This is a game of pure Irony. On one hand as a Piston Fan I hate we lost, you never want to see your team lose.
On the other hand as a hoop fan, they don't get much better than this. 2 good teams, playing hard coming down the stretch, and players making plays.
On the other-other hand, man the refs just....just....... , that's how I feel. I really like the fact the team has to shut up and play, on the other hand I hate we can't argue the OBVIOUS F'd calls, man oh man. It seems as if there is a Hitler type of dominance by the refs now, at times I felt like calling the ACLU. I really think that the league needs to hold the refs under a magnifying glass now. Their should be a ton of pressure to get it right seeing as how they now have eminent domain over the game.
On a good note, when Tay, Rip and Chuancy can suck it up as bad as they did and we can go on the road and get 100+ against a team as tough as Utah and almost win, that's a damn good night. This is one of those games that I don't mind losing for the sake of developing. I pray that we have a Larry Brown/ Pat Riley type of season, start off decent, the team starts to gel and then WHAM!!!!! The chemistry comes together full circle just as the playoff season rolls upon us.

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Play hard, Play smart, Play together, share the ball, have fun....Play the right way!!!!!!

glad to hear flip not lying down and taking it...see below

From the AP report:

Wallace was still unhappy, to put it mildly, after the game and said he got the technical more on his reputation than what he said after thinking he was fouled when he made a shot that got the Pistons within 44-42 in the second quarter.

"I was just running down the court and said 'And one," Wallace said. "This cat (referee Steve Javie) is looking at me from the other side of the court and he bangs me up."

Wallace and coach Flip Saunders had a few other adults-only words in their postgame comments.

Saunders said the game shouldn't have been decided by technical fouls.


"My comment is that we might as well play 'PlayStation' if we are going to take the emotion out of it," Saunders said.

I don't care what the result was tonight, it is good to see that the Pistons can still play smash mouth power ball when they really want to. Sheed, Dyess, JMax, Nazr were all playing HARD. They were getting their paws on everything.

Delfino looked very tough as well.

If we play like this even half the time, we are going to win a lot of games.

Yes thats something we are going to have to keep in mind this season. The bench helped tonight, especially with Billups lethargic play, but there will be plenty of other times when we lose a close one and play armchair coach wondering why Tay or whoever did not play more. The theme of this season is to win enough games while developing a solid post-season bench.

That 4-point play (okurs non-travel 3-pt and Cowens T ) did hurt and never should have happened. What can you do? There is a reason why there is so much disparity between home and road losses.

On the plus side this should translate over to a W when they visit the Palace and as for the rest of the trip stops in LA and SAC are not what they used to be.

I thought Sheed and Dyess have been doing a good job after game 1 trying to establish somekind of paint defense. Now the guards have to step up more and stop letting their guys blow by them. A couple of plays there Chauncey was just not paying attention. Overall the Pistons continue doing a good job reversing the precedent set in game #1. You can tell Utah was trying to really take it inside and had to back off a bit as the game went on.

Took the Bad Boys a few years to do it in Boston, at least when it counted. I hope we don`t have to wait that long!

The refs are so inconsistant, how are you going to call a tech on Sheed for saying "And 1". This is BS. I don't really care about the loss right now. I know that Sheed and Nazr were the only starters doing good, and if one of our perimeter players had an average game the Pistons would of won. I hope this stops soon.

No doubt we outrebounded the Jazz but we gave up too many offensive rebound to them. If we have limited them to one shot, we would have won the game easily. Hopefully, we will improve on this.

CB had a bad shooting night and so does RIP. But CB has not been shooting well since the season started. If he is not shooting well, he should be distributing the ball better. He's the PG and should make more plays by moving the ball around.

Instead of being victims to the new rule in the NBA, CB should take advantage by driving to the hoop more against bigger guards or post up against smaller guards. He will definitely go to the line more doing stuffs like that and he is a 90% FT shooter.

So far the bench has been doing well, hopefully they will be more consistent all season.

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DETROIT BASKETBALL

I agree with ya jz. We were unsure of how our bigs would play as a unit and saw first hand the problems we were going to face from the PIP in the first game. They have however played well in the last 3 games and our weakness today was with our guards. Flip played well but our starters were certainly not up to par. Someone has to let CB know that he must take advantage of his size. Even tho we are .500 i have a good feeling about this team. I dont know how AJ is progressing but i would love to see him play 6-10mpg and brahma 12-15mpg. Any thoughts?

I'm with you. First game this season I actually let let myself enjoy. At some point in the fourth I realized I wasn't thinking about Flip or rotations or contracts or changes in the rules on defense and was just having fun watching basketball. You know, I like games when they score 100 points. A win would have been nice though.


Yep.

He was doing that in the first 3 games--his totals were 29 assists against only 3 turnovers. But he only had 4 assists against 2 TOs last night.