good game plan - eliminate shaq and make everyone else beat us. dice still looks horrible (how many wide open passes are you not going to expect and how many balls are going to bounce off you??), but good job flip staying with sheed/jmax in the 4th. it was funny seeing shaq guard max on offense, and realizing just how massive shaq really is.

afflalo looked already, although made a few rookie mistakes, like not closing out on the shooter (the result of a double-team which the pistons won't use much of anyway), but when he played man-to-man defense he was solid. his shot looks fine too. flip murray and nazr did their jobs adequately, nothing special, but didn't hurt us.

hayes was fantastic in this game. i don't mine the 3-9 shooting...he made a couple timely 3s, played very good defense, and got a couple steals from shaq as he tried to go into the lane. he and tay also sucked in one-handed rebounds that reminded me a little of ben. i have a feeling hayes will also be backing up rip vs. afflalo/murray, which is fine with me. also, most of his missed shots were when he was forcing it, shooting on the run, etc., basically dumb shots. once he settled down he was fine.

anyway, congrats tay, congrats rip on the baby boy, and congrats pistons on the W.

At this stage, if Dyess is going to play poorly, he may as well do it with the starters in the first half. At least he won't drag down our new players and make Flip doubt them.

As long as he doesn't play in crunch time when he's having a tough night, then I think it's a good way to use him.

He will have plenty of good nights too. Maybe not with consistency until the 2nd half of the season.

It's most likely going to take some time for Dyess to get into the top playing shape, I just hope it happens sooner than later. He'll contribute, always does.

i could care less what we shoot aslong as we win, remember detroit basketball is about winning and not putting up pretty numbers... how many times did we win quarters 12-10 and the like in 04.

we just have to make sure we play 1 point better then the other team, and there is going to be alot of ugly this year with the young kids.

Maybe the best post on the game and season thus far. Who could ask for anything more, be 1pt better than the opposition while we transition new players into the mix. KUDOS

I hear you, however, this is not `04 and we don`t have the same players who played that ugly, winning basketball.

Our current Piston team plays a different brand of ugly ball, not always resulting in wins!!

oh those days for the pistons and the nba as a whole are long gone, with player changes and rule changes those type of scores probably won't happen. what i was trying to say is that it might not be pretty day in and day out, but as long as there giving a good effort and are winning along the way i don't care how ugly it looks. I can see us making alot of rookie mistakes (two stepping out on the side line in the first quarter tonight for example) but i can live with that.

Review of Miami game.

The most glaring mistake I made in my report after the game was saying Davis scored a lot of his points with Murray in the game. Not true. Mind you, I made that statement knowing that Davis scored very little with Afflalo guarding him. But anyway, the only time Davis heated up was against a backcourt of Billups and Tay.


Murray was part of a 22-6 run for us in the first half, and part of a 12-0 run in the 2nd half that put us in control of the game. Murray did not come out of the game until about 7 minutes left in the game with us up 12. We played our best defense while Murray was in the game, and Murray himself played just fine on D.


Some people think that Afflalo failed to close out one time on Davis. This is not true either. What happened is we sent 4 guys down around Shaq, a Miami player screened off Afflalo down there while Shaq passed the ball out to Davis.That play was just part of our strategy of not letting Shaq beat us. The strategy worked very well with the Pistons continually scrambling to cover open shooters from the double teaming of Shaq. Just can't cover everything every time. The most scoring Davis did do with Afflalo in the game was on a pair of fast breaks, neither of which involved Afflalo in anyway.

It takes a big man to own up to his mistakes and correct them. Thanks lee. I haven't been heavily scrutinizing the games as much, relying on a quick second re-watching.

What I am liking is that everyone seems very aggressive with their strengths, except McDyess who always seems a little tentative at times.

This is shaping up early to be a very good squad. A lot of energy and determination. And I think the minutes in the second game of the back to back were handled super responsibly.

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They are the archetype for dominance. They are the gatekeepers of the conference. They are the Detroit Pistons.

lee, i get what you're saying, but i don't think that's what the announcer meant. he meant that afflalo should've ran hard at davis to at least make him put the ball on the floor and not get that open look. now yes, that would mean he'd have to overrun davis and wouldn't be able to challenge davis's next shot, but that next shot probably wouldn't have been a wide open 3...it'd just be a wide open 2...or with putting the ball on the floor he'd have to make a decision which might be not shooting it.

if that made any sense lol