Stan Van Gundy has struck upon a plan to fix his second unit: disband it.
No, the Pistons won’t become five 48-minute ironmen even though Andre Drummond played all of Tuesday’s second half as they battled back from a 20-0 Indiana run over the first five minutes of the second quarter while the starters rested.
But there won’t be any such segments in near future games with five reserves occupying the floor together.
“We will try to tweak the rotation a little bit,” Van Gundy said after Thursday’s practice before the Pistons head out of town for six road games against Western Conference teams. “Foul trouble could cut into it, but we will try not to play at all with no starters on the floor – at least one or two of ’em out there all the time.”
He wouldn’t delve into specifics other than to say the loss of Jodie Meeks – out for at least the first half of the season with a broken foot – robbed the second unit of its scoring anchor.
“Jodie’s injury hurt us a little bit offensively. He was the guy we ran plays for in that unit. Steve (Blake) and Jodie had played together before and had a pretty good chemistry. Without Jodie, what we really have in that lineup is a lot of guys who are very good team players and ball movers, but we don’t really have a scorer in that group.”
What might a new rotation look like?
Maybe Van Gundy pulls Reggie Jackson and Marcus Morris with four minutes left in the first quarter and brings in a backup point guard – either Blake or Spencer Dinwiddie, who replaced Blake in the second half of Tuesday’s loss to Indiana – and rookie Stanley Johnson. He could then bring Jackson and Morris back to start the second quarter with Johnson, Aron Baynes and Reggie Bullock while Andre Drummond, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Ersan Ilyasova sit.
The downside is that it means fewer minutes together for a starting unit that has been playing exceptionally well.
“We’ve got to make sure we give them a little bit better balance,” Van Gundy said of the bench. “We put them in a tough situation and then I went away from them in the second half, so when our guys made a defensive stand in the fourth quarter they didn’t have the legs to get things done offensively. A lot of that game – both the 20-0 run and then what happened in the fourth quarter – was on me in terms of the way that we handled the bench.”
Van Gundy says he’s undecided who backs up Jackson on Friday in Phoenix, Blake or Dinwiddie. But he talked to Blake about why he pulled him in the second half.
“I thought Steve was really frustrated and I thought mentally could use a rest there,” he said. “I talked to Steve today and he totally understood why.”
He didn’t have the same conversation with Baynes, who also didn’t play in the second half while Drummond – who finished with 25 points and a career-high 29 rebounds – went the distance, but he didn’t figure it was necessary, either.
“I think Aron probably has a pretty good idea that when a guy’s having a career night, that’s probably why didn’t (play). It had nothing to do with Aron. It had to do with Andre was rolling and he never looked fatigued to me. It would’ve been almost arbitrary just to take him out at that point.”