http://www.nba.com/pistons/news/trueblu ... 00118.htmlOne Step Back
When Rip Hamilton awoke feeling ill, he wasn’t the only one left sick to his stomach.
If it wasn’t for bad luck, the Pistons would have no luck at all. Riding a three-game winning streak and poised to sweep a holiday weekend back-to-back with New York, the Pistons lost one more starter before tipoff and yet another by halftime. That didn’t stop them from a huge third-quarter comeback to take the lead, but the Knicks opened the fourth quarter with a rush and held off another Pistons rally to steal a win that stalls momentum a team chasing a playoff spot can ill afford to have slowed. Without Hamilton’s steady scoring, a team still missing Ben Gordon, Will Bynum and Tayshaun Prince just didn’t have the stuff to counterpunch the Knicks on a day the mercurial Nate Robinson exploded for 27. Robinson made 5 of 9 from the 3-point arc, where the Knicks (10 of 22) outscored the Pistons (0 of 12) by a mere 30 points. The Pistons scrapped, coming back from 14 down at halftime on the strength of a 19-2 run to take a two-point lead into the fourth quarter. But after not turning it over once in the third, the Pistons committed turnovers on their first two possessions of the fourth and the Knicks quickly took a 10-point lead that held up. A win would have pulled the Pistons essentially into a tie with the Knicks for 10th in the East with each having 25 losses. Instead, the Pistons fell to 14-26 and the Knicks improved to 17-24. With Toronto, Charlotte and Chicago sitting in the 6, 7 and 8 spots and all racking up recent big wins – Toronto ripped Dallas on Sunday, Charlotte won a weekend set with San Antonio and Phoenix and Chicago won at Boston last week – the Pistons simply can’t afford many more losses to teams sitting outside the playoff field.
Which made Hamilton’s illness all the more difficult to stomach after the Pistons again saw fleeting signs of the team they thought they would be coming into the season. The Pistons have now lost a staggering 87 man-games to injury or illness with the season one game shy of the halfway mark: 31 for Prince, 27 for Hamilton, 15 for Gordon, 13 for Bynum and one for Charlie Villanueva. “I am very proud of the guys, but I thought as hard as we fought – we came back and take the lead – you’ve got to show poise,” John Kuester said after the game. “We did a great job in the third quarter and then we had to go to our bench. We need our bench to come through in that situation and it didn’t happen.” It didn’t happen mostly because the bench – which is supposed to consist of Villanueva, Gordon and Bynum – is now heavily dependent on rookies and a 35-year-old point guard, Chucky Atkins, who was added to the roster on the last day of training camp and was supposed to be the emergency No. 3, inactive most nights. To compound their frustration, Chris Wilcox – coming off his best game as a Piston, a 14-point, 10-rebound performance in Saturday’s win over the Knicks – put in a flat eight minutes in the first quarter before a nagging back injury flared and KO’d him for the rest of the way. “It’s tough,” Villanueva said. “Missing Rip, BG, Tay, Chris Wilcox couldn’t go. We were shorthanded, but we put on a fight. It was a game of spurts. They made a run, we made our run. It’s just we didn’t get stops when it really mattered the most in the fourth quarter.”
The Pistons keep looking for light at the end of the tunnel, and keep hallucinating at every faint spark, but again the hope is that when they next take the court – Wednesday, when Rasheed Wallace returns to The Palace in Celtics green – fortification will be at hand. Hamilton hopefully is over his bug and Tuesday’s practice could see Prince and Gordon testing their injuries – a left knee for Prince, a right groin for Gordon. The Boston game starts a stretch of six straight at The Palace to close January: Indiana, Portland, Memphis, Miami and Orlando close it out. “We have to take advantage,” Villanueva said. “We’ve got all home games. We must protect our home court. We’re playing some good teams, though. So hopefully we can get the guys healthy and they can help us on this run.” If you dare look any farther, a good finish to January could vault them into the pre-All-Star break portion of February with momentum for what sets up as one of the most favorable portions of the schedule. The Pistons have road games at New Jersey, Indiana and Milwaukee and home games with New Jersey and Sacramento – five teams that are all unlikely postseason participants. But first things first. Those six home games, as Villanueva noted, include four probable playoff teams and one (Memphis) other possibility. And even if they get some healthy bodies back, the lesson of the first wave of returnees is that it takes time for everybody to get to the same page. And time – like luck – isn’t exactly on the Pistons’ side these days.
