I think the Pistons are bad because I've watched them play a decent amount this season, including a couple times in their house. Did they play well tonight? Sure, I'll give them credit for that. One key was Ivey got his confidence going and the Kings couldn't stop him, not to mention Burks and Sasser... And Fox had a very disappointing game. I agree that the coaching staff could have done way better, especially with the playing times of some guys.
To just gloss over the loss and state the Pistons are a better than terrible team is missing the point that not only should have the Kings won tonight, but even more so considering they've dropped games to the Hornets and Blazers already this season in similar ways. I'm usually a "hey it's just a loss, let's move on to the next" type of person but this one sews a weird kind of perplexity regarding this team
I'm not glossing over the loss. Of course we should find a way to beat the Pistons if we want to be called a playoff team. But that's just it -- we have to
beat them and we didn't do that on any level. So yeah, I'm just as concerned as any Kings fan right now -- I just also want to credit this young Pistons team who have had an absolutely abysmal year and are still coming to play in mid-February and looking pretty good for a night.
Here's where I sit with this team... Even in our winning streak I felt like we were winning in spite of our defense rather than because of it. I can live with this offense even though I think we were more effective when Fox was primarily a slasher instead of a volume jump shooter. They're inconsistent and it's not my favorite style of basketball but there's enough data points to warrant staying the course with it. However, any time we have an off shooting night we're going to lose if we can't figure out how to defend pick and rolls. Collapsing
everyone into the paint and giving up wide open threes is a terrible strategy. So is allowing a screener to come up to the top of the key and willingly make the switch so that suddenly our worst defender is matched up with their top scorer. And I lost count of how many times we ran into the screener or fought to get through the screen and got called for a foul. That's just not smart basketball.
You have to know refs are going to favor the offense. I'm pretty sure that's why Huerter got ejected. The NBA makes the rules based on how they want the game to look and we have to play within those rules. The Kings are flat out refusing to make those adjustments and then complaining instead when the officials call the same fouls in the 4th quarter that they called in the first. I've been really critical of the officiating this season but tonight I think it was on us for refusing to take the hint. The most frustrating part of it is that I think we are a good team and we have players who are capable defenders but during the course of the game they're just not executing anything sharply. Maybe we've just hit the wall and this is as good as we're going to get without adding more wing defenders and a true rim protector. Maybe we're still a couple years away from getting all the pieces right.