An optimist sees the doughnut, as Oscar Wilde once said, while a pessimist sees the hole.
Stan Van Gundy usually spots about a dozen holes for every doughnut. But at a time when Pistons fans might be looking for the nearest ledge, he’s brought a dozen doughnuts to our morning meeting.
Maybe it’s partly Van Gundy doing when must be done to bolster the battered psyche of a team that feels a little snakebit. But only partly. The Pistons have gone 3-8 in their last 11 games after hanging on by the fingernails to eke one out against Charlotte, giving Van Gundy the sort of restless nights he had during the 5-23 start to his first season.
But the comparisons to that stretch only go so far. He didn’t think that first team was 5-and-23 bad, but he also knew the roster as constituted then wasn’t going to be his for long.
“I knew pretty early on – long before 28 games – that that wasn’t a good group,” he said this week. “It was not one individual; it just wasn’t a good group and things needed to change. Here, I like our group. We’re just not playing nearly as well as what our talent would dictate.”
He blames himself for that and is churning through ideas to rectify the situation. But he’s also convinced the Pistons aren’t playing as badly as their recent record suggests. And he sees clear reasons why – if they don’t allow their frustrations to drain their will – things will improve in the relatively near future.
And so Van Gundy – who pokes fun at himself for being less than a rosy-cheeked optimist – is conscious of the dangers that a roiling collective frustration level presents and is doing a little bit of cheerleading these days, aware that piling on would be counterproductive.
“And they don’t deserve to be piled on,” he said before Thursday’s tipoff. “When you come in like I did yesterday and everybody’s there working, early, and what they’re doing in practice and the way there were this morning – this is far from a group that’s given up the ship. The group’s working hard. It’s a high-character group.” <p Let’s back track a wee bit. Losing Reggie Jackson when the Pistons lost him was a gut punch.
“I’ve always said the hardest time to lose a player is training camp,” Van Gundy said. “That’s when your team is built. That first week of training camp this year, we were excited. Reggie was playing at an unbelievably high level. Our guys were excited to be back.”
If you think Van Gundy hasn’t really always said that about training camp and injuries, guess again. He said it two years ago when the Pistons lost Jodie Meeks in camp. And Meeks, for as important as Van Gundy expected him to be to his first Pistons team, wasn’t Reggie Jackson. He wasn’t the point guard. This one hurt more than that one.
But the Pistons survived Jackson’s absence, all things considered. They went 11-10 and did it while playing both the East’s busiest and toughest schedule. Then Jackson came back – on the heels of a 3-0 road trip to Charlotte, Boston and Atlanta – and the Pistons went through a second major adjustment and, alas, a subsequent funk.
Van Gundy looked at the 16 games between the 11-10 start and Thursday’s much-needed win and broke it down. And what he saw can’t all be traced to deteriorating Pistons play.
“We broke down the defense and teams are basically getting the same shots against us they got for the first 21 games. The difference is they’re making them at a much higher level.”
In three recent games, the Pistons got down big to Milwaukee, Miami and Indiana, largely because those teams – none of them particularly noted for 3-point shooting – started games shooting unbelievably well. The Bucks went 7 of 11 from the arc in the first half, the Heat 10 of 15 and the Pacers 7 of 8. It’s tough to do that in shooting drills with no defender in sight, let alone in the heat of an NBA game. Charlotte shot 6 of 8 from the arc in the fourth quarter to launch its improbable comeback.
Mid-range shots are ones that Van Gundy pointed to as further evidence of the bad karma that has enveloped the Pistons for the past month.
“The league average is about 38 percent and they’ve shot over 48 percent against us in the last 16 games,” he said. “Most of those shots have been contested. So some of it is there’s no change to be made. Teams have come in and done a damn good job shooting the ball. Probably our contests can be a little bit harder, but it’s tinkering around the edges. What’s changed is where at every distance we were holding people below the league average in percentage, now at every distance teams are shooting above the league average in percentage. It’s not a difference in shots they’re getting; it’s a difference in them making them.”
So a little regression to the mean from Pistons opponents will help. So will a little mercy from the schedule maker. Good news: that’s coming, too.
Van Gundy noted that Thursday’s date with Charlotte was the 13th home game for the Pistons this season against a team with a winning record as of Thursday. They only have nine such games in the season’s final 22 home games. Of the top four teams in the East – Cleveland, Toronto, Boston, Charlotte – the Pistons have a total of three games left at their buildings. After their five-game West Coast jaunt, they’ll have only three road games vs. Western Conference teams remaining.
“The schedule turns in our favor a little bit,” he said. “Our focus has got to be on getting out of the frustration of the last 16 games and the way we’re playing. There’s not a damn thing we can do about those 16. We’ve got to really pull together and hang in there and we’ve got to play better. Our focus has got to be on playing better basketball. If we play better basketball, this is going to take care of itself.”
Sounds like a plan. Pass the doughnuts.