I'm behind in my posting. I wanted to write about the Pistons yesterday, but I was having some technical problems getting the highlights video to post to the Lions recap piece. So, here I am, a day late and a dollar short.
I had been getting worried about Reggie Jackson. The Pistons invested a lot in him, $80M over 5 years. They essentially traded for him last year so he could audition for the role of PG of the Future, and he was good enough to land the role. His stats last year? 17 ppg, 9.2 assists, 4.7 rebounds, 3.5 turnovers, and decent shooting percentages. He looked like a totally different player through the first 10 games. He was looking for his own shot more, pounding the air out of the ball, and turning it over like crazy without racking up the assists. On the telecast, Greg Kelser mentioned that SVG sat down with Reggie after the LA game (which was a nightmare game for him) and watched film from when he was playing better last year. Apparently it worked.
Reggie was a new man. He started the game off with a beautiful lob to Drummond, and the rest of the first quarter was much of the same. When the reserves came in, the ball movement proved to be contagious as it was whipped around the arc, inside and out. It got a little bogged down in the 2nd half, partly due to a little regression from Reggie, but the 4th quarter was all Pistons.
Drummond played a manful game. He looked tentative in his PNR defense for a stretch of the game, and Cleveland exploited that to make a couple of runs. The defense tightened up in the 4th quarter, especially on LeBron James. He would finish the game with a nice stat line of 30 pts and 6 boards on decent shooting numbers (11-21, 4-7 from 3 and 4-5 from the line), but only 3 assists and 4 turnovers. His 4th quarter was particularly ugly: 2-5 from the field and 1-2 from the line for 5 points, 1 rebound, 1 assist, and 2 turnovers (both in the final minute of the game). A big reason involved Stan Van Gundy's end game strategy of putting Reggie Jackson on LeBron and swinging Drummond over on the double-team when LeBron tried to bully him in the post. It was a brilliant move, forcing LeBron to get rid of the ball, once throwing it into the backcourt for a violation.
A strategy I expect to see a lot of this year is the Hack-a-Dre. We've been spared this brand of ugly basketball prior to this year because the Pistons haven't been very good. Now, opposing coaches fear this team more than they have in the past and have already employed Hack-a-Dre in a couple of games. It was weird to see the Cavs use it while they were ahead, though. For example, the Clippers were behind by 9 or 10 when they broke out Hack-a-Dre. Drummond missed a couple of FTs, Stan pulled him from the game (big mistake), and LA took over from there. This time, Stan stuck with Drummond, and Dre rewarded him by knocking down his FTs. 5-9 for the game isn't ideal, but it's good enough to making Hack-a-Dre a dubious strategy.
Overall, the offense looked the best it has all year. The defense wasn't always there, but it certainly showed up in the 4th quarter. The excellent ball movement led to all 5 starters finishing with double-digit scoring totals, including 20+ point games from Drummond (3 boards away from yet another 20-20 game), Reggie Jackson (also had a double-double with 12 assists), and Ersan Ilyasova. The bench was bad again, but Brandon Jennings sat down with Blaha and Kelser for an in-game interview, and I have a lot of hope that he'll be back soon to bolster the bench unit. If that happens and Reggie's PG renaissance continues, this team could be a force in the East.
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The Tigers made an out-of-the-blue move yesterday, trading a mid-level prospect for Francisco Rodriguez. On one hand, this move smacks of every ill-conceived closing solution Dave Dombrowski ever came up with - trading for an aging closer on the down side of his career. None of those worked, because Dombrowski kept getting guys who had little to nothing left in the tank.
The difference here is K-Rod (so called because he racks up a ton of Ks) has morphed from a flame-thrower to a more savvy pitcher. He's 33 and his fastball isn't what it was when he was striking out 11 guys per 9 innings. Per fangraphs, his average fastball has dipped from 95 mph at his peak to just below 90 mph. I had been under the impression that Rodriguez was done as a closer, but after a couple of years of growing pains when his velocity started to drop, he's come back as one of the better closers in baseball by mixing his pitches. He'll start the season at the age of 34, but there are encouraging comps in Trevor Hoffman (very successful into his 40s) and Koji Uehara (still good at 40) of closers who followed a similar path.
My initial reaction was that new GM Al Avila was following in Dombrowski's footsteps for acquiring a new closer, a path that led to much weeping and gnashing of teeth. A deeper looks shows that not only does K-Rod have something left in the tank, he's improved to be a more effective pitcher now than he was 5 years ago.
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