plus you go against the same team night after night and the better team/coaches have time to adjust to how you play....

Flips playbook great when you play against it once every couple months.... give a coach days to prepare and twink.... not so good, and the farther into the playoffs you go the more the other team will be able to tweek how it plays... aka Flip mr CF coach... but no farther.

Pistons beat a lot of good teams during the season. Blew out a few.

WOW! That's a pretty big conspiracy for professional athletes to forgo winning a championship and intentionally throw games so their coach gets the "ziggy"!

...It's a little TOO big if you ask me.

I don't see how that's possible. In order for that to work ALL the players or key ones anyway would have to have come up with this plan. Sheed can't lose (or win) a game by himself. And he was giving effort on the defensive end. For once he was actually fighting Perk for rebounds. Chauncey/Rip also both showed up .

In the end, Sheed looked distraught on the bench after we lost. After watching that game, something was wrong, and it did look like internal drama but i don't question them trying to win the game. They just lost whether it was b/c BOS was so great or b/c our chemistry which didn't seem to be there made us so great.

Game 3 just seemed like a "Hey, we beat BOS at home, now they are going to roll over and die" type of thing. I don't feel like they threw Flip under a bus. In fact, didn't Tay go out of his way to take some blame off of Flip ?

Also from what i understand, Joe made it clear to all the players that if they lost this year, he would likely be breaking up the core. If they love playing together so much, why would they jeopardize that ?

Pretty much. There is a HUGE difference between coaching regular season wins and PO ones. The Suns and Cavs will attest to it.

Yup. They know your plays. You know theirs. The team that imposes their will as well as the superior coach will likely win, and 99.9% of the time it will be the defensive team.

I have not gone to the point to think that all the players mutually agreed to purposely lose to get Flip out as coach. There is no way. As much as some players may disagree with Flip they would not waste a chance at championship, a whole season's work, and a year of their careers.

You know we are getting on Roscoe's nerves by keeping this Laker-Celtics thread open with comments about the Pistons shortcomings...

Shortcomings=short of coming to the finals party again and no parade

I don't know how that happened but I don't know how any Pistons could not not be thinking about it during those games.

Celts avg over 100 PPG in the Finals. They did not have to hold teams under 80 to win. They also followed their coaches instructions to the letter. Whatever plays Rivers drew up their guys went out and executed it as it was designed. There was no changing plays to ones they thought were better. There was no blaming things on the coach or saying they were tired.

It helps if you have a hungry team. These comparisons to 04 are so old and tired and its a completly different scnerio.

We will see how the Celts hold up after playing all those games. One thing about the Pistons is they sure have played a lot of games in the past 6 years.

IMHO the 2004 championship team was part of our storied and gloried past and we, Joe, Mr D., and those arrogant leftover players have to forget about it, just like DWade's one and done'ers have to forget about the 06 championship. We have to move on and bring something new to the court. A new coach is a start, but a couple of more moves will prove to me that Joe and Mr. D are trying to build a new winner as opposed to collecting fans money on the old product.

I heard Doc say in his pregame and halftime huddles during the Pistons and Laker series "We are better than them..go out there and prove it"! Nothing that Flip or Phil said got their respective teams more than 2 victories vs the Celtics...So was Doc a good coach or a good motivator?

I didn't watch the Finals, but I didn't see any evidence of great coaching in the games against the Pistons. Boston has three legitimate All-Stars and 1-2 of them were usually able to step it up every night and lead the team w/ their energy and drive. The players were hungry, something the Pistons didn't have.