Archive for Detroit Pistons
McGrady and Pistons a Marriage of Convenience
Posted by: | CommentsThe Pistons are using Tracy McGrady. But that’s OK, because Tracy McGrady is using the Pistons.
Let’s get that straight, because to not acknowledge that means we cannot have an honest dialogue about McGrady signing with the Pistons.
McGrady is 31 and has agreed to play for the Pistons this season for chump change. He’s being brought in at the paltry NBA veteran’s salary of $1.35 million, which is like Radio Shack bringing in Steve Jobs and paying him minimum wage.
There’s still magic in the McGrady name in NBA circles. His fan base is still strong. To many, McGrady is just one good rehab curriculum away from returning to greatness.
The Pistons signed McGrady for his name recognition and his potential to pull people into the Palace on a snowy night in January when the Memphis Freaking Grizzlies are in town.
I’ve crabbed about it before: the Pistons struggle to find an identity nowadays. They have no stars, no one who gets the NBA fan’s juices flowing.
Jonas Jerebko was a nice story last year. A posse of fans took to wearing plastic Viking horns on their heads at Pistons games, in honor of Jerebko’s Swedish heritage. That’s cute.
Rodney Stuckey is a nice guard who can shoot a little bit and play some defense. That’s OK.
Will Bynum has some potential in the backcourt. The Pistons just signed him to a new contract. Good for him.
Ben Wallace will play for the Pistons for two more years, past his 37th birthday. No one can doubt Big Ben’s status as a fan favorite.
But guess what? None of those players are enough, even combined, to generate the excitement required to want to traipse to the Palace and drop $100-200 on tickets, parking, some drinks and food.
Neither are Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince, the other links to the team’s salad days of 2004-08.
Does Ben Gordon do it for you? Charlie Villanueva? Jason Maxiell? Austin Daye? DuJuan Summers?
Some competent players among this bunch—some are even above average at what they do. You can win with these players, provided they have some help.
Not even the rookie big man, Greg Monroe, is enough to make the average fan trek to the Palace this winter.
Tracy McGrady will draw folks to the Palace, if at first for no other reason than curiosity. After that, it’s hoped, he’ll draw them for what he can do unequivocally.
The Pistons are using McGrady because they have no one else who’s even remotely a star in the NBA in the truest sense of the word. Even at 31 and fresh off major knee surgery, T-Mac has some gravitational pull.
It matters not that McGrady plays the same swingman position that more than half the Pistons roster plays. That’s irrelevant. McGrady is a name, still—and the Pistons need one, especially with the team for sale.
Of course, this sword cuts both ways. McGrady is using the Pistons, shamelessly.
He needs to showcase himself to the rest of the NBA. He needs to prove that he’s not finished.
He needs to do this, so he can get paid a real NBA salary again.
McGrady didn’t put himself through rehab hell to make $1.35 million a year for the rest of his NBA career.
If McGrady proves himself for the 2010-11 Pistons, someone will take notice and pay him something more than the peanuts the Pistons will pay him this season. That someone might be the Pistons themselves; who knows?
McGrady, of course, couldn’t care less who it is, as long as it happens.
The Pistons-McGrady marriage couldn’t be one of more convenience if they put a Slurpee machine, some beef jerky, an ATM and a magazine rack in the locker room.
But that’s OK. This is a business and both parties need each other.
The Pistons need McGrady to put some fannies in the seats. McGrady needs the Pistons to showcase his talents.
Till death—or 2011—do they part.
Tracy McGrady isn’t that far removed from when he drew gasps in NBA arenas. He’s playing for the Pistons this season on the cheap. He’s Allen Iverson minus the money and the baggage.
This signing will almost certainly spawn some roster moves. You can’t have six guys who stand between 6′5″ and 6′8″, all shooting jump shots and slashing to the hoop.
But those decisions can wait.
Tracy McGrady is the Pistons’ new groom.
And the team is betting that you’ll show up for the reception.
Rest In Pieces, Joe Louis Arena
Posted by: | CommentsJoe Louis Arena is the only sports venue I know of that became obsolete the moment it opened for business.
One of the best things to come from yesterday’s announcement by Mike Ilitch that he and his family are seriously pursuing a purchase of the Detroit Pistons, is that it probably will accelerate the construction of a new arena to replace JLA—one that will likely house both the Pistons and the Red Wings.
Such an arena can’t come a moment too soon.
Ilitch has been associated with the Red Wings for so long, I’m sure there are folks who think he had a hand in the creation of Joe Louis Arena. He didn’t. JLA opened in 1979, and Ilitch bought the Red Wings in 1982.
Where The Palace of Auburn Hills was built ahead of the curve in 1988, JLA was erected with no vision, no sense of convenience, no adroitness.
Parking is a nightmare. A fellow could have a heart attack climbing the steps leading up to the joint. The concourses are too narrow. There aren’t enough restrooms.
JLA’s exterior looks like a warehouse. It has the aesthetics of war-torn Europe, the warmth of a scorned woman.
They didn’t build an arena, they created a giant mausoleum. Today, it’s old and dilapidated. On Opening Night, it was just dilapidated.
It’s not like they shouldn’t have known better; JLA was built in the late-1970s, not during World War II. You walk in and you want to ask where they used to make the tanks.
The air inside has the freshness of milk left on the counter overnight. It’s more stuffy than an aristocrat whose name ends with “the Third.”
It’s the only sports arena that should have been fitted with drop-down oxygen masks. All the air is borrowed from whatever the patrons brought in with them. The foot traffic is fanny-to-fanny; it’s always rush hour. You could walk a mile and never see the walls.
The seating was arranged as if to punish those who couldn’t afford the lower bowl tickets. The only arena promoting class warfare. The top row in the upper bowl is somewhere in Bad Axe. The game below is only being played on the word of well-placed sources.
If you don’t have the cash, you’re sitting closer to Terry Sawchuk’s retired number than the ice. Between periods you can while the time away by counting the girders.
There are suites, of course, but they’re even further away than the so-called nose bleed seats. Every suite should have come equipped with telescopes.
Joe Louis Arena was never state-of-the-art, unless the state of your art is circa 1950. It’s the only arena I know of that was a demotion from its predecessor, Olympia Stadium, which even at age 60 was ten times the hockey palace than JLA was on Opening Night in 1979.
JLA is a 20,000-seat cave. You keep wanting to look out for the bats.
The arena was old and outdated the night they swung the doors open for the first time. If it was a Broadway show it might have opened and closed in one night.
In the early days, the hockey team was worse than the arena, if you can imagine such a thing. Then the team got better and the arena just kept getting older. They’d try re-painting it from time-to-time, like Tammy Faye Bakker’s face, but it only postponed the inevitable.
The funny thing is, when JLA opened on December 27, 1979, it was deemed to be some sort of marvel—a real nifty place. It wasn’t until you got further from its grand opening, and you saw the types of buildings built shortly after it, that you realized we were sold a bill of goods.
Then along came The Palace of Auburn Hills, and that only underlined the foibles of JLA.
The Palace opened in the summer of 1988—less than 10 years after The Joe but light years ahead of it in every way imaginable.
So brilliant was the planning and architecture of The Palace that even today, some 22 years after its opening, the arena is presented as a model for what a sports and indoor concert venue should be.
If Ilitch succeeds in buying the Pistons, no doubt a new, dual-sports arena will be in the offing, likely downtown.
The Red Wings’ original 30-year lease with JLA has expired, and the team then negotiated a temporary extension to that lease, until another arena is built—or until the Red Wings move elsewhere (The Palace) as a stopgap measure.
Regardless, it appears as if the days of the Red Wings playing in Joe Louis Arena are (finally) numbered.
I call dibs on the plunger at its implosion.
Pistons Next Coach? Why not Big Ben?
Posted by: | CommentsThe NBA head coach is like a child in his terrible twos.
He’s up, he’s down. He can’t sit still. He always has something to say. He’s constantly asking his players, “Are we there yet?”
He stomps and screams and makes faces. He won’t eat. He wants everything right now. Sometimes he needs a time out.
The NBA head coach has typically been a former player, and one who likes to touch the basketball a lot.
Point guards and small forwards have enjoyed the most success. Perhaps they’re the most cerebral players. Nobody tell any behemoth I said that.
The NBA head coach, as a rule, hasn’t been a former center or power forward. At least not the ones who’ve won a lot of basketball games wearing Armani.
These things happen. Goalies haven’t traditionally made good hockey coaches. Pitchers aren’t normally the best managers in baseball. When’s the last time a running back became an NFL head coach?
So Ben Wallace has the odds against him. It’s not the first time.
Wallace, the Pistons’ soon-to-be 36-year-old center, went to Virginia Union, which sounds like something that should be in a Civil War Museum. Nobody drafted him, which isn’t surprising, because nobody knew where to look.
Undrafted NBA players are lucky to latch on to a roster, let alone stick in the NBA for 14 years, as Wallace has.
Wallace found a place in the NBA because he could block shots and intimidate in the paint. It takes him a week to score 20 points, but that’s not his game. That was odds-defying, too; not too many players stick around for 14 years being as offensively challenged as Ben Wallace.
Wallace found his niche and decided to be a master at one thing rather than try to be a jack-of-all-trades. He’s been named the Defensive Player of the Year four times, and has made four All-Star teams. He has a championship ring, and came very close to snagging a second.
Not bad for an undrafted, undersized (he’s 6′9″, which barely qualifies as a forward nowadays, let alone a center) player from Virginia Freaking Union.
He’s defied the odds, and will have to do so again, if what I’m about to suggest is to come true.
Ben Wallace ought to be the next coach of the Detroit Pistons, right after whoever is coaching them when he retires. Now bring your jaw back up from the floor and put your eyes back into their sockets.
I don’t mean this season, or next. He just agreed to terms on a two-year contract as a player, anyway.
Wallace has a coaching gene in him, I’m convinced of it.
I’ve taken him to task in the past for failed leadership, but that was a few years ago. Since he returned to the Pistons last summer, Wallace has been a gem, counseling the younger big men. He can’t wait to sink his tendrils into rookie Greg Monroe.
Wallace is a Piston, and always will be, despite not starting his career in Detroit, and fleeing for a couple of seasons as a free agent. He’ll retire as a Piston. Whoever is the head man at that point, whether it’s John Kuester or someone else, ought to hire Wallace to his staff, let him work with the bigs, and Ben should stick around until there’s an opening a few seats down—which there invariably is in the NBA.
Wallace would make a good head coach because he had to work his ass off to attain the success he found as a player.
Bill Laimbeer is mentioned a lot as a possible NBA head coach. I agree with the mentioners. I see Wallace as Laimbeer with a mute button.
They’re similar, in the sense that Laimbeer was a lumbering oaf with the sad-sack Cleveland Cavaliers who no one could have predicted would turn into a multiple All-Star and a two-time NBA champion.
Wallace was a lumbering oaf who couldn’t score who was playing for the irrelevant Washington Wizards because no one else would have him.
No one talks about Wallace as coaching material because he doesn’t have that “terrible two” side to him. Laimbeer certainly does.
But if yelling and screaming was all it took, John McEnroe would have been the next Red Auerbach.
Wallace was never a guard. The offense never ran through him. He never called plays, or even for time outs. His words can be measured by the handful.
But he’s won, and he’s been around a lot of different coaches. He can pull the best from many of them.
I wouldn’t put anything past an undrafted multiple All-Star and NBA champion who played a position that he’s several inches too short for, from Virginia Union.
Pistons coach Ben Wallace.
It’s just crazy enough to work.
Pistons Could Have Left Detroit When No One Was Watching
Posted by: | CommentsThey were a ramshackle pro basketball franchise, with a history of slapstick. Their story seemed to have been written by Mel Brooks in collaboration with Albert Camus.
Since moving to Detroit in 1957, the Detroit Pistons in 1974 had, at various times: hired their radio guy as the team’s GM; made a 24-year-old player the head coach; played playoff games in a Grosse Pointe high school gym; had a coach quit on the spot after just 10 games into the season; and had an owner that was so absentee, he only knew of his team’s nightly fate via the wire services.
All that, and more, played out against the backdrop of losing in a vacuum. A typical Pistons season in those days finished at 26-56, with home games attended by only a few thousand of Metro Detroit’s most curious. The Pistons didn’t have fans, they had gawkers.
But Bill Davidson liked pro basketball in the worst way, so the Detroit Pistons were perfect for him.
It was a perfect time, too. 1974 was pet rocks and mood rings and polyester and Richard Nixon out, Gerald Ford in. It was Patty Hearst with a machine gun and boycotts of lettuce. It was like the country threw up in its throat a little bit.
So what better time to lead a group of investors in buying the Pistons, the NBA’s deadbeat son? 1974 did very nicely in that regard.
Davidson, the millionaire from Guardian Industries, came from a world where a deal was a deal. So imagine his umbrage when Dave Bing held out for more money.
Davidson wasn’t the Pistons owner for more than a few months when superstar guard Bing wanted a raise from his 1973-74 salary, even though Bing was under contract at that rate.
Davidson didn’t understand. In his world, a contract was a contract.
The Pistons had just completed, finally, a relatively successful season in 1974. They went 52-30. Their coach, Ray Scott, was named Coach of the Year. The blind squirrel had found its nut. Every dog really did have his day.
Now Dave Bing wanted more money. He threatened not to attend training camp unless Davidson ripped up Bing’s contract and wrote another one.
Davidson looked at Bing and saw a petulant player who was using his team’s only good season in Detroit as leverage.
A year later, Davidson traded Bing away—for Kevin Porter. Davidson went from the frying pan to the fire; Porter’s photo could have been found next to Webster’s entry for petulant.
Such went the beginning of Bill Davidson’s foray into pro sports ownership.
Somehow, the Pistons remained in Detroit throughout the 1960s and early-1970s after moving from Fort Wayne, Indiana, even though the teams were lousy and the crowds were skimpy. The Pistons were dinner theater; the Red Wings, Tigers and Lions were Broadway.
Davidson’s predecessor, Fred “The Z” Zollner, was committed to Detroit. It would have been so easy to up and move the Pistons. He could have fled town with them and had gotten a one year head start before the team would have been reported missing.
But Zollner stayed in Detroit. He’s one of the most under-celebrated figures in Detroit sports history, for showing such resilience.
Today, Bill Davidson’s widow has shown how smart she is.
Karen Davidson, from the moment her husband passed away in March, 2009, made no bones about it: she wanted no part of being the owner of an NBA team.
Women usually are the brains of the group.
Karen Davidson has no delusions of grandeur, like her late husband did when he purchased the Pistons in 1974, thinking owning a pro team would be swell. She knows how shark-infested the waters can be.
“I think you need an owner that’s passionate, engaged,” she told the media during the latest basketball season.
What she didn’t add because she didn’t have to, was that she is not the passionate, engaged owner that the Pistons need. She’s the Accidental Tourist.
The Pistons are for sale. Only those sleeping under rocks don’t know that.
Karen Davidson stands to make quite a haul when she gets someone’s signature on a receipt. The Pistons are just part of the deal. She’s selling Palace Sports & Entertainment (PS&E), too—which includes the DTE Energy Theatre, Meadowbrook Theater, and the Palace itself.
The irony is that, after all those wretched years in Detroit in the pre-Davidson era, after all the times Fred Zollner could have moved the Pistons elsewhere, there are rumblings that after this upcoming sale, the Pistons might not have Detroit as their prefix.
“It’s always our preference to keep the sold team in its market,” NBA Commissioner David Stern told the media this week. “But we haven’t always been successful in that endeavor.”
Cue the foreboding music.
The Pistons would leave Detroit now , after all they’ve been through and all they’ve overcome? It’d be the couple divorcing after 53 years of marriage.
For what it’s worth, Karen Davidson doesn’t think that will happen. She thinks the lure of PS&E would make moving the Pistons unattractive to potential buyers.
But the fact that Stern didn’t slam the door shut on such a notion is a little troublesome.
The Pistons leaving Detroit? After 53 years?
We’ve already lost Stroh’s and Uniroyal and Towne Club. Vernor’s, too. And Hudson’s.
Karen Davidson thinks that’s not going to happen. David Stern says, cavalierly, who knows?
If the Pistons leave Detroit now, decades after having no business even being an NBA franchise—and after three championships and many near-misses—then the franchise’s story will not have been written by Brooks and Camus, after all.
It sounds like something LeBron James’s biographer would pen.
Today’s Pistons Sans Identity
Posted by: | CommentsWe can recall them now like all the infamous gangs—crews of James, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Black Hand.
Call Warner Brothers. Commission the first draft of a screenplay. Start casting the principals. Find a sexy femme fatale.
The godfather was called Daddy Rich. He wore $500 suits whose creases could slice an apple.
The wise guys were led by a runt that went by Zeke. His seconds were a big oaf named Laimbeer, a sharp shooter called VJ, and a quiet assassin named Joe D.
The minions had names like Spider and Worm and Buddha.
The architect of the whole operation, they called Trader Jack.
This marauding, brawling posse reigned terror throughout the National Basketball Association some 20 years ago or so.
The Detroit Pistons, aka The Bad Boys.
They were on the NBA’s Most Wanted List. G-men like Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson were powerless to stop them, when the Bad Boys were in their heyday.
Enter the lane at your own risk. Zeke’s gang gave no quarter, showed no mercy.
They pulled jobs at all the NBA burgs. They were detested, feared, but celebrated—in that infamous way that we’ve reserved in twisted fashion for the likes of Charlie Manson and Robin Hood.
The Bad Boys didn’t play basketball, they committed it.
They squeezed the life out of you, 48 minutes at a time.
The Pistons of the late-1980s, early-1990s. Legendary now. Forget the Hall of Fame; their exploits should be in the Smithsonian, in the American crime history wing.
They traveled the league in their own jet plane, the first NBA team to do so. It was their getaway vehicle, parked on the tarmacs of all the airports around the country, the engines running. The pilot could have been prosecuted as an accessory, unless the Bad Boys held his family hostage in exchange for unmitigated destination-to-destination travel.
They were branded as thugs, bullies, heathens. They hardly denied it.
Zeke and the Bad Boys would swing into town, mug you for 48 minutes, and make off with another victory. You can practically imagine them in their getaway plane, cigars in mouths, swapping stories of infliction, as they jetted to their next stop.
They carried on in this manner, thumbing their noses at NBA Commissioner David Stern, Jordan, Bird, and anyone else who had a problem with they way they conducted themselves.
It was fitting that they were around courts so much.
Was there shame? Ha!
Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn—Ricky was one of the heavies, part of the muscle—once posed for a poster with a deflated basketball and one of them was chewing on a net. They wore dark glasses and sleeveless shirts. They all but dared Stern to arrest them.
Daddy Rich, Chuck Daly, was the coach but he wasn’t so much coach as he was boss. Daly was a hands-off administrator. He let Zeke and the Bad Boys police themselves.
When Trader Jack McCloskey traded for Mark Aguirre in 1989, Laimbeer and Zeke’s other seconds took the new guy to dinner. They may as well have taken him to a backroom and shined a bright light in his face.
Throughout dinner, Aguirre, whose reputation as being a team player was less than sterling, endured a third degree. He was warned: play nice here or we’ll break your legs.
And I might not even be exaggerating.
Whether you liked them or not, admired them for their brashness or were disgusted by their tactics, the Bad Boys had one thing that no one can ever take away—besides their two NBA championships.
They had an identity.
So did Creepy Karpis and Baby Face Nelson and Bugsy Malone, I know. But at least you knew who those guys were.
One of the Bad Boys alums—the one they called Joe D—is in charge of today’s group of Pistons. It’s not the easiest of gigs these days.
Joe Dumars has seen the highest of highs as a player, and as a team executive. He’s one of the few who’s won NBA titles as both player and GM, for the same franchise.
He was the quietest Bad Boy. Every gang needs one of those, who doesn’t say much. Daddy Rich would give an order, and Zeke would gather his seconds and minions to carry it out. And Dumars was the one leaning against the wall, chewing on a toothpick, nodding when given his assignment.
Last year’s Pistons finished an unsightly 27-55. They were Pistons in tank tops only. The franchise’s once-appropriate motto, “Going to Work”—leftover from the championship of 2004 and the near miss of 2005—fit it last year like a Speedo on Rush Limbaugh.
It was a team of no leaders, no guts, no passion.
And no identity.
Dumars’s charge is to rebuild his team into a winner, like the glory days. But right now he has no Zeke, no Laimbeer, no Spider, and no Worm. The players wander around aimlessly, looking for their leader. It’s a bunch of Joe Pescis waiting for their Robert DeNiro.
At last week’s draft, Dumars grabbed Greg Monroe, a 6′11″, skilled big man from Georgetown University—the school of Ewing, Mourning, and Motumbo. Georgetown used to be a Big Man Factory. John Thompson, the old coach, was a center’s kindred spirit. And Thompson sent some of the very best to NBA greatness.
Thompson’s kid, also named John, coaches Georgetown nowadays. And he says the Pistons got a whale of a player in Monroe.
Monroe isn’t the leader type—at least not now. But he should be a competent, steady player. A big—literally—piece to the puzzle.
I submit to you that Dumars needs to find an identity for his team. Right now, there’s no “there” there, as was once complained. The basketball clothes have no emperor.
It doesn’t have to be “Bad Boys, Revisited.” Not necessarily “STILL Going To Work.”
But it has to be something.
Dumars needs to figure out in what mold he wants today’s Pistons to be cast. The great teams all have their identities.
He ought to know.
Dumars’ Non-Midas Touch Must End Soon
Posted by: | CommentsWWJD?
What Will Joe Do?
They’re going to have another of those NBA Drafts next month. Another day where a bunch of man-children’s souls are sucked into the darkness of pro sports. The NBA allows the nation’s teenagers to get drafted. Someday, someone will stop them.
But that day is far from being here. So it is that the Pistons will, with the No. 7 overall pick, take their chances on a likely-to-be immature, underdeveloped project. Heaven forbid you draft a senior. Heaven forbid a player stay in college that long, period.
There isn’t going to be, at No. 7, a cure-all player. No panacea will be ripped from a college campus and plopped into the laps of the Pistons in Auburn Hills.
The ping pong balls didn’t cooperate, nor did one of the U.S. mint’s coins.
The Pistons lost a coin flip at the end of the season with the Philadelphia 76ers, and it apparently cost them the No. 2 overall pick. The ping pong balls put the Pistons where, mathematically, they suspected they’d be: seventh.
So now it’s up to Pistons president Joe Dumars to turn water into wine.
He’s been less-than-miraculous in that area over the years.
The beauty of pro basketball is that, since one new player represents 20 percent of your on court presence, improvement can come in a hurry.
The evils of the NBA Draft say that, unlike the NFL’s, first round picks are hardly guaranteed starting positions and a legitimate shot at success. If you’re not a Top 5 pick, the odds take a nosedive that you’re going to be an impact player. Sometimes.
Dumars is the rare president/GM, in that he’s now being given the chance to do a second rebuild.
The first came in 2000, when Dumars officially took over the Pistons’ front office and inherited a mess. He had himself a superstar (Grant Hill) who wanted out, and a questionable coaching situation. There were precious few talented players on the roster outside of Hill.
A few trades and free agent signings later, plus the hiring of Rick Carlisle as coach, and the Pistons were back on the map.
Rebuild No. 2 is just beginning, and this time the mess is of Dumars’s own making.
But like I said, Joe D is a rarity; not too often in this win-now society in which we live does a GM get the chance to even stick around long enough for a second rebuild. Usually they’re canned somewhere in the middle of the first one.
Yet here Joe Dumars is, ten years and six coaches later, with a roster full of shrimps and the big men he does have play like shrimps.
The Pistons haven’t had a center who could score with men guarding him since Bill Laimbeer. And Bill was most comfortable 15-20 feet (or more) away from the basket.
Don’t come at me with Rasheed Wallace, who isn’t a true center.
They haven’t had a low post threat with the ball since Mark Aguirre, and Mark was a shrimp, too.
If you want the awful truth, the Pistons haven’t had a true center to whom they could toss the ball in the post and make something happen since Bob Lanier—and Bob last played here in 1980.
Yet the Pistons have won three championships since then, playing with perimeter-happy big men and being served by guard play par excellence—and a bench that was among the league’s best, both in the Bad Boys days and in 2004.
Today the Pistons are a bunch of crooked jump shooters with no affinity for defense or rebounding. It’s a team lacking heart, leadership, and anyone taller than 6′10″ who can insert the basketball into the hoop.
No one plays close to the rim, except for Ben Wallace, who just happens to be the least talented man on the team. But he’s the hardest worker, which has kept him in the league for over a decade.
To this hodgepodge Dumars will add two players from this year’s draft—the Nos. 7 and 36 overall picks. The pie in the sky hope is that those youngsters will somehow invigorate a stale bunch and the relative newcomers—guard Ben Gordon and forward Charlie Villanueva—will rebound from lousy seasons and the whole unit will start to come together.
Yeah, and they used to hope that New Coke would take the nation by storm.
Forgive my lack of confidence in Dumars presently. He’s on a bad streak that’s now in its fourth year. It’s as if the soul he sold to the Devil early in his tenure is now a marker that Satan himself is calling.
Joe D needs a great draft in the worst way. He also needs a whole bunch of “ifs” to come true.
If Dumars has a plan left in him, now would be a wonderful time to break it out.
Pistons’ Rapid Fall from Grace is Stunning
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been a long time since the Pistons have provided this much fodder for the ink-stained wretches and bottom feeding bloggers around town.
Being a card-carrying member of both of those groups, I can attest to this from experience.
Another one of our four children in Detroit has gone astray.
The Lions have been, for decades, the one kid that just can’t seem to get it together. He’s the one who is most likely to ask for money or call you in the middle of the night from jail—things of that nature.
Now the Pistons have fallen off the wagon.
They dropped yet another game last night—a fairly spirited try (for a change) but the same old result. The Cleveland Cavaliers beat them, 113-101. It wasn’t all that long ago when the Pistons kept the Cavs at arm’s length in the Central Division. These days, the Cavs all but toy with them before putting the Pistons out of their misery.
I’ve written it before: the Pistons are a fraud of a team that is bereft of a plan, sans an identity. They’re a franchise that was once a model for others in the NBA. Today they’re a cautionary tale.
President Joe Dumars took a wrong turn somewhere and now is in desperate need of a GPS system to get himself back on the right path.
Half the time the Pistons don’t compete, because they can’t. The other half, they don’t compete because they care not to.
This bunch has taken the Pistons name, which used to stand for excellence and hard work and elitism, and made it into a league wide joke. It’s hard to say if league observers look at the Pistons with pity or with smirks.
This is a great time to be a Pistons hater, whether you are an old-school protester from the Bad Boys days or a Johnny-come-lately since 2004. It’s reminiscent of how it was in Detroit when the Celtics of the 1980s got old and decrepit and stumbled through the league, a shadow of their former selves. We relished that unabashedly.
Dumars has dug himself a hole of horrific proportions.
How are those free agent signings from last summer looking?
How’s his wallet, going forward? Lighter than a feather.
Dumars has no vision anymore. He’s become Mr. Magoo, and no one is more of a shadow of himself than Joe D. He’s the Incredibly Shrinking GM.
The Pistons still try to use “Going to work” as a marketing hook and it’s laughable. This team only goes to work for coach John Kuester on occasion; the rest of the time it’s out to lunch.
It’s sad what’s happened to this team, but that sadness pales in comparison to the future’s outlook, which is chillingly bleak.
Forget free agency; even if Dumars finds some dough, his team isn’t anywhere near any star player’s short list of possible destinations. Dumars would have to pull off a snow job of unprecedented proportions to con any player worth his salt to become a Piston for the next four or five years.
That leaves the draft.
The Pistons are lottery-bound, and if you pull for this team, you’d better gather as many rabbit’s feet and horseshoes as you can find. Prayer and meditation wouldn’t hurt, either.
The Pistons have a bunch of crooked shooting small guys and a center who couldn’t score 20 points unless you gave him a week to do it. They have no leapers, few athletes, and matador defenders.
Add to that financial constraints and a history of suspect drafting, and you have a recipe for disaster.
I’m sorry to ruin your St. Patty’s Day with such negativity, but like comedian Jeffrey Ross said in a recent celebrity roast: “These aren’t jokes, these are facts!”
The Pistons’ best bet at this point is to go young and cheap, and hope that some of the kids they have and will draft, pan out.
There are some bright spots: Jonas Jerebko, Austin Daye, Will Bynum, and Rodney Stuckey. None of them make an obnoxious amount of money, and all of them have encouraging upsides. Add a lottery pick (preferably a scoring big man) and Dumars might be able to save some face and get the Pistons back to respectability in a couple years.
It’s disgusting to watch the Pistons play on most nights. They’re having trouble staying in games before halftime. The Celtics brutalized them on Monday night with nary a whimper from the boys in red, white, and blue.
The Pistons’ situation isn’t hopeless, but it’s close.
All this, and Karen Davidson has to find a sucker to buy them, too.
Pistons Need to Cut Ties with Hamilton and Prince Before True Rebuilding Can Begin
Posted by: | CommentsThe Pistons just slogged through another unproductive, unsuccessful road trip out west. Of course, they can’t really win out east, down south, or up north, either.
“Pistons’ inconsistency maddening to fans,” read a headline on MLive.com.
The Pistons aren’t inconsistent; they aren’t any good—that’s the problem.
They win a game here and there, then lose several, not due to any inconsistency, but due to the fact that they don’t have the goods to hang with most NBA teams on most nights.
But the Pistons can do this re-tool, rebuild on the cheap, if they permanently cut all ties to their glorious past.
It’s time to part ways with Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince, and go with what’s left over, then add to it—via the draft and mid-range free agents.
The Pistons have a chance to get through this rough patch and still maintain a degree of dignity, if they make Jonas Jerebko a starter, same with Ben Gordon, and give playing time to Austin Daye and DuJuan Summers.
Rodney Stuckey is the clear choice at point guard, and he should be; Stuckey has what it takes to be a top-tier NBA No. 1 guard.
Start Gordon, Jerebko, and Daye, team those guys with Stuckey and the venerable Ben Wallace, and call it a season. You’re not going to the playoffs; you may not even win 30 games.
Dump Hamilton and Prince, even if it means choking down their contracts. If the Pistons are serious about turning the page and rising from the ashes, then they ought to divorce themselves from the 2004-05 glory years entirely.
Neither player is what he once was. Neither provides leadership or inspiration. Neither is anything special; players like Hamilton and Prince are to the NBA what cooked rice is to a Chinese restaurant.
Prince, especially, is useless. The ball gets dumped into him and he holds onto it for about a week. He has no explosiveness, no moves. He doesn’t draw fouls. His shot is erratic. He’s not a particularly good passer. Other than that, he’s great.
Prince is a 12-point, six-rebound a night guy, and there are about 150 players in the league who can do that.
The Pistons can prevent a total bottoming out if they hit a home run in the draft and bring a low-scoring big man to Detroit. The home run comparison is not only apt, it’s mandatory. President Joe Dumars hasn’t been a power hitter in the draft; sometimes he hasn’t even fouled the ball off. But this summer, there can be nothing less than a drive over the fence in order to save face.
Speaking of faces, who are the Pistons? What is “Piston basketball” anymore? And who is the face of the franchise now?
Answer: no one.
Stuckey is a good player but he’s frightfully low on effervescence. Wallace is too old. Jerebko is too young.
The face might have to be whoever ends up being the Pistons’ first-round choice in 2010. That might be the player who gets splashed on the cover of the media guide and yearbook and whose mug you see on the fold-out schedules that rest on all the counters of all the party stores around town.
Dumars must show signs of having some semblance of a plan. The Pistons are in danger of skimming bottom with no discernible plan or identity. That’s not a good combo.
They can start in both categories—plan and identity—with the cashiering of Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince, forthwith. Why not cut Ben Wallace, too? Because Ben comes to play every night and he’s on his last legs anyhow. His better-than-expected season is one of the few things worth talking about when it comes to this group of Pistons.
All I see when I look at Hamilton and Prince are two reminders of what the Pistons used to be; I don’t see where the team is heading.
That is, unless they hang onto those guys. Then I see things getting worse before they get better.
It’s a Slam Dunk: Laimbeer will be an NBA Head Coach One Day
Posted by: | CommentsThe Minnesota Timberwolves have been in the NBA since 1989, and they come to town once a year, thanks to the league’s unbalanced schedule. So by my count, I’d say this Tuesday will mark the first time in 21 trips to The Palace that we’re going to pay any attention to any of the T-Wolves’ assistant coaches—ever.
That’s because Bill Laimbeer now sits on an NBA sideline again—this time in Armani.
Laimbeer abruptly quit as head coach of the WNBA’s now-defunct Detroit Shock last summer because, well, because Bill Laimbeer pretty much has done whatever he’s wanted, whenever he’s wanted.
He abruptly quit as a player, too, retiring in November 1993 because he lost his competitive fire on the court. He was 36 and fed up with the NBA. That was then.
Today, he’s 52 and is serving as an apprentice under T-Wolves head coach Kurt Rambis, positively smitten with the league once again.
“That’s my stated goal of why I got back into the NBA and the assistant coaching ranks,” Laimbeer recently told Pioneer Press columnist Bob Sansevere. “To learn and prepare to be a head coach.”
Laimbeer made no bones about that when he quit the Shock, although he truthfully said that, at the time of his self-ziggy, he had no NBA coals on the fire. But the NBA was his unquestioned desired destination.
And he’ll continue his on-the-job training when the T-Wolves visit the Pistons Tuesday night.
The Timberwolves, like the Pistons, aren’t any good, either. They’re 13-40, 4-22 on the road. It’s a far cry from Laimbeer’s days as a player and as coach of the Shock, when winning was a constant.
There are still those around town who’d like to see Laimbeer end up with the Pistons—as a head coach, not an assistant. But when President Joe Dumars went on his bi-annual search for a new coach last summer, Laimbeer wasn’t seriously considered.
It was quite evident that Laimbeer wasn’t going to make the leap from the WNBA to the NBA as a head coach in one fell swoop, so he was all ears when Rambis, an old on-court rival with the Lakers, called.
Laimbeer (left) jumped at the chance to work for old on-court rival Rambis (right)
“I’m excited to add someone with Bill’s experience to the staff,” Rambis said when he made the mildly surprising hire in late-August. “We can’t wait to get with our players in training camp.”
Now, Rambis, Laimbeer et al probably can’t wait for the season to be over with.
Laimbeer’s stock as a blue chip coaching prospect has its skeptics, to be sure. Those types will tell you that he’s too bombastic, too sassy to work effectively with today’s NBA players. But those traits are the same ones that have the pro-Laimbeer people convinced he’d be a terrific NBA head coach, so there you have it.
Bill Laimbeer, as far as I’m concerned, has always been one of the most cerebral, attentive, sophisticated men to ever play in the NBA, though he rarely gets credit for it. Beyond the pouting and flopping and the whining to the officials has always lied a brilliant basketball mind, and a very astute businessman.
I have a hunch that if given the opportunity, Laimbeer will know when he needs to push and prod, and when he needs to just back off. Don’t forget that he likely learned a thing or two from Chuck Daly, and you can find dumber brains to pick than Daly’s, for sure.
Whether it happens in Minnesota or Detroit or Atlanta or Sacramento, Bill Laimbeer will be an NBA head coach. He’s never done things without a purpose, and he’s rarely been unsuccessful in his basketball life.
Pistons a Mess; Is Kuester Up to the Task?
Posted by: | CommentsEddie Mathews saw something on the chalkboard in the clubhouse and decided, all by hisself, that it was time for a meetin.’
Mathews, the Hall of Fame third baseman, was a Detroit Tiger for all of one day, maybe not even 24 hours. He had just been picked up from the Houston Astros to provide some help in the pennant push of 1967. It was late August.
Eddie was the only man who played for the Braves in Boston, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. He’d won a World Series in 1957, defeating the mighty Yankees, and returned the next year, though the Yanks got revenge.
Eddie played for quite a few managers in his day, and always with the proper subordination as a player. So when he walked into the Tigers clubhouse that August day in ‘67, he was a little peeved.
“We’ll win it despite Mayo!” was what “some clown” — Eddie’s words — had written on the black board in the middle of the clubhouse about manager Mayo Smith.
Eddie, a Tiger for just a few hours, called a meeting. Players only.
In it, he took his new teammates to task for showing that kind of disdain for their manager.
Immediately, Mathews became ingratiated by men who wished, among themselves, that Smith had “chewed them out more.” So Mathews’s beat down was some welcome piss and vinegar.
The Tigers came within a whisker of winning the 1967 AL pennant. We all know what they did the following year.
But eventually Smith’s laissez-faire, “treat them like men” approach petered out. The Tigers quit horribly on Mayo in the final months of the 1970 season, and Smith was replaced after the season by Billy Martin, the pissiest and most vinegary of them all.
Someone needs to talk to the Pistons of today, because it sure doesn’t seem like their coach is doing it.
The Pistons have lost 12 games in a row. And counting. They look about as ready to burst out of their slump as an unpopped kernel of corn at the bottom of the bag. There are whispers that the big “Q” doesn’t stand for John Kuester—it stands for “quit.”
The Pistons, at least publicly, are getting a love-in from their coach.
“There are some hugs in there,” Kuester, the first-year man, said the other day. “We address things, but there’s room for some hugs.”
HUGS??!!
I’m not saying go the Gilbert Arenas route and start pulling guns, but enough with the hugs.
“We have a great group of guys,” Kuester also said recently.
Terrific.
Kuester might not be the right type of man to coach the Pistons, after all
The Pistons are, again, devoid of leadership. It’s been a black hole, a vacuum, ever since they traded Chauncey Billups away. Poor Michael Curry got swallowed up by it. Don’t believe me? Anyone see Michael lately?
The Pistons are a bunch of soft scorers and Ben Wallace. They play with no life, no urgency. The Palace is a great place to go to get caught up on some reading, or maybe study for a trigonometry test.
But their coach thinks they’re a bunch of great guys who aren’t afflicted with anything that some hugs can’t cure.
Kuester’s Mayo Smith-like approach would be great if: a) the Pistons were contenders; b) the Pistons were mature enough to police themselves; or c) Kuester wasn’t a rookie head coach. None of the above is the case.
Who’s the leader? Again, it doesn’t seem to be Rip Hamilton. It’s the same old story. Tayshaun Prince speaks as much as a mime. Rodney Stuckey is still trying to learn how to be a point guard. The new guys, Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva, don’t have the pull. Chucky Atkins scowls a lot, but isn’t a leader.
And they’re being coached by Dale Carnegie.
The Pistons are bound for the draft lottery, which isn’t the end of the world, but they’re headed there like a man trudging off to his own execution, with nary a hope in the world of a stay.
What’s worse, they don’t seem to care.
I’ll even take some in-fighting right now. Without the gunplay. You know what I mean.
These are the NBA’s dog days—the middle of January, the end of the season nowhere in sight. It used to be a time when the Pistons of old would struggle to stay interested, mainly because they had a playoff spot sewn up and usually the division, too. Now they struggle to stay interested because they’re so bad and no one is around to make sure they stay interested.
GM Joe Dumars created this mess, in case you were wondering. He’d better fix it, and fast. Or else leave town and we’ll find someone who’s up to the task. Joe fixed someone else’s mess, once upon a time. Let’s see if he has it in him to fix one of his own making.