A lifetime ago, in the first year I covered the Pistons on a consistent basis - the 1986-87 season when they'd traded for Adrian Dantley and drafted John Salley and Dennis Rodman - I asked then-Milwaukee Bucks coach Don Nelson how long he thought it would take Chuck Daly's team to find its identity and settle in after the significant turnover in personnel.
"Quite a while," he said, or words to that effect. "We've only made one big change, trading for Jack Sikma, and I told our team it would take us half the season to really get comfortable."
It should be noted that the Sikma trade happened on July 1, giving Nelson all summer to doodle plays on cocktail napkins and his team all of training camp and the preseason to figure out how to play, all of a sudden, with a center more comfortable facing the basket from 22 feet than posting up with his back to the rim from 10 feet.
The Pistons just underwent an even more radical transition. Changing point guards is like changing quarterbacks. The offense Michael Curry spent his summer imagining and implementing was designed with a physical, big, strong point guard whose strengths were perimeter shooting, controlling tempo and executing the called play so precisely that it would work seven times out of 10 even when the defense knew it was coming. The point guard he's inherited is slight, slithery and at his best when a gust of wind blows the script away and chaos is the order of the day.
The Pistons, the NBA's model of consistency for the new millenium, were about to undergo their most significant facelift since the 2002-03 season - the year Chauncey Billups was signed as a free agent and Jerry Stackhouse was swapped for Rip Hamilton - even before Joe Dumars shipped Billups and Antonio McDyess to Denver for Allen Iverson two games into the season.
The Iverson trade took the degree of their makeover from a 3 to a 7 on a 1-10 scale. Toss the timing of the trade atop the heap - not just that it happened two games into the season, but in the midst of perhaps the most trying stretch of schedule they'll face all season - and you can ratchet it up to a 9.
Long way of saying: Take the loss to Boston on Thursday night with a chunk of salt. The hand-wringers will say two blowouts to the Celtics this year proves the Pistons can't compete with them, but there's no more logic in that than to say the Pistons proved their superiority over the Lakers and Cavs - by many accounts, the best teams in the West and East so far - by snapping their respective seven- and eight-game winning streaks within the past week.
The Pistons were at a significant disadvantage in each of their two games with Boston. In the first, Iverson had been with the team for all of one game and one practice. In the second, the Pistons had played the night before - and played Cleveland, the league's hottest team - while the Celtics were home resting and, oh, by the way, the transition to Iverson is still in its infancy.
NBA regular-season games are fun and entertaining, and when you look at a representative sample size of them, they're meaningful and often predictive of playoff success. But to draw ironclad conclusions from any single one of them is foolish. There are just too many variables to take into account to extrapolate anything of substance from an isolated November matchup.
The Pistons looked sluggish and confused in the first half against Cleveland, then dynamic and certain in a 58-point second half to win going away. They looked sluggish and confused against Boston pretty much all night.
You know what? It's going to be that way for a while. It's going to come and go. Momentum is almost always an elusive thing in the NBA. It's especially going to be true for these Pistons for the next 15 or 20 games.
But game by game, practice by practice, they'll figure it out. All of them. Curry will discover playing groups that click better than others - perimeter combinations, frontcourt pairings and the melding of one with the other. Iverson will get a better feel for when to probe and when to pull back. Rip Hamilton will begin to sense how to exploit the openings Iverson creates for others. Iverson will know where and when to look for Rasheed Wallace and Wallace, too smart to not make this work, will find the soft spots Iverson's creativity manifests. Tayshaun Prince, as intuitive as Wallace, will grow more and more into his role as the facilitator.
And all those useful parts off of Curry's bench - Rodney Stuckey and Arron Afflalo, Jason Maxiell and Amir Johnson, Will Bynum and Walter Herrmann - will continue the gradual, sometimes painful, process of finding their niche within the evolving bigger picture.
To a great extent, all of that uncertainty is invigorating - for the Pistons and for their fan base. The sameness that gave this team a certain comfort level was both good and bad. The hard work of making this transition is something that will require a certain mental focus that might have been beyond their reach before the trade. Now, shaken out of their comfort zone, no longer able to go by rote, they're using brain muscles and drawing on inner strengths they haven't had to exercise in a very long time.
They survived the grueling 12-game stretch to start this season - the one that looked daunting even more the dislocation caused by the Iverson-Billups trade - and now get to spend some time at home, allowing more and better focused practice time. Better than survived it really, coming out the other side with an 8-4 record.
They get eight of their next 12 games at home, a stretch that covers the next month, a much gentler pace than the 12 games in 23 days they've just experienced. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy. It's going to come and go for a while. But it should come more often, stay a little longer when it does, and go less frequently. And after these next 12 games, then we might be ready to make some meaningful assessments.
- Walter Herrmann took a hard shot to the head late in Thursday's game, suffered a slight concussion and stayed overnight for observation in a Boston hospital. He returned home Friday morning and is listed day to day. If the Pistons hold him out of Sunday's game with Minnesota, they would activate Walter Sharpe. Since the trade of Billups, McDyess and Cheikh Samb, the Pistons are operating two players under the 15-man roster limit.
- Curry said he got to Boston in the wee hours of Thursday morning after the Cleveland game, turned on the TV and was jolted to see a report that Antonio McDyess was considering an offer from Charlotte. That one doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Beyond the mutual affection McDyess and Larry Brown hold for one another, Charlotte wouldn't satisfy McDyess' desire to compete for a championship. The Bobcats are also not known to throw money around and have been suffering badly at the gate this season. The teams that make the most sense for McDyess are Cleveland and San Antonio, but the overwhelming industry consensus remains that McDyess is waiting out the 30-day window to sign with the Pistons on Dec. 7.
Questions and comments on Keith's posts can be submitted via the Pistons Mailbag. Click here to submit your question.
Click here to return to Pistons.com
Award-winning journalist Keith Langlois, most recently lead sports columnist at The Oakland Press, joined Pistons.com as the web site editor on October 2, 2006. Langlois, who brings over 27 years of professional sports journalism experience to Palace Sports & Entertainment, serves as Pistons.com's official beat writer and covers the team on a daily basis.