Hitting bottom 1st step to reaching the top

The Pistons still have no idea what their ceiling is with Allen Iverson, but they at least now know where their floor must be. They’d better hope it doesn’t get any lower than Sunday, when the woebegone Minnesota Timberwolves thumped them by 26 at The Palace.

What we’ve learned in the three weeks since the Allen Iverson trade is that right now it’s not about who lines up against the Pistons, it’s about the Pistons. In their first home game since scoring 58 points in the second half to beat one of the league’s most rugged defensive teams, Cleveland, the Pistons scored 34 points in the first half against one of the league’s flimsier defenses, Minnesota’s.

The offense was bad Sunday and the defense might have been worse. And the tendency will be to blame a letdown, the bugaboo that marked the Flip Saunders era, the whole “flip the switch” conversation that drove him crazy.

But you know what it really is? Disorientation. A team that could find its way around with the lights off before has suddenly been plunked down in a new house, blindfolded, and is groping to find its way from the bedroom to the kitchen for something as simple as pouring a glass of water.

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: There’s no way around the fact that Sunday’s 106-80 setback was a bad loss. A really bad loss. The Timberwolves hadn’t won a road game yet. They limped to The Palace at 2-9. They got clubbed at home by Boston two nights ago, losing by virtue of being dominated 35-10 in the third quarter after leading narrowly at halftime. They led by 10 at halftime against the Pistons, too – and then won the third quarter decisively this time, 32-18.

“I stunk up the gym tonight,” Iverson said. “I couldn’t do anything right on the offensive end of the court.”

As if to make the newcomer feel at home, perhaps, Iverson had plenty of company in that stinking up the gym part. Iverson, Rip Hamilton and Rodney Stuckey – the three guards expected to give the Pistons the dynamic edge over their Eastern Conference competitors – shot a combined 5 for 27.

“If they go 5 for 27 and you add (Rasheed Wallace) together, 8 for 37, we’re not going to win many games,” was Michael Curry’s glum assessment.

Tayshaun Prince scored 20 points, dropping 8 of his 13 shots, and he tried to change the complexion of a lifeless game in the third quarter, when he took 8 of Detroit’s 18 shots and scored 13 of its18 points. But he had no help. Jason Maxiell played with verve off the bench, contributing 12 points and eight boards in 23 robust minutes, but Minnesota beat the Pistons soundly on a night the Timberwolves didn’t get anything special from the only guy on their team, Al Jefferson, who would start for the Pistons. Jefferson didn’t even hit his averages, scoring 19 points and grabbing eight rebounds. Randy Wittman only rode him for 32 minutes because he was getting whatever he wanted from everybody else.

The Timberwolves are ranked in the mid to low 20s – the bottom 15 percent of the league – pretty much across the board offensively. Yet they shot 53 percent against the Pistons. A 28 percent 3-point shooting team, Minnesota knocked down 7 of 11 against a porous defense.

“We all know (the offense) is not in sync right now as a group,” Curry said. “Offensively, we can get better. But until we get better offensively, we can’t be bad defensively. And the problem I have right now is we’re allowing missed shots to affect the way we’re defending – and that has to change.”

The knee-jerk reaction is to call that a lack of effort. I’d trace the roots elsewhere, though. That disorientation they’re experiencing in the wake of the Iverson trade has forced them all to start thinking about things they’ve executed by rote for years. In the long run, that’s a good thing. In the short term, well, there are going to be nights like this one.

No reasonable person expected a smooth transition to the Iverson era. Changing point guards two games into the season is extreme even if you’re swapping out one traditional point guard for another. Chauncey Billups and Allen Iverson could hardly be farther removed from one another on the continuum of NBA point guards.

But maybe the wins over the Lakers and Cavs, foremost, convinced others that they could warp this process, or at least capture enough lightning-in-a-bottle moments to routinely beat the Minnesotas of the NBA and hold their own against the elites until they gain their footing.

They’re home now for the first time approaching an extended stay this season and Curry has his practice schedule mapped out for the next two weeks. Sunday’s dreary performance should assure him his team’s full attention for the two days of workouts before the Knicks – another team hit with major dislocation with Friday’s blockbuster trades of Zach Randolph and Jamal Crawford – come to The Palace.

They know they have work to do, in other words, and for the first time since the trade, the schedule is giving them a fair chance to get that work done.

“We’ve got no choice,” Hamilton said. “We’ve got to figure it out. It’s very disappointing. You want to get a game on your home court. They’ve been struggling and we knew that. … Very frustrated. Just the simple fact that where we want to get to and where we are now … it hurts. The way we’ve been losing lately, it’s tough.”

A 26-point home loss to a winless road team? Yeah, that’s pretty tough. It’s one of those scores they’ll notice in other NBA cities and start asking questions about what’s wrong with the Pistons. It’s the type of cold water to the face that rivets the attention of a chastened team. The Pistons have found their floor. Starting with Monday’s practice, they’ll all start the quest to find their ceiling with a little more urgency.

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