The art of building a basketball team

On the art-science continuum, basketball is way over there on the left, the art end. Basketball is the most elusive of sports to quantify numerically. Oh, sure, you can crank out field-goal percentages and points in the paint and various and sundry other numerical categories, but none seem very accurate predictors.

Putting a winning team together, too, is much more a function of gut feel than statistical analysis. I thought about that after talking with Joe Dumars the other day and getting his perspective on evaluating the Pistons since he traded Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson.

There's no way to tell for sure, but chances are the Pistons would not have hit the NBA quarter-pole flirting with .500 had Joe D stuck to the status quo. They might not be abreast of Boston and Cleveland in leading the charge atop the Eastern Conference, but chances are they would have won at least twice as many as they'd lost.

But Dumars said something that struck me: "I watch how we play more than anything else. There have been times we've been winning games and I don't like the way we've played and there are times we've hit some struggles and I say, I like the direction we're heading. Right now, it's probably neither for me. Right now, it's watching a team trying to find itself. Get down big, can come back. Get up big, can lose a lead. That's a team trying to find itself and that's what we're working through right now."

Last year's Pistons - and the year before that, and the year before that, and ... - never had to search far to find themselves. Dumars could have stood pat with this team and been virtually assured of at least a top-four seed in the Eastern Conference yet again. The Billups-Wallace-Hamilton-Prince nucleus - even if not quite as durable and irrepressible as it had been two or three years ago - still gave the Pistons a puncher's chance of winning it all because a blossoming young nucleus behind them could seal whatever fissures were threatened.

But then this intriguing proposal comes along: Denver offers Allen Iverson, one of the most mercurial scorers in NBA history. Dumars weighs the pluses and minuses. Surely he realized the trade carried the risk of lesser than what has become the customary success here at Six Championship Drive. Surely he grasped that the breathtaking talents of Iverson, if folded adroitly into the recipe here, could yield a product with a higher potential for changing the address yet again.

On top of that, the cherry for Dumars was the chance to dramatically alter the mix next season with the increased payroll flexibility that shedding the long-term commitment to Billups entailed. If he chooses, Joe D will have the Pistons at or near the front of the line for two very desirable free agents next July with the $22 million he'll have available to him under the salary cap.

But let's set that aside for the moment and focus on this year and the unpredictability of plugging star personnel into stable lineups. The biggest free-agent move of last summer was Philadelphia adding Elton Brand to a team that closed the regular season in a rush and made the No. 2 seed Pistons sweat in the first round. It looked like a near-perfect match: Brand, a drop-dead post scorer, on a team that otherwise struggled to find half-court offense but was proficient in nearly every other area.

In Philadelphia, despite the benefit of an off-season and a training camp to integrate Brand, they're struggling more mightily than the Pistons to find themselves. Go figure.

In baseball, if you have trouble scoring runs, you go get yourself a few bats - a couple of guys with high on-base percentages, a slugger or two with triple-digit RBI histories. In football, if you can't stop the run, you direct your draft and free-agent resources to landing a 320-pound nose tackle and a linebacker with a forward gear.

In basketball, the equations are never that linear. The link between offense and defense is inexorable and complex. Trying to solve a weakness often undermines a strength. A trade might upgrade the talent yet degrade the product.

Joe D said something else: It might take all 82 games for the Pistons to figure this thing out. And he'll be watching, looking for signs the rest of us probably won't see, invisible to the masses way down on the art end of the team-building continuum.

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