Why is it that Iverson ruined the team? How come Stuckey hasn't been what everyone was saying he could be? where did Teyshaun Prince and Sheed disappear to? I think the only real player that cares on this team is McDyess. What about Michael Curry, who doesn't have a fuckin clue what hes doing? I admit i thought Iverson would make the team better, but i thought this was the same old piston team. I honostly believe the pistons would be sucking just as bad either with or without billups. Prince, Sheed, AI, and Hamilton just don't have any heart this season.
Because everyone chalked Stuckey up to be the next coming of Moses, thanks to his play last spring. He's a second year player, its not his fault. Wonder if the lack of a point guard has anything to do with that? Billups was somewhat of an important player on this team, you know. Prince is performing pretty close to par, anyway. Is he not coaching the Detroit Iversons correctly? Just like George Karl couldn't do while coaching the Denver Iversons? WTF? Billups was the key to this team. He was their best player. He was their leader. He was the guy in crunch time. He was the point guard. Him being traded was a giant gaffe in its own right, but to bring in one of the most selfish players in recent memory and try him at PG (at first, before all hell broke loose and now there's a three guard glob on this chemistry-less team)? Pure idiocy. Iverson is the reason this team sucks. Sorry. Reverse that trade, and the Pistons are right there, as usual.
Why? It's pretty simple. He's a chemistry killer. When he came in, it completely killed the way the Pistons played. He also completely fucked up the rotation by coming over. If Billups is still here, they don't have the guard rotation problems that they have with Hamilton coming off the bench but not wanting to. If Billups is still in Detroit, he's still the starting PG, Rip is still the starting SG, and Stuckey is the 6th man. By trading Billups, they traded their glue guy. They traded the guy that kept the team together. He was a huge reason why their chemistry was so good. To blame this mess on the coach is pretty crazy. I realize Michael Curry is a new coach and blah blah blah, but you can only coach what you have. When you have Allen Iverson, your job is made exponentially harder. No one has ever gone out and called the guy a good chemistry guy or anything. If George Karl or Larry Brown couldn't coach him (2 HOFers mind you), how the hell do you expect a 1st year coach to do it? Not gonna happen. If you must blame anyone for the Pistons demise, there's two places to look. AI for completely ruining the team chemistry and mojo, and Joe Dumars, for completely fucking over their chances this year by making that trade.
The are looking towards 2010, so maybe Joe had to make a sacrifice, this trade + Kwame = not good off-season for Dumars
I don't know why they're looking so much towards 2010. They're a small market team, and big names like Bosh, LeBron, Wade, etc. are going to be looking more towards the big markets if they leave their current teams.
Aside from the Knicks, only the Pistons will have enough money (unless they sign someone this summer) in 2010 to virtually guarantee victory in a bidding war.
The Bulls are going to have at least $19mil or so, maybe closer to $25mil if Salmons declines his PO. The Thunder should also have a good chunk of cap space. If the Nets can find a taker for Carter, I believe they're in a good cap situation as well. Plus all those teams that currently have those players will be in on the bidding.
Who says the Pistons have to splurge for the big targets? If they continue to draft well, they can use all the attention placed on Lebron and co. to sign the lesser stars to more reasonable contracts. I like what Dumars did. He's sacrificing a year and a half for the next half decade.
Iverson is a rhythm killer for this team. Chauncey Billups understands how to run an offense like he's doing for the Nuggets. He gets his teammates comfortable by sharing the ball and dictating the pace. Players become more focused when they're actually touching the baskeball and involved in the offense. The Pistons were used to having Billups on the court and now they have to deal with an erractic individual in Iverson. I don't think Iverson ever bought into the team concept in Detroit and it's had a negative effect on the entire roster. The Pistons don't have the type of players who compliment Iverson's game. He needs to play with guys who can catch and shoot when they get a rare pass from Iverson, and front court players who can put back all of his missed shots. I think it's clear the Pistons have given up on this season and are looking forward to Iverson-free team next year.
Over and over again at this forum there is the logical inconsistency of everyone blaming losses of Nuggets games last year and Pistons games this year on Iverson not being a good point guard, yet Iverson has not been assigned the position for most of his NBA career. Believe it or not, on the full scale Pistons forum, the Pistons' unexpected losses this year are mostly not blamed on Iverson, because on that forum, it is understood that Stuckey is the designated point guard backed up by Will Bynum and Arron Afflalo. Whereas Iverson is a 2-guard, along with Rip. It's basically just as goofy to blame Iverson for any Pistons PG problems as it would be to blame Rip Hamilton. I know for a fact that few here support the idea of Iverson being designated the PG, so for anyone who does not support AI to be designated PG to blame him for not being a good PG when he is not designated that is, to repeat, goofy. During February, the Pistons were 3-9. If you visit this topic, you can see that one of the big and probably the biggest reason for that was that Stuckey fell off a cliff and ended up on the border between poor and very poor. Stuckey was the PG problem for the Pistons during the big losing streak, Iverson had almost nothing to do with it, unless you want to argue that Iverson should be the PG and was crowding out Stuckey. In that case, it would be the fault of Iverson coaches, not the fault of Iverson himself. An experienced coach would have played Will Bynum more and Stuckey less during Stuckey's huge slump, but that did not happen, which cost the Pistons at least a couple of February wins. During February, Iverson was leading the Pistons and was a little distance into the star range. So, laugh out loud how Iverson gets blamed for everything on this board and yet, how much do you want to bet that few if any Iverson haters will subscribe to the theory that the underlying problem is that Iverson has been playing the wrong position for many years.
Add: To argue that Iverson is not as good at running the Pistons offense as Billups was would be very close to like arguing that a running back is not as good at running a football team's offense as the quarterback was, assuming the running back was obtained in a trade for the quarterback. I realize that positions in basketball are not as well defined as positions in football, but still, you can't just ignore the positions in basketball.
But how do you explain we are a 500 team with AI, and right now we are on a 4 game winning streak with out him. With 2 wins coming against Orlando and Boston?
Well I think that underlying everything is that Iverson has been playing the wrong position for many years. But he has followed instructions to reduce his shooting, which would reduce the negative effect from that. But let's leave that aside to try to explain this year's Pistons. These are just preliminary teasers really; I intend to be more thorough later. So this is just a brief chat answer and not a complete answer. --Stuckey, who is Billups' replacement, has been wildly inconsistent. He was a superstar in December and only a poor player unqualified to start in February. The Pistons will never be a very good team if Stuckey is going to be this inconsistent. --Although Coach Curry was smart to try numerous starting lineups and rotations, he probably got carried away with experimenting. --Worse, Curry has had difficulty judging the results of the experiments and has not done very well with rotations overall. He gets an A on generosity to reserves, but maybe a C- on judging which reserves to play when. --Specifically, Amir Johnson and Will Bynum have not played enough, whereas Walter Hermann and Arron Afflalo have played too much. At least one of the two between Hermann and Afflalo should not be playing at all, considering the Pistons are overloaded with guards who are better than them. --There is one player who has played worse due to both Stuckey and Iverson combined: Rip Hamilton. It basically makes a mess of the offense to have all three of them out there at the same time, which for some strange reason Curry has insisted on for way too many minutes. In other words, small ball has been a total disaster. --Although many Pistons are down from last year to this year, Rasheed Wallace deserves special mention. His 3-point shooting has not been as bad as it may seem, and his defending is almost as good as last year. But he isn't taking it to the hoop as much, so his overall scoring, free throws, and offensive rebounding are all down. Since he mostly wants to catch and shoot now, his assists are down also. --Let's be honest: the Pistons may have drunk the kool-aid and decided that it doesn't matter what they do this season because "everybody knows" that Dumars is rebuilding now and will be getting rid of Iverson and Wallace in order to get new big time players in the next couple of years. The trouble is, "everybody" does not really know this. Nothing is written in stone. If Iverson or Wallace were to accept much reduced salary, they would probably be welcome to remain. Or if the Pistons with this group went to the ECF, at least one of the two between Iverson and Wallace would be given a new contract that was not discounted. But this may be a big problem with the internet and 24/7 TV news now: everyone and his uncle has cynical, simplistic, and exaggerated theories about what general managers are doing. Dumars and other managers can do some of the things people are dreaming of, but not all of them. For one thing, Dumars is in competition with 29 other managers for those players you are dreaming of. For another thing, not every player Dumars or you or I might want is going to want to play in Auburn Hills, Michigan. For a third thing, you have a big potential problem even after you get the player you are dreaming of. A great player who is chronically injured is not really so great a player, really. For example, the Rockets don't have Tracy McGrady due to injury, and so they are most likely not going to be able to make it to the West finals. Another huge complication for any multi-year plan right now is that the League may end up in some kind of lock-out if the economy is bad enough, and no manager is going to be able to operate any huge plan if that happens. Keep in mind that the salary cap can go down as well as up, and if it is going to go down, then dreaming about cap space right now is kind of silly. But if the players, as a result of all the know-it-alls, believe this season is just a transition from the old Great Pistons to the new Great Pistons, and so this year is just a wasted year in between needed due to basketball economics, than they might believe that nothing they do this season is going to change the Plan, so why should they go all out to make this season a good one? What does it matter whether the Pistons win 40 or 55 games when Dumars already has a plan he is set on that will go forward no matter what? If Dumars were a perfect genius, he would have informed the Pistons that this season, like all seasons, matters, and that he has no set in stone, detailed plan about who is coming back in 2009-10. But there are no perfect genius managers, and Dumars may have, by accident, made the Pistons more likely to believe the media rumors that this season is meaningless, when in his news conferences and statements to reporters he emphasized that he would make as many changes as necessary, and when he did nothing to refute the notion that he has a master plan that makes this season meaningless. I think Dumars should have kept his great eagerness to make changes, immediately in off-season 2008 and in the next few years to follow, out of the public view, so that it would be out of the player's view. No GM should ever create the impression that the Plan is so big that the season can not affect the plan, or else the result may be a ruined season. And if the season is ruined, you now need a bigger plan, one so big that it probably canl not be implemented successfully. You've dug yourself a hole, laugh out loud. So general managers need to keep their plans and their eagerness to make changes to themselves, and they have to remind everyone from time to time, especially the players, that every season matters and that there is no set in stone plan ever. But the players should be smart enough to know that Dumars is not dumb enough to have a set in stone Plan to the point where he will totally ignore the results of this season. But maybe they drunk the kool-aid, since everyone and his uncle (but not me, l avoided it) was saying that this season has to be meaningless due to basketball economics.
