Parallel Paths
Taken for granted, Pistons will soon open eyes nationally
by Keith Langlois
Monday, September 24, 2007
I got hooked on Green Bay Packers football during the Lombardi heyday and actually held season tickets for five years after I got out of college and was working a few hours away from Lambeau Field. When you get into this business, you check your loyalties at the door. But I’m always curious to see what the Packers are up to, and today they’re about the biggest surprise team in the NFL with a 3-0 record, all wins coming against 2006 playoff teams.
I didn’t expect much from them this year, even knowing they’d won their last four games last season to break even at 8-8. But a story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on the day of this year’s opener by Bob McGinn – the best beat writer in America, no matter the sport, by a safe margin – suggested the Packers were much better than the national media suspected. The Packers, McGinn predicted, would finish 10-6 and nose out the ballyhooed Bears to win the NFC North.
I’m thinking the national media – or a good chunk of it, at least – is similarly missing the story on the Pistons.
I don’t blame them. The enduring image of the Pistons is getting run out of the building in Cleveland in Game 6 to cap a bewildering turnaround that saw the Cavs come back to win four straight games after losing the first two of the conference finals. The Pistons looked sluggish and confused for most of those four games, the staples of their success rendered curiously ineffective by the Cavs, whose own deep flaws were revealed by San Antonio during the Finals sweep.
The Pistons did nothing dramatic on the surface over the summer to shake that image, either. As far as the rest of America knows, the same old cast – Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince and Rasheed Wallace – is coming back, another year older, to attempt to chase down what it hasn’t been able to catch three years running.
A lot of noise was made in the Eastern Conference this off-season with five 20-point scorers – Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, Zach Randolph, Jason Richardson and Rashard Lewis – imported from the Western Conference. None of them came to Detroit. In a draft where Greg Oden and Kevin Durant stole 98 percent of the headlines, the Pistons picked outside the lottery and wound up taking a player who somehow managed to avoid even ESPN’s cameras during his two years at Eastern Washington. Their only free-agent signing, other than to retain their own players, netted them a player the Washington Wizards chose to let walk.
So it’s no more surprising that Cleveland, Chicago and even Boston are getting more play nationally than the Pistons than it is that the NFC North was seen as Chicago and three 6-10 teams, Green Bay lumped in with Detroit and Minnesota.
McGinn cautioned that sometimes reporters who study one team intensely are prone to overestimating what they see, having nothing but other editions of that team for perspective. I’ll give myself the same out.
My hunch that the Pistons are going to be a more formidable team by year’s end is based on the belief that Rodney Stuckey, Amir Johnson, Jason Maxiell, Jarvis Hayes and even Arron Afflalo are going to alter the mix significantly, giving the Pistons a considerably different look that will prove a tough adjustment for opponents who know exactly what they’ll get from the mainstays. I’m banking on a team that by the time the postseason arrives will be getting far more explosive and consistent production from its bench than recent Pistons teams.
In hanging around the practice facility over the last few weeks, I get the sense that at every level of the organization – from Joe Dumars and his executive staff to Flip Saunders and his coaches to the holdover veterans right down to the young players expected to alter the chemistry – the Pistons are going into this season with a sense of excitement that’s been missing for the last few. That’s not to suggest they weren’t hungry or confident last year or the year before, only to underscore the value of change – not solely for change’s sake, but adding players talented enough to push for playing time.
Rather than feel uncomfortably challenged by that prospect, the veterans have embraced it for the help it promises them. Everything I’m hearing, it’s invigorated them – Rasheed Wallace dropping 25 pounds is a pretty good signpost – and they’ve reached out to the young players to let them know how valuable and appreciated their contributions would be.
So that’s why I’m drawing parallels between the disregarded Packers and the taken-for-granted Pistons.
Then again, I could be wrong. That is, after all, why they play the games.
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Originally Posted by Uncle Mxy
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