Originally Posted by lapiston

Plain and simple. They took it to us. We were ripe for the picking and they obliged us. Lee, Evans was as bad as Chauncey, Tay, and Arroyo to name a few. Take your pick. I pick all four. But we are not going to win them all and winning 70 is probably not a worthy goal. Lets keep home court and go from there. I was watching the Cleveland offense. We will stop them when the time comes. They have no half court game to speak of. And, they can not guard Sheed at all and can not stay with Rip. What I worry about a bit is our poor perimeter defense (Wade, Le Bron, Ginobli). We don't seem to have a perimeter stopper. That could be a problem. As for Evans in particular, if he doesn't start hitting that three, his rebounding won't matter.

Originally Posted by Lee356

Yep, he did fine on Bron. That 11-0 run Cleveland got to start the 2nd consisted of Sheed leaving Marshall open for a pair of made 3 pointers, a Bron dunk off a turn by Arroyo. And earlier a bad call by the official. Bron lowered his shoulder into Delfino and got the call. The Pistons responded to that 11-0 run with a 6-0 run of their own before Evans came in for Delfino. We were down just 6 at that point.

Originally Posted by Lee356

This game was more about Flip experimenting with stuff than anything else. One, lets see if we give Tay enoungh shots he will come out of a shooting slump. He didn't. Two, lets see if Delfino can guard James. He couldn't. Not that bad really, but not needed at all. Prince could have played a bit more until Bron came out of the game. Three, lets see if Evans can do better. No, he missed all his shots. Except for a few rebounds, he gave us no points, no assists, no ball handling at all. Worse, he was playing when Delfino should have been playing.

We fell in love with outside shooting. Got behind. To start the 2nd half we were not shooting any jumpers and were getting back into the game. CB decided to lead us right back down the wrong path. Missed another triple. Not to mention he threw the ball away several times. But that does not matter so much. You will throw the ball away on occasion trying to go inside. What killed us is everyone else imitating Billups, trying to be a hero from the outside. We needed to go inside in this game.

There is nothing wrong with trying some outside shots. But if they are not going, you switch up. Altogether, the Pistons failed to do that in this game.

Ben Wallace on many occasions guarded Wade just fine. Further pointing up the simple fact we could go big with Ben at small forward. This leaves Delfino as the shooting guard, where he should be playing, and Evans right out of the rotation. Or play Maxiell. Or Johnson. Got to change something because this experiment with Evans is not working. Evans was given a quick shot at guarding Bron and it ended real real bad. Bron lost Evans so easily and came in and scored at the basket with Evans no where in sight. Again, if Evans can't defend, don't play the guy.

Arroyo made some mistakes in this game. And missed a couple of shots. That pales in comparison to all the shots Billups missed and all the bad passes he made. But I suppose there will people who find reason to hate on Arroyo. But think about this. Flip is foisting Evans on Arroyo's unit. Not easy to work around that. Not that both Arroyo and Billups did there best at it. Hey, much easier to just remove the player than try to work around a guy not contributing to the offensive sets.

Dyess was off. Not good on a day where everyone else was too. Arroyo left Dyess as wide open as possible on one shot.

The only real effective play we saw in this game was the brief time we had Arroyo and Delfino in together with Evans over on the bench. I'd say if Flip wants to try an experiment, try Arroyo and Delfino in the backcourt, with Delfino bringing the ball up. Then if it bogs down into a halfcourt set, let Arroyo run that. And please remember, no Evans. That is too much to overcome.

Originally Posted by LA Dre

First this game was lost at the beginning of the second qtr when Cavs went on their 9-0 run to begin the second qtr. If I recall Arroyo, Delfino, Dice and two starters were in there and both the defense (giving up 2 quick treys) and the play and shot selection by our guys was atrocious.

Shot selection in the first qtr was bad too as Rip, CB and Prince could not hit the perimeter shot and only Rip tried to penetrate for a higher percentage shot. I am not sure why if the shot is not falling, Prince does not drive to attack the rim and dish off if necessary. They were killing us in the paint and we failed to adjust anytime during the game. I'm Lee, but this loss should not be blamed on Evans, even if didn't he have a good game, because we would have lost whether he was in there for his non-productive 12 minutes or if he had missed the plane ride over there.

This is another game where we got out hustled for a stretch of about 6 minutes or so and gave up an extended scoring run that we could not answer due to poor shooting/shot selection. Even in the third qtr when we were in the penalty with a full 7 minutes left in the period & we still took questionable shots that should have been in the paint instead of outside. Yeah we got 14 of our 23 points from the FT line, but I expected that the coaching would have emphasized going inside to slow the game down and put points on the board while the clock wasn't ticking.

Even when we made a run to cut it down to 10 in the 4th, we were still jacking up threes when we had plenty of time (7.5 mins) to complete the comeback. They only made two more threes than we did, but three of them counted, (the 2 at the beginning of the 2nd qtr and the one James hit to put the score back up to 13 when it appeared we were making that run in the middle of the 4th. It seem that everyone of our long misses turned into a bucket on the other end.

Game lowlights>
CB & Prince shooting 4-23.
They outscored us 46-32 in the paint
They outpaced us 20-6 in fast break points

Never really thought about the 72-10 record, but a win today and we could have been looking at a possible 15 win streak before the meeting with the Spurs on 1/12. With an average of two losses a month, we could be looking at 70-12 maybe Right now, a game at time will do and the Pistons need to forget this one and go out an party.

Originally Posted by Lee356

LA Dre, your summary of the game fails to mention the fact that we went on a 6-0 run, cutting the lead to just 6 points before Evans came into the game. No way the game was over. Maybe after Evans went out of the game a few minutes later with us down 19 points?
I have been rewatching the game some more. The more I watch, the less I am thinking good of Evans. He has pretty much been reduced to just walking over to the corner and staying out of the way until someone hits him for a triple try.

On defense, its a lot worse. In that first half, Evans was directly responsible for most of the points put up by Cleveland while he was in the game. I won't go into all the details, but lets start with immediately losing his man who gets an easy bucket in the lane. Then losing his guy on the perimeter, forcing Dyess to cover, leaving Ilgauskas open for a bucket. Etc. In the 2nd half, they put Evans on the point. Not too bad there. But hey, if that is the best he can do on defense, guard a rather weak offensively point guard, then why let him play?

Nothing wrong with losing a game occasionally to develop a player. Also, Delfino got some real important minutes there late in the 4th quarter. Flip is learning. Part of my gripe is people keep saying we can't play Darko, cause it would lose us game. So far, playing Darko has not lost us any games. Today, playing Evans did, and I am seeing a double standard here. I really don't see why people think of Evans as a vet. He barely has over a years experience playing in the NBA.

One more thought on Evans. Did you know that Evans only got in ten games, over the course of an entire season, in his first year in the NBA. He was dressed. Just did not play. And the coach who never played him. Flip. I wonder what changed his mind.

Originally Posted by Lee356

Dude, just no. Look, we were down 6 when Evans came in. Evans own personal mistakes (always his except for in two instances) gave Cleveland a score every single time down. And we only scored one time, on a strictly one on one move from Prince. This put us down 19 before Evans came out of the game.

Sure some players did not have good games. But some did. And Cleveland ain't all that. We should have won the game.

Sorry, you just can't dismiss a minus 13 performance by one player when that player single handedly for the most part gave the other team a bucket time after time. And on offense, the guy just sat there in his spot. Real hard for the other team to defend that, right. Evans gave us nothing, and the other team everything, in that stretch of about 4 minutes. Ugly. No way will I just say we lost just because.

Originally Posted by BROTHER HQ

Lee, we played a bad game.Period. Nothing really to evaluate. No team ever went 79 and 3. Here are some flaws in your reasoning:
1.Arroyo and Delfino CANT guard anybody. The reason our bench is in is to rest the FabFive and score some points. If they dont score, they dont play. Arroyo has had a great year, just not tonight.
2. U say Chauncey was throwing it all over the place.More than Arroyo. Um...maybe cuz Los played only 7 minutes, 0-2 fg, 2 assist , 3 to's. That's 15 turnovers if he played 35 minutes,Lee. Chauncey( I call him by his first name when he has a bad game)had 6 in 37 minutes. So dont ever compare these two.
3. Enuf with the Evans bashing. OK, u hate him WE GET IT. But I never see a poor EFFORT from him. like with the europeans. I see him in a new role when Lindsay comes back. But he needs time to grow with this team. The same time frame we gave to Dice, Dos Los, and even Tayshaun. Anybody who tries to find flaws every time someone 'touches' the ball, 'obviously' never played the game.
4. Dice was "off"? He was 4-8. 50% is even, not off. Tay and Chauncey (4-23) were OFF.
Happy New year...we still love ur posts tho, my bruddah!