NBA Insider: Pistons firing again
"It’s just all effort," Billups told the Detroit writers last week. "We’ve got good defenders. But it’s been a huge transition without Ben (Wallace). He made up for so many our mistakes and now we don’t have that luxury. We have to hold each other accountable. We have to hold our own feet to the fire and when we make a mistake you have to say, ‘My fault, I wasn’t there,’ or, ‘Why weren’t you there?’"
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MySA.com: KENS 5: Sports
How East Was Lost: Mediocrity and Parity
Welcome to the N.B.A. Eastern Conference, where the line between mediocrity and parity is blurring nightly. Joe Dumars, the Pistons’ president, coined a word to explain the trend: paridocrity. "We’re a team in transition," he said in Philadelphia, "and it’s a conference in transition as well."
link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/sp...l/26hoops.html