How to beat… The Detroit Pistons

Here we are in another road back-to-back… and after the sting of of that loss to the Cavs, the Celtics may well come out with their trademark intensity in these situations. The Pistons are dangerous, but beatable. Their two best players are flawed and can be exposed… and here’s how.

1: Let Avery Bradley loose on Reggie Jackson

The Pistons are an inconsistent bunch, and that all starts with Reggie Jackson. To horribly over-simplify this team, they win when he’s playing great, and they lose when he’s not.

In wins, he’s averaging 23.4 points with a true shooting % of 60.5. In losses, it’s 15.9 points and a 45.2 TS%. Most of that decline comes from his three point shooting, which is at 50% in wins and 22.8% in losses.

He’s also second in the NBA in drives per game with 12… however, in losses, 30% of his shots are 3’s, and in wins, just 22.5% of his shots are 3’s.

Again, to over-simplify… when Reggie Jackson is playing well, he drives like a beast, which softens you up, gets you to back off, and he drains 3’s at a ridiculous rate thanks to that space. It also makes him a better passer (7.1 assists in wins, 5.5 in losses), thus lifting up the rest of his teammates.

So the plan here is simple… hound him with your best individual defender, keep him from driving the lane and make him into what he is when he’s “bad Reggie”… a guy who settles for too many 3’s and who turns the ball over. Jackson WILL try to go hero ball if he feels like he needs too… so let him. If Jackson is getting into the lane at will, this will be a long night for Boston.

2: Blitz Andre Drummond

Drummond’s strength is not as a post player… but they’ll post him up anyway if they can’t get the pick and roll game going. When he does post up, let’s not let him take advantage of smaller guys. Blitz him from the weak side like this (well, not quite like this but more on that in a minute)

As explained here, the Warriors got confused and sent two guys instead of one, but the result of the play is kind of what I’m going for here.

In a world where the Celtics are trying to force more live ball turnovers, blitzing Drummond and getting him to make a weak play like that will more often than not result in turnovers.

 2A: Ice Ice Baby!

While we’re talking about Drummond, let’s just focus on his strengths a bit and how the Celtics style of D could neutralize it. The Celtics try to Ice pick and rolls, which, in a nutshell, is to get the ball handler on the wing pick and roll to go to the sideline away from the screen. The Celtics really need to be on their game here because if they’re not, Drummond will be dunking all over the Celtics for the whole game.

Drummond has 42 dunk attempts on the year (38 actual dunks) for 90.5%. However, he’s shooting 104-188 (55.3%) on all other shots at the rim and he’s below 40% at shots 3-10 feet.

So ice those pick and rolls and prevent Drummond from getting deep into the lane. If he’s not dunking, he’s not having a positive effect on the offense.

3: Box out!

Welcome to the obvious portion of the preview. The Pistons are the best offensive rebounding team and third-best rebounding team overall. I don’t really give a damn about Drummond getting 15 defensive rebounds. That’s something that’ll happen no matter what. What I do care about his him getting 14 points on put-backs or follow dunks after the Celtics expended a ton of energy playing good defense.

That shit is deflating. That has a big negative effect on defensive effort later in games… and in permeates the offense because everyone will spend the first five seconds of the ensuing shot clock blaming each other for losing track of him and negating all their hard work.

It will probably happen a couple of times because he’s really good at it… but he’s averaging a league-best 5.6 offensive rebounds a game. That can’t happen.

The Pistons are a wildcard. They can look great sometimes, but then look bad. The Celtics are a fast-paced team (generally) that can expose the Pistons and win by double-digits. They’ll do that, if they can do these few things to Jackson and Drummond.