Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The Playoff Perspective

Hello and welcome again to another edition of the playoff perspective, as brought to you by yours truly, Lil' Mack

As you know, the pistons took the first game of the eastern conference playoffs; sadly this was not the win that everybody probably expected.  It was, as the Detroit Free Press put it "a lucky win that the Pistons almost didn't deserve".  Ouch, and that coming from the home team paper, you can only imagine what Cleveland's papers must be saying if Detroit itself feels like this.  But really, can you blame the fans and sports writers in the city for being like that?  If you go back and look at some of the stats from last night, you will see that the starting five (excluding Rip) sucked.   Tayshane was mediocre at best, Billups was only there when we REALLY needed him, 'Sheed had an below average, way below average showing in terms of what he is capable of doing (especially with a matchup that the Cavs presents).  And Webber just looked plane terrible.

             Another problem that I had besides the fact that the starters where bad, was the fact that Dale Davis was the high scorer off the bench!!! Dale Davis, not saying that he's bad at his age, but where the hell were McDysse and Hunter.  Well let me correct that, Hunter had some good assts. and was good at on the ball defense so I can't argue with that there but man, it was terrible.  Oh, I almost forgot to mention that when McDysse was subbed in for Webber, he did so bad that Sanders went to Maxiell for help just to provide some kinda spark that the Pistons needed. (Which he did very well). 

            The only thing that went the Pistons way was their plane to shut down King James.  LBJ had only 10 points 12 rebounds and 9 assts. that whole game.  Now the points I don't mind, that's a good thing and a testament to our defense, but its when you start looking at the rebounds and assts that he got, that's when you start to see what would have really happened if the Pistons didn't lock him up defensively.  He is basically trying to get his team involved and it looks like it almost worked.  As it was quoted in the Detroit News "Lebron didn't have to beat the Pistons, his teammates almost did that themselves".  Truer words couldn't have been said, Igaduages (I know I'm spelling it wrong, just too lazy to correct it) had a team high of 20 points. When was the last time he did that, especially against us?  The answer is never.  Basically this game was controlled by the bigs, and the Cavaliers front court almost pretty much won out.  

            If the Pistons are to do better, they must come out more aggressive than before, they must hit their shots and they must get their big men active on both ends of the floor. To match up with the double team that the Cavs did to Chancye, they probably should go back to what they did before and start running some offence through Webber or something, cause if they don't pick up the intensity and take their game off auto-pilot, then they might just go back to having another 7 game series and the thing is we might loose this time.  If we don't, then we (most likely) face a Spurs team that will have had plenty of rest and it will be the 2005 Finals all over again, and nobody wants that. 

Pistons, we've got to do better!!
I'm out, like Miami in the first round.

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