimate optimism that it really isn’t the halfway point. They’ve hit the 41-game milepost with a 22-19 record, above .500 for the first time since their last playoff season, 2008-09, and expect to be playing basketball beyond mid-April this time around.
A quick check of three playoff projections – BasketballReference.com, ESPN.com and TeamRankings.com – gives the Pistons anywhere from a 75.5 to an 81.5 percent chance to qualify for the Eastern Conference’s postseason, two projecting them with 44 wins and one with 45.
The Pistons think they can be better in the final 41 games – ensuring that there’ll be more than 41 games still to play. It’s not just happy talk, either. They look at their progress since training camp, the fact they’re so young and the familiarity yet to be achieved with two new starters, two more key newcomers off the bench and the recent return of Brandon Jennings as indicators of growth still to be realized.
That growth can’t possibly come soon enough to satisfy Stan Van Gundy, but he doesn’t hesitate to say what he’s already seen has exceeded his reasonable expectations.
“We’ve come along probably a little bit quicker than I would have expected,” he said. “Our guys have worked hard at it. We’ve got a great practice group. They work hard and it’s a group of great resiliency. Within a game, when we get down we don’t quit. We come off games like the Memphis game – heartbreaker – guys are ready to play again. Our group has some really good things. There’s still a lot to do to get better, but there’s some things I really like.”
What both Van Gundy and the players understand has to improve is a greater consistency.
“We’re consistently inconsistent,” is how Reggie Jackson put it after Monday’s 111-101 loss to Chicago in which the Pistons allowed the Bulls to shoot 52.4 percent. “We play to the level of our opponent quite a bit. We show the world we have flashes of being a really good team and then we show flashes of being not so good. Just got to be consistent.”
“I’m happy where we are in terms of making progress, we’ve just got to be more consistent,” Van Gundy said. “If you’re consistent in terms of winning every night, then you’re San Antonio or Golden State. I just mean we need to have a consistency in our energy and our approach, our focus. That’s something we want to get better at going over the second half of the season.”
Van Gundy said that before Monday’s loss and maybe a little of what he meant reared its head in the second half when two of their youngest and most important players, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Andre Drummond, made mental gaffes that cost them dearly.
Caldwell-Pope, with four career technical fouls in 21/2 seasons entering the game, picked up two in the span of 10 minutes in the third quarter and was ejected. Drummond, who also picked up a third-quarter technical, committed a costly foul in the fourth quarter, the Pistons trailing by seven points at the time. After a rare sound defensive possession left the Bulls in a pickle – Pau Gasol caught the ball 30 feet from the basket with about two seconds left on the shot clock – Drummond bailed them out by grazing Gasol as he launched a desperation bomb and inviting a call that resulted in three Bulls points and a 10-point led with four minutes left.
“Still up and down right now, which is what’s expected, I would say,” Marcus Morris said of the season’s first half after the Chicago loss. “We’re better than what everybody expected us to be. Still getting used to each other. Just got to continue to get better.”
“We did pretty decent, but we could’ve done a lot better,” Anthony Tolliver said. “We expect a lot more out of ourselves. We’re halfway there, halfway to the end, so we have a long way to go and hopefully we can continue to learn from situations like this and get better.”
The run-up to the All-Star game will challenge the Pistons. Starting with last week’s loss to San Antonio, 17 games were jammed into the 29 days leading to the Feb. 10 date with Denver when the Pistons retire Chauncey Billups’ jersey and end the pre-All-Star break portion of the schedule. Next up: a road trip to Houston, New Orleans, Denver and Utah that starts with a back-to-back set. There’s no more than one day between games over the next three weeks.
“We’ve improved defensively,” Van Gundy said of the 22-19 record over the first half. “One, because of some of the guys we’ve brought in and, two, the guys are a year older and more comfortable with what we’re doing. We’re still one of the six or seven youngest teams in the league, so there’s still going to be a lot of ups and downs. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’re on the right path and making progress. There’s also no doubt that there’s still a long, long way to go.”
