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Game Thoughts: Pistons vs. Thunder, 10/30/09

The home fans got their first regular-season look at the fresh, new Pistons tonight ... and it didn't go well. After a good start, they collapsed in the second half and lost 91-83 to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Yeah, the same Oklahoma City Thunder that started 1-16 a year ago and finished 23-59. Now, thanks to the Pistons and the horrific Sacramento Kings, they are 2-0. With Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Jeff Green and James Harden, the Thunder are nowhere near as bad as they were a year ago, but that doesn't excuse the Detroit performance tonight.

Neither does the absence of Rip Hamilton, who will also miss Saturday's game in Milwaukee with a sprained ankle. Yes, he's been their leading scorer for the last seven years, and yes, he had 25 points in the season-opening rout of Memphis, but he is a shooting guard. Since Detroit's next two scoring options - Ben Gordon and Rodney Stuckey - are also shooting guards, losing one just makes John Kuester's roster dilemma a little easier.

Stuckey is supposedly a point guard, but tonight's matchup with Westbrook showed what the Pistons are missing. Westbrook had 10 assists, Stuckey had two. Stuckey did score 21 points, thanks to a 12-for-13 night from the free-throw line, but driving to the hoop and getting fouled is usually more in the job description of a ... say it with me ... shooting guard.

In the fourth quarter tonight, Detroit went with Stuckey and Bynum. Do you know how many assists they managed? Zero. Not just those two - the entire team didn't get an assist in the final 13:56 of the game.

The Pistons do have a fairly talented point guard - Will Bynum. When he and Stuckey were on the floor together, it was Bynum who brought the ball up the court, while Stuckey and Gordon covered the shooting guard and small forward positions. That was a combination that worked well in the preseason, but has a few flaws of its own. First, it lacks a bit of size. Stuckey and Gordon aren't exactly big guards, and Bynum is approximately three feet tall. The only way that group can play together is by matching them with Ben Wallace and Kwame Brown, which turns you into a hockey team - Bynum in the center with Stuckey and Gordon as his speedy wingers, with Ben and Kwame as the hulking defensemen. The problem? Hockey teams have a goalie. NBA teams don't.

Playing all four guards worked in the opener, but it is hard to say if that means anything, because Memphis is terrible. Tonight, Oklahoma City knew that the Pistons were only going to get offense from their guards, and used that knowledge to take over the game in the second half. Detroit's starting frontcourt - Wallace, Tayshaun Prince and Charlie Villanueva - combined for three points in the second half. They missed seven of their eight shots, and couldn't help the offense any other way, managing just one offensive rebound between them.

In Ben Wallace's case, that's fine. The Pistons won an NBA championship in 2004 without Ben adding anything to the offense, and he can still do that. I'd argue that he was probably Detroit's best player on Friday with 12 rebounds, three steals, three assists and two blocks. He only scored two points, but he made the only shot he took, so he put together all those positive stats against the negative of one turnover.

But the Pistons can't win with two empty offensive spots in the lineup - that's why the Ben/Kwame combination can only work for short periods of time. Villanueva was brought in for exactly that reason, but he was terrible tonight. He went 3-for-12 from the floor, turned the ball over twice and didn't have a block or a steal. OK, he pulled down five rebounds, but five boards in 34 minutes isn't exactly spectacular from a 6-11 power forward.

This team was never as good as it looked against Memphis, and it probably isn't as bad as it looked in the second half. I don't think Hamilton/Stuckey/Gordon can be on the floor at the same time, because they will get in each other's way, but it did hurt the Pistons to not have Hamilton tonight. He's a better player than Stuckey and while everyone expected that he and Gordon would be as much of a mess as he and Allen Iverson, keep in mind that they both went to Connecticut. Huskies hang together.

Kuester is a rookie coach that has been handed a talented roster that doesn't work. His three best scorers are all shooting guards. He has three promising rookies, all of whom play small forward, a position already held down by Prince, and which is also needed to contain the overflow from all the shooting guards. He has Ben Wallace, an incredible defensive impact player that just takes up space on the other end of the floor. He replaced Rasheed Wallace, a 6-11 finesse player with another one in Villanueva - except that Sheed is also a great defensive player while Villanueva is also a 6-11 finesse player on defense. That isn't as useful.

Of course, there was also the crucial move of replacing Antonio McDyess, Detroit's best player last season, with Chris Wilcox. To use a car analogy, Antonio McDyess in his prime was an Aston Martin DB9. He wasn't a flashy Ferrari or Lamborghini, he was smooth and elegant and incredible. This is a man who put up 40 point/20 rebound games fairly often. I've covered the NBA for 20 years, and I've never seen a single 40-20 game in my life.

As a Piston, McDyess was playing on two bad knees, but he understood his limitations, and still performed at a high level at both ends of the floor. You might not want to use the older DB9 to commute to work, but it still works great for weekend trips, and people gawk when you take it to the Dream Cruise.

Chris Wilcox? A Chevy Cobalt. Nice car that will get you to your boring 9-5 job and will run the family to Sonic for dinner ... but no one is going to confuse it for the Aston Martin.

(That might sound more insulting to Wilcox than it is intended - my wife drives a Cobalt and likes it very much. Besides, Kuester apparently thinks less of Wilcox than I do, since he didn't even put into the game against Oklahoma City.)

Anyway, a bad loss to an improving team. I'd certainly take the Oklahoma City nucleus over the Detroit nucleus at this point. Durant just turned 21, and is already a better player than anyone on the Pistons. Green's 23 and Harden and Westbrook are both 20. Harden might very well be the Rookie of the Year - he didn't look like someone in his second NBA game when the Thunder needed someone to deal with Detroit's defensive pressure while Westbrook was on the bench.

The Pistons get right back at it on Halloween night with a visit to Milwaukee. Most people think the revamped Bucks roster is going to be a disaster. I'm not one of them, because I think they'll be a tough defensive team, but they didn't look great in Friday night's loss at Philly, losing 99-86.