You couldn’t have written up a more dispiriting Game 1 performance from the Detroit Pistons than what they delivered against the Orlando Magic on Sunday night. The eighth-seeded Magic, facing a Pistons team that never spent a day below first place in the Eastern Conference all season, never trailed. They had the better game plan, the better players, and the better energy. Even in a game when its star, Cade Cunningham, scored 39 points, it never seemed like Detroit was threatening to take over the game.
For a team and a fan base that dealt with a season of hearing Detroit disrespected as not real contenders, with the likes of the Celtics, Knicks, and Cavs, thrust above them as teams that could win a title, it was a chance to prove the doubters wrong.
Now those same doubters have no reason to do anything other than double down, and many of the believers are in crisis mode.
The Pistons have one game to fix the mess they put themselves in. Wednesday night at Little Caesars Arena is a must-win contest, or this series is effectively over.
I have faith in the Pistons, but I also recognize that playoff basketball is not regular-season basketball. There is too much time to game plan and prepare. The Magic were able to effectively close off the paint to call comers, and for a non-shooting team like the Pistons, having zero pathways to the basket completely short-circuited anything they hoped to do on offense. It shouldn’t have been that easy to neutralize Detroit’s attack and take away all their strengths, but here we are.
With zero hyperbole, the Pistons had their worst game scoring inside this season. Their 34 points were a low point. The same team that scored 80 points in the paint against Brooklyn in November, and at least 60 points in the paint 38 times, managed a meager 34.
I have seen some say Jalen Duren was invisible, and, boy, I wish that were the case. Unfortunately, he was extremely noticeable in all the worst ways. Only two players on the Magic roster who played had fewer shot attempts than Duren.
Duren only had one game with a lower usage rate all season than he did on Sunday, and never had a lower percentage of his team’s shot attempts than he did against the Magic. He didn’t make any of this up on defense, where he was constantly letting Magic players have position and getting beaten on back cuts in both man and zone defense.
It was ugly. It is also fixable.
Cade proved he is a playoff performer. He can get his own, but it’s on him and his coaching staff to figure out how to get others involved, chief among them, Duren. They need to embrace Duren’s face-up game and short-roll opportunities instead of only force-feeding entry passes right below the basket.
It’s not that I want Duren suddenly co-running the offense. I just need the Pistons to find opportunities inside to provide any semblance of spacing the floor and creating cracks in Orlando’s defense. Detroit settled on Sunday and made it easy for the Magic defenders. They can’t afford to do that again.
If they do, it is effectively game over on not just the Pistons season, but has to be game over for this version of the franchise’s team-building project. If it’s this easy to shut down how your offense works because you want to put superior defenders on the floor, then you don’t have a winning formula.
Detroit would need to think long and hard about who is part of that title-contending future. It can’t be all three of Duren, Ron Holland, and Ausar Thompson. Not because any of the three can’t get markedly better on offense, but because Detroit has chips they can move around to build an extremely dangerous team that can succeed in both the regular season and the playoffs. Cunningham’s performance is all the proof you need of that fact.
The scheme, the secondary players, the future? Those are all question marks. We are going to get an answer on Wednesday, one way or another.
