Curry: 2 more games to gauge lineup

Self-evaluation is an everyday reality of professional sports. It hasn’t normally been a terribly agonizing process for the Pistons during the Joe Dumars era. But a four-game losing streak – their first in four years – tends to make it so.

Michael Curry stopped short of saying changes are in the offing – in fact, he specifically said there isn’t necessarily another lineup change coming – but he did broadly hint that if the Pistons don’t turn a corner in tonight’s game with New Orleans and Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. late afternoon tip with Memphis, all bets are off.

When Curry was asked about 90 minutes before the New Orleans game if he’s convinced the small lineup can defend and rebound well enough to give the Pistons a chance to be successful, he didn’t beat around the bush.

“I haven’t been totally convinced yet,” he said. “I think we’re good enough, whichever way we decide to play, but we haven’t played defense and rebounded the ball as well as I would have liked with that group.” And then …

“So we’re really looking at today and Monday to see how our performance is. I’m not saying after that we’ll make another decision, but I thought regardless of the lineup, I thought if we shared the ball a little more and took care of some fast-break opportunities … we’re not talking like we are now, because we would have beat Charlotte and we would have beat Indiana and a tossup how that game in Oklahoma City would have gone.

“We’ll see. We’ll look at everything.”

Everything, presumably, includes continuing with the small lineup or reverting back to a more conventional lineup with Tayshaun Prince at small forward and Rip Hamilton at shooting guard. Both were banged up in Friday night’s loss at Oklahoma City, Prince straining a groin and Hamilton hyperextending an elbow.

Curry said his hunch was that Prince would play tonight, though he remains a game-time decision, as does Hamilton.

Jason Maxiell hasn’t played in consecutive games and Curry said that frustrates him as much as it does Maxiell and again brought up the difficulties of managing the rotation while experimenting with the small lineup.

“One of the big reasons I struggle with playing the small lineup is that it’s tough to play more than three bigs when Tayshaun is a 35-minute-a-night guy and he starts at the four. So you consider him a starter at the big, you’re really playing four bigs – Tay, (Rasheed Wallace), Amir (Johnson) and (Antonio McDyess).

“You have to have (Maxiell or Kwame Brown not play), but in the midst of having to figure out how to win the game, you can’t play everybody.”

But who plays and who doesn’t – and in what combinations - in the coming weeks appears to hinge to a great degree on how the Pistons play over the next two games.

Stay tuned.

And check Pistons.com later tonight for my report on the Pistons-New Orleans game.

---

Questions and comments on Keith's posts can be submitted via the Pistons Mailbag. Click here to submit your question.