Motor City Mayhem

Hey, this is A.C. – What’s happening.

The only thing I didn’t like about Monday night is that we once again lost a game at the beginning of the third quarter. It’s happened all season. It happened in the Jersey series. We come out flat and that problem needs to be addressed. It doesn’t make sense for this team to play as well as they did in that first half and then come out and let the Pistons go on a 17-6 run, and basically that was the game right there…

What I learned when I got into the playoffs at this level, it’s not good enough to say that you had a ‘chance to win.’ Because a chance is nothing but a loss. You’ve gotta win. You have to get the job done if you’re gonna win. If you don’t get it done, a pat on the back means nothing because you lose. And that’s a hurt feeling, man. I hated that feeling. Getting that close, playing six, seven months of basketball and missing one shot to lose, that’s a bad feeling…Moral victories do not get it at this round of the playoffs. In the playoffs, moral victories get you nothing but a loss. It may sound hard, but that’s reality. It’s painful…

I also hated to waste a great game by Z like that. When Z plays like that, we have to win those games. And like I told everybody from the beginning of the season, if Z can hit that 15-foot shot, that’s gonna give us a huge advantage in the playoffs. Especially against the Pistons because they’ll give him that shot. Now he’s knocking ‘em down and it’s changing the whole complexion of the series because they have to game-plan for him now. Which will take another guy out of the middle. C-Web can’t move anymore, especially laterally - he can’t move at all laterally - so they don’t want to run him out there. Plus, Z can shoot over the top of him anyway. So, to me, that should be a focal point of everything. We should start with Z right away. Make their defense react to that, then we play off of their reaction…

The Pistons are forcing us to be a better half-court executing team on offense. If you watch the Pistons run their offense, they wait. They wait for plays to develop. They wait before they set picks. They wait for the pick to get set before you move off of it. They wait for the guy to get open before they make the pass…

If you look at our offense, we’re running too quick. We go too fast. We don’t give the defense a chance to make a mistake. We make the mistake because we go too fast and – boom! When you get to this level, the little things count. Little things like timing on offense. Letting things develop. Having patience. All of that counts now and that’s the difference in the two teams right now…

It has to be a five-on-five game. They have five guys who can make plays. We need five guys who can likewise step-up and make plays. You look at their balanced scoring; they don’t have any 30-point guys. But they all can do what they have to do when it’s needed, when it’s necessary…

We have to win tonight in order to change the complexion of this series. If we don’t win, then we’re going to have to pull off a miracle like we did last year…The Pistons know we can compete with them. We match-up well with them, so every game’s gonna be like the last one. I don’t see anybody getting blown out. Unless they just shoot the ball horribly. But how much worse can we shoot? We shot 38% from the field; 10% from 3-point land; and 65% from the foul line. It doesn’t get much worse than that. We should shoot the ball better, which I think will give us a win Thursday…