Tim Fuller-US PRESSWIRE
Inconsistent play has crippled the Detroit Pistons in the past. It very well could haunt them again this year.
Wednesday’s 105-96 NBA loss to the Houston Rockets, who outscored Detroit 33-15 in the fourth quarter, illustrated that this is not a team that knows how to play a full four quarters. They’ll have their entertaining stretches where they’ll do some good things. But this still appears to be a team that gets burned too many times by inconsistencies as was demonstrated by the Rockets.
“We gave ourselves a cushion, but you hold them to a 17-point third quarter, then in the fourth quarter they had eight second-chance points, nine points off of turnovers. They outrebounded us 12-3, we gave up 33 middle drives for 48 points,” said coach Lawrence Frank. “We played at a really poor pace. We lost our rhythm. You go from holding them to a 17-point third quarter, to then the floodgates opening, where we give up a 35-point fourth quarter, that’s not a recipe to win.”
“I think we just lost our pace. When you watch the amount of times we get into things later than we want to, and the ball sticking, we didn’t change what we ran, but just our intent with it. We like to play an up-tempo game as well, but they were just able to do it for longer stretches tonight.”
Rockets forward Chandler Parsons commented afterwards on how a team should play in the situation the Pistons found themselves in Tuesday night.
“If it was one thing we could take out of this is inconsistency,” he said. “Every team is going to make a run. We are playing against very good players so we just have to maintain their runs and go on runs ourselves and just keep getting shots and keep rebounding.”
That’s a lesson the Pistons badly need to learn.
