Matt
10-05-2006, 06:30 AM
Re-tooled bench will be key to Pistons' success
Second Wave, Part II (http://www.nba.com/pistons/news/second_wave_061004.html?rss=true)
By Keith Langlois
AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- The genius of Chuck Daly wasn’t in calling the perfect play on the final possession, or in milking a mismatch to its ultimate advantage, or in scrawling trailblazing offensive concepts onto cocktail napkins.
Daly’s genius was in managing people and massaging egos. For all the coaching legends who’ve hung their hat on Detroit’s bedpost the past few decades – Scotty Bowman, Sparky Anderson, Larry Brown and now Jim Leyland – nobody was any better at people management than ol’ Daddy Rich.
He had a tremendous line that encapsulated his philosophy when it came to doling out the commodity most precious to players – playing time. “I don’t decide minutes,” Daly would say, “players decide minutes.”
And that was it. That was as far as you’d draw Daly in to a discussion about how he utilized his roster. Produce and you’d play. End of story.
That said, there’s a chicken-or-the-egg element to the saga of the Detroit Pistons’ bench play the last two seasons, seasons that ended a few gasps and desperate lunges short of the championship they delivered so unexpectedly in 2004 when the second wave included the likes of Mehmet Okur, Mike James, Corliss Williamson and Lindsey Hunter.
The last two seasons, the only reserve player trusted to any significant degree by either Brown or Flip Saunders has been Antonio McDyess, a player both coaches considered a sixth starter.
Which begs the question: Does a bench produce only when the coach first exhibits confidence in its constituents, or does it fall entirely on the shoulders of those constituents to foster the coach’s confidence?
But it’s not really a chicken-or-the-egg situation at all – neither black, nor white – because the truth falls somewhere in the middle. And it’s in that murky grayness of the middle where most coaches get buried, which explains why they have the life expectancy of a fruit fly.
You could make a compelling case that this season for the Pistons will come down to how much better their bench will be than they were a year ago, when they weren’t very good at all, not when it mattered, at least.
The first six still match up with anybody’s and exceed pretty much everybody’s. And they almost certainly will again. But those first six weren’t quite good enough to take on anybody else’s seven or eight or nine the last two seasons. And it would be foolhardy to expect the rest of the league’s elite to come back to the pack, this season or ever.
So the Pistons acted this summer. Not dramatically, perhaps, but dramatic moves are usually the domain of the desperate. There was nothing dramatic in the acquisitions of Williamson or James, either, or in the second-round selection of Okur, a kid from Greece unfamiliar to half of NBA scouts at the time of the draft.
The first step to fill the gaping void Ben Wallace left was signing Nazr Mohammed. Mohammed’s a likely starter, so how does he help the bench? By keeping McDyess affixed to it for the start of games, that’s how. It’s the role McDyess professes to prefer now, which suits the Pistons just fine. They need him there.
They also picked up Flip Murray, a player they see as more valuable to them than he would be on the open market because he’s something the Pistons’ three perimeter starters – Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince – are not, a slasher whose strength is the ability to take the ball from the perimeter to the rim.
And if this is, indeed, the breakthrough year many are confident it will be for Carlos Delfino, look out. Because Delfino is another with the explosive first step and ballhandling skills to break down defenses. He’s a more reliable 20-foot jump shot away from forcing his way into major minutes.
What a completely different look that would give the Pistons, to go from a first quarter of Billups-Hamilton-Prince, to an eight-minute stretch to start the second of Lindsey Hunter-Murray-Delfino.
“We didn’t have a variety of guys who were going to give you something different,” Flip Saunders said during training camp this week. “Last year we had Mo (Evans) and Mo was not a creative player off the dribble. He was more of a spot-up shooter. Flip is a creative player. He gives you something different than you had in there. We made a decision at the end of last year to try to have a better balance.”
Murray also gives the Pistons insurance at the point. Though he’s largely been a shooting guard with Seattle and Cleveland, he’s played both spots in the NBA and primarily played point guard as a collegian. That should lessen the strain on Lindsey Hunter, who had some terrific moments last year down the stretch when he was fresh from sitting out nearly two-thirds of the season with an ankle injury.
The wild card is second-year power forward Jason Maxiell, notably slimmer than a year ago. A unique player who makes up for his lack of height with an enormous wing span and a healthy dose of fearlessness, Maxiell needs only to develop a reliable low-post move and more consistently knock down the 15-foot jump shot to solidify his future as a rotation fixture.
Saunders would like to parcel out 90 to 100 minutes of a regulation game’s 240 minutes to his bench, which would keep his starters at around 30. If Mohammed and McDyess essentially split time, that means nobody should have to play more than 34 or so minutes a game, a figure Billups sees as just right.
“Thirty-four is probably a good number,” he said. “I like sitting over there when I can sit and relax and know I’m going to be sitting for a few minutes as opposed to the game changing a little bit – boom! – I’ve got to get right back off the bench as far as managing the game.
“I’ve got a healthy Lindsey and Flip, and the young rookie in Will (Blalock) who’s going to be pretty good, as well. If I can go sit down and know that we’re going to be all right, they’re going to hold it down until I get back in, that takes a lot of pressure off of me.”
Three straight seasons of playing into June, and a fourth of playing to its brink, take a toll both mental and physical. The starters are always going to be in the game for those outsized moments when your heartbeat thunders in your ears and your arms grow weary from all of the heavy lifting.
All the Pistons ask of their bench is for somebody else to take care of those more manageable burdens that present themselves in the second and third quarters. The players who’ll constitute the bench and the coach who’ll dole out the minutes both appear confident that the pieces are in place this time around. Then again, it’s October. There are still cases to be made for how those minutes get decided.
Second Wave, Part II (http://www.nba.com/pistons/news/second_wave_061004.html?rss=true)
By Keith Langlois
AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- The genius of Chuck Daly wasn’t in calling the perfect play on the final possession, or in milking a mismatch to its ultimate advantage, or in scrawling trailblazing offensive concepts onto cocktail napkins.
Daly’s genius was in managing people and massaging egos. For all the coaching legends who’ve hung their hat on Detroit’s bedpost the past few decades – Scotty Bowman, Sparky Anderson, Larry Brown and now Jim Leyland – nobody was any better at people management than ol’ Daddy Rich.
He had a tremendous line that encapsulated his philosophy when it came to doling out the commodity most precious to players – playing time. “I don’t decide minutes,” Daly would say, “players decide minutes.”
And that was it. That was as far as you’d draw Daly in to a discussion about how he utilized his roster. Produce and you’d play. End of story.
That said, there’s a chicken-or-the-egg element to the saga of the Detroit Pistons’ bench play the last two seasons, seasons that ended a few gasps and desperate lunges short of the championship they delivered so unexpectedly in 2004 when the second wave included the likes of Mehmet Okur, Mike James, Corliss Williamson and Lindsey Hunter.
The last two seasons, the only reserve player trusted to any significant degree by either Brown or Flip Saunders has been Antonio McDyess, a player both coaches considered a sixth starter.
Which begs the question: Does a bench produce only when the coach first exhibits confidence in its constituents, or does it fall entirely on the shoulders of those constituents to foster the coach’s confidence?
But it’s not really a chicken-or-the-egg situation at all – neither black, nor white – because the truth falls somewhere in the middle. And it’s in that murky grayness of the middle where most coaches get buried, which explains why they have the life expectancy of a fruit fly.
You could make a compelling case that this season for the Pistons will come down to how much better their bench will be than they were a year ago, when they weren’t very good at all, not when it mattered, at least.
The first six still match up with anybody’s and exceed pretty much everybody’s. And they almost certainly will again. But those first six weren’t quite good enough to take on anybody else’s seven or eight or nine the last two seasons. And it would be foolhardy to expect the rest of the league’s elite to come back to the pack, this season or ever.
So the Pistons acted this summer. Not dramatically, perhaps, but dramatic moves are usually the domain of the desperate. There was nothing dramatic in the acquisitions of Williamson or James, either, or in the second-round selection of Okur, a kid from Greece unfamiliar to half of NBA scouts at the time of the draft.
The first step to fill the gaping void Ben Wallace left was signing Nazr Mohammed. Mohammed’s a likely starter, so how does he help the bench? By keeping McDyess affixed to it for the start of games, that’s how. It’s the role McDyess professes to prefer now, which suits the Pistons just fine. They need him there.
They also picked up Flip Murray, a player they see as more valuable to them than he would be on the open market because he’s something the Pistons’ three perimeter starters – Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince – are not, a slasher whose strength is the ability to take the ball from the perimeter to the rim.
And if this is, indeed, the breakthrough year many are confident it will be for Carlos Delfino, look out. Because Delfino is another with the explosive first step and ballhandling skills to break down defenses. He’s a more reliable 20-foot jump shot away from forcing his way into major minutes.
What a completely different look that would give the Pistons, to go from a first quarter of Billups-Hamilton-Prince, to an eight-minute stretch to start the second of Lindsey Hunter-Murray-Delfino.
“We didn’t have a variety of guys who were going to give you something different,” Flip Saunders said during training camp this week. “Last year we had Mo (Evans) and Mo was not a creative player off the dribble. He was more of a spot-up shooter. Flip is a creative player. He gives you something different than you had in there. We made a decision at the end of last year to try to have a better balance.”
Murray also gives the Pistons insurance at the point. Though he’s largely been a shooting guard with Seattle and Cleveland, he’s played both spots in the NBA and primarily played point guard as a collegian. That should lessen the strain on Lindsey Hunter, who had some terrific moments last year down the stretch when he was fresh from sitting out nearly two-thirds of the season with an ankle injury.
The wild card is second-year power forward Jason Maxiell, notably slimmer than a year ago. A unique player who makes up for his lack of height with an enormous wing span and a healthy dose of fearlessness, Maxiell needs only to develop a reliable low-post move and more consistently knock down the 15-foot jump shot to solidify his future as a rotation fixture.
Saunders would like to parcel out 90 to 100 minutes of a regulation game’s 240 minutes to his bench, which would keep his starters at around 30. If Mohammed and McDyess essentially split time, that means nobody should have to play more than 34 or so minutes a game, a figure Billups sees as just right.
“Thirty-four is probably a good number,” he said. “I like sitting over there when I can sit and relax and know I’m going to be sitting for a few minutes as opposed to the game changing a little bit – boom! – I’ve got to get right back off the bench as far as managing the game.
“I’ve got a healthy Lindsey and Flip, and the young rookie in Will (Blalock) who’s going to be pretty good, as well. If I can go sit down and know that we’re going to be all right, they’re going to hold it down until I get back in, that takes a lot of pressure off of me.”
Three straight seasons of playing into June, and a fourth of playing to its brink, take a toll both mental and physical. The starters are always going to be in the game for those outsized moments when your heartbeat thunders in your ears and your arms grow weary from all of the heavy lifting.
All the Pistons ask of their bench is for somebody else to take care of those more manageable burdens that present themselves in the second and third quarters. The players who’ll constitute the bench and the coach who’ll dole out the minutes both appear confident that the pieces are in place this time around. Then again, it’s October. There are still cases to be made for how those minutes get decided.