Allowing 122 points is frowned upon. Allowing 122 points to the 1-5 in the preseason Timberwolves (who were without their two best players, Love and Jefferson), is downright criminal.
Detroit has given up an average of 113 points in their last four games (all losses, shocker), and in those four games the opposition has shot 47%, 56%, 53%, and 53% (58% from downtown) respectively. Unless you’re fielding the Dream Team in a video game on rookie level, you’re not going to win many games allowing opponents to shoot and score like that. It should probably also be noted that the Wizards, Grizzlies, and T-Wolves were miserable teams last year. Yes, they are better this year, but there is no excuse for allowing them to put up those types of numbers.
Of course, we all knew this was going to be the issue coming into the season, which starts on Tuesday against Memphis. Detroit’s sore spots are defense, inexperience, defense, and defense. Coach John Kuester has been stressing it all preseason, but the Pistons have actually taken major steps backwards in their last four games.
IF there’s a silver lining to getting humped while on defense every time down the court, it’s that the Pistons were without some of its best defenders on Thursday night — Ben Wallace, Kwame Brown, and Tayshaun Prince played limited minutes.
With or without those guys, the Pistons as a unit need to man up and play some effing old school defense. Roll up their knee socks, put on the headbands, throw in the mouth pieces, and play some prison rules defense, like your local cable guy:
Good defense always leads to transition dunkaroos:
Sticking with the Jim Carrey movie theme here with this post, the Pistons could extract a key lesson from the following clip for their perimeter defense (pointing out the obvious: it’s the first line of the movie):
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