That and a buck won't get me a cup of coffee. Fun game, though. Maxiel is pretty decent.

This team will not be interested until the playoff stretch, I will take back that they will play .650 ball until the new year it will be closer to .500. wins and loses will not concern this team anymore unless they lay an egg like they did.

Sheed gave nothing, the soft rotation on D, and to many turnovers was the real issues other than that they looked the same. lets see how the road trip Pistons look if they come back stuperfied than lets just wait.

It should concern them. This is not the same team that went to back to back finals. They can't afford to coast through the season.

That reminds me of that simpsons episode when Lenny got plastic surgery on his face and had a permanent smile. Hilarious!
'This is the worst day of my life...'

If they tried to use zone it couldn't have worked with 22 turnovers. There would be no time to set. We'll have to see what happens Friday.

i'll agree darko didn't have a great game. he did look better than ben though so what does that say about ben??? darko was playing good interior defense nobody scored on him. his offense will come around. he won't really start to get off until b. hill puts him on the court with d. howard at the same time.

ben got treated like a girl by dwight howard repeatedly. i mean highlight type stuff.

Nevermind the fact that they did NOT come because of TOs. They came because of a donut defense that did nothing to stop the Bucks from getting to the rim at will.

I don't care if the points came because of gremlins, you aren't going to beat anybody getting your ass handed to you in the paint like that.

Enjoy this while you can. Pistons are not going to play that bad very often. I see your guy Ben had a whopping 5 boards and 0 blocks in his new teams loss to the Magic.

I really don't care what "my guy" puts up in numbers in CHI. What I do/did care about is his impact and necessary input on THIS basketball team which is/was constantly being downplayed and rewritten by revisionist historians.

okay i was at the game, and finally have a chance to give the writeup. needless to say, there was no banner-raising ceremony for the new 'central conference 05-06 championship' banner lol. the flames were still cool, and now they have smoke (like a work whistle) that comes out above the basket, not attached to the flames (so it can be used during timeouts and such). i bought a tayshaun jersey since i couldn't get the maxiell swingman, and the big boy hamburger was good but could used some, ya know, lettuce like i'm used to big boy burgers having (maybe that's what the extra $1 for a 'super big boy' woulda gotten me). automotion has new outfits that accentuate their cleavage and are very nice. chauncey is now the last one announced instead of ben. subway used to give free 6" subs if the pistons scored 95 points, but now they have to score 100 AND you only get $1 off. totally lame. subway tastes good but it is the most overpriced fast food chain out there. prices for sandwiches literally go up at 3x the rate of inflation, and it's really annoying.

hah - so now that that's out of the way...

nazr started the game terribly - in fact none of the pistons looked like they new how to rebound, like they were waiting for ben to snag them. nazr had his stone hands going, which cost us 3 straight baskets at the start of the game. he did settle down later and was able to grab boards, so i don't think his rebounding will be a huge issue during the season. tayshaun stepped up with 11 boards and dice was active as well. granted the bucks took 91 shots, but rebounding wasn't our problem today.

nazr was extremely slow. dice was slow. sheed was slow. all 3 looked like dinosaurs out there, and this is a huge, huge problem. even the bucks' big men like bogut were dribble driving past them, forcing us to foul or go for an awkward block. on a sidenote, a lot of these were offensive fouls but not called, like bogut wrapping his arm around sheed to get by him. bogut has also been taking lessons from the Gordon Bombay / Manu Ginobli School of Flopping. darn softy euros.

our guards also gave up the baseline a LOT...something that should never happen. flush them to the middle!! we're going to have problems this year if steve blake (STEVE BLAKE!!) can dribble penetrate and dish for easy layups. listen detroit, it's not steve nash ... let that 2nd/3rd string point guard drive if he wants and make a play - he most likely won't. that was more annoying than anything - 3 guys collapsing on one guy driving, instead of sticking to your man - and any of the other 4 guys were bigger threats than blake. it's not like it's d-wade.

i liked how aggressive delfino was. making the shots was a huge bonus and great for his confidence. it looks like he's been practicing catch-and-shoots, because he was very quick to release and shoot once he caught the ball. hey if he's comfortable doing this like rip, that's a good weapon to have. he should've gotten a lot more burn in the 2nd half, he earned it. plus he was defending redd pretty well. do you know who wasn't guarding redd well? flip murray. redd just owned him every single time - and the height disadvantage didn't help. flip in general was non-existent out there - he only had 4 points in significant minutes (until garbage time when he drained a couple 3s). for now i'll attribute that to first-game jitters. he really looked like he didn't want to shoot or try to penetrate for fear that he'd come across as a me-first player or ball hog to start the season.

maxiell had an excellent game. he should've been 3 for 3, but those 2 close baskets barely missed. 3 blocks in 12 minutes is impressive though. more importantly, he absolutely annihilated charlie villaneuva (sp?). charlie went after max on about 4-5 straight possessions and didn't score once - and j-max had a sick block to go with it.

i hate to say it, but we would've been better off with amir johnson and maxiell the whole game - and we might need amir come 2nd half of this year, because our bigs just look really, really slow. i don't think sheed has alley-oop slammed since his first year here.

i described in my other post about sheed's ejection. it was pretty weak, but he didn't show up anyway. terrible effort. he was also getting double-teamed low and couldn't get open for many shots, or when he did try to isolate bogut, he started way too far away from the basket. as for the other starters, prince got open many times and was never afraid to shoot, which was great. rip was really aggressive and both him and chauncey took advantage of the new no-hand-checking rules to get to the basket for easy layups or fouls.

the best way to describe our offense was in one word: forced. we passed into the post when our big men didn't have position, resulting in several turnovers. we played 1 on 1, and hardly passed the ball around. they were double-teaming our bigs down low and we never took advantage. we made terrible passes in transition, tried to force shots downcourt, miscommunicated and passed balls out of bounds, etc. hopefully you can say this is because we've got a bunch of new players into the mix and it will take awhile for everyone to get used to each other.

one of the main things this game lacked was momentum shifts. we never had a lead, and never really threatened. we got within 2-3, then sheed got tossed, and the game was collectively over. it wasn't like last year where we knew the pistons could get stops and go on a run and we'd win the game. i turned to my friend and said 'even if we score, we can't win if we can't get stops or force turnovers.' and that's exactly what happened. something definitely felt missing without ben there - a killer instinct or confidence perhaps.

i guess there's consolation in the fact that we outscored them by 1 over the last 3 quarters, and still came close to winning despite giving them 20 more shots. at one point early in the game, they had around 50 shot attempts and we had 26...that's not how you win a ballgame. also when the bucks had 30 points, 26 were in the paint, 1 was a free throw, and the other was a 3-pointer. in fact, only 12 of their 100+ points came off of 2-point jumpshots - 18 if you count 3-pointers.

so anyway, it's only 1 game. we're going to have a slow start this year with 5 of 7 games on the road (including 3 on a west-coast swing that always gives us trouble). but look - miami lost by 42 to chicago, then chicago lost to orlando. the lakers beat the suns without kobe, and the knicks won in triple overtime. sh*t happens.

one thing's for sure - this is going to be a long year. at least on the forums we're not going to have a shortage of topics to debate this year!! last year got boring nitpicking over playing time or how we only won by 8 instead of 15. hopefully people don't commit suicide during game chats - because i remember how livid people got at our play when we were cruising to victories. heh.