The Goin' to Work Pistons, an era now in rapid transition to something else with Chauncey Billups having joined Ben Wallace as expatriated Pistons, would have loved this: Their next four games, coming in a dizzying week ahead, are against teams with a combined record of 28-6, a tidy .823 winning percentage.
But wait, as someone selling you a miraculous set of kitchen knives might say, there's more. The first of those games comes tonight at the undefeated Los Angeles Lakers. They're not just 7-0, they're winning games by a preposterous average of 18 points a game. ESPN's research gurus say only two teams in NBA history - the 1971-72 Bucks of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (22.6) and the 1966-67 76ers of Wilt Chamberlain (19.0) - ever had a wider winning margin through seven games.
It gets worse. While the Lakers were home watching the TNT doubleheader Thursday night, the Pistons' key players were logging unusually heavy minutes for the second time in three nights as they again had to come from behind, this time to beat Golden State. Tayshaun Prince played 46 minutes two nights after playing 43; Allen Iverson played 43 two nights after playing 46; Rasheed Wallace and Rip Hamilton were on their heels both nights.
After the Lakers game, they'll drag themselves to Phoenix for Sunday's finale of a four-game road trip that surely feels like the last of an eight-game trek - and an emotionally draining one, at that. It started, really, 11 days ago in Charlotte - the day news of the Billups-Iverson trade broke. The Pistons played that night and two nights later in Toronto without either Billups or Iverson as the trade moved through the pipeline. Iverson made his debut a week ago at New Jersey, having all of one practice with the team under his belt, then came to Detroit for his Palace debut on Sunday against the reigning NBA champion Celtics.
That made two games, one practice for Iverson. No wonder the Celtics had the Pistons appearing so out of sorts offensively. It didn't help any that whatever rotation ideas Michael Curry had drawn from Iverson's debut, the loss of Rodney Stuckey two quarters into the Boston game forced him to adjust on the fly again. And when the Pistons got up Monday morning after losing to the Celtics, they had to head back on the road again 48 hours after coming off the previous trip - and Stuckey stayed back in Detroit to undergo another battery of tests to determine the cause of his dizzy spell.
So it'll be a weary bunch that gets back to Detroit in the wee hours of Monday morning. They'll get one more practice in before an unforgiving back-to-back Wednesday and Thursday - hosting the red-hot Cavs (7-2 and on a six-game winning streak) and then heading to Boston, where the Celtics will be off on Wednesday and no doubt goading the leprechauns into all sorts of dirty tricks.
That looked like a really tough stretch of games when the schedule came out last summer - before the Pistons knew they'd be enduring the inevitable transitional bumps the trade presented, before dealing with the uncertainty of Stuckey's condition, before the Lakers established their dominance and the Celtics and Cavs got off to streaking starts.
Now it looks sadistic. No wonder Curry poured so much into those wins at Sacramento and Golden State. Joe Dumars has said he's not going to monitor the regular season for wins, necessarily, but in the mind-set his team adopts on a game-in, game-out basis. But the reality of their straits surely wasn't lost on the Pistons when the Iverson era began 0-2 and the next six games stretched out before them. If the Pistons had lost to both the Kings and Warriors - and neither of those places ever allows for easy wins under the best of circumstances - they could have been staring down the barrel of an eight-game losing streak.
That would have tested the resolve of all of them. There isn't anything remotely approaching a sure win over the next four, either, but the Pistons proved something to themselves to start this West Coast trip, no matter how the next week plays out. A few of the names have changed, but these Pistons don't back down from a challenge any more readily than the more familiar cast of recent vintage did.
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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.