John Niyo: If Pistons can't flip this script, playoff flop is looming

ORLANDO, Fla. — They’re in danger of throwing it all away.

The 60-win season. The No. 1 seed it earned them. Even some of the hard-earned momentum the Detroit Pistons have gathered as a franchise the past couple years, going from an NBA laughingstock to one of the league’s best stories.

Because the script they’re writing now, down 2-1 to the Orlandoin their first-round playoff series after Saturday’s sloppy 113-105 loss to the Magic, is starting to feel more like a horror film than a comedy. And based on the somber faces in the visitors’ locker room at the Kia Center, perhaps it’s finally dawning on the Pistons’ players just what that could mean in the end.

Even if it is, though, it may be too late to rewrite the ending, just as it was Saturday, when Cade Cunningham led a furious fourth-quarter rally that erased a 17-point deficit, then watched along with his teammates as Orlando made a series of tough shots down the stretch to seal the win.

“We'll learn from it, but it's over with,” head coach J.B. Bickerstaff insisted afterward, well aware that his team is now halfway to making the wrong kind of history here. “You can't hang on to it. And our guys have been consistent all year that we've been able to move on to the next. So I trust our guys that we'll focus on it, we'll learn from it, we'll study it, we'll get better at it, and then Monday we'll be ready to go.”

That they weren’t Saturday, though, should be cause for alarm. The Pistons grabbed an early lead with a pair of 3-pointers out of the gate, but they did little else to take the Orlando crowd out of the game for the next three quarters.

Giving it away

Detroit committed seven turnovers in the first quarter alone, most of them unforced errors. And when asked later what was missing for much of the afternoon, Ausar Thompson, whose effort was one of the few bright spots in this loss, answered honestly: “Intensity.”

“I feel like the whole game we were playing from behind,” he said, comparing it to the sluggish outing in Game 1, when the Pistons trailed from start to finish and officially put themselves on notice.

Look, if we’re being honest here, Orlando has been the better team for the bulk of these three games, both in terms of coaching and execution on the court. Outside of that ridiculous 30-3 run in the third quarter of Game 2, and the 5-minute stretch Saturday when they erased a 17-point deficit, you’d be hard-pressed to look at the rest and say the Pistons even faintly resembled a No. 1 seed.

Same goes for the Magic as an 8-seed, obviously. If anything, this looks more like a 4-5 matchup and Orlando is the team that has home-court advantage. But therein lies the danger with what the Pistons have done here, while coming undone themselves.

They’ve given the Magic a world of confidence now, and after Orlando stole Game 1 on the road, Saturday’s win in front of a black-clad Kia Center crowd only built on that. Paolo Banchero played with power and poise, finishing one assist shy of a triple-double. Franz Wagner hit the biggest shots down the stretch. And Desmond Bane finally shook out of a shooting funk and hit seven 3s for the Magic.

“Even though we lost Game 2, I felt like we just let one slip,” Wagner said. “I felt like the whole locker room felt like that.”

The Pistons claimed they felt the same way after Saturday’s loss. And Cunningham was quick to shoulder most of the blame, as you’d expect. He finished with a game-high 27 points and nine assists, but he knew his nine turnovers told a different story about how this game slipped away.

“It all starts with me,” he said. “I gotta be better about organizing (the team), making sure we get shots on rim. … Too many times we're having empty possessions, just giving the ball back to them, and that’s on me.”

Duren's distress

Of course, that’s the fear plenty of Pistons fans had coming into these playoffs. That when the intensity ratcheted up, and the defense began collapsing in on Detroit’s All-NBA floor leader, there wouldn’t be enough capable scoring options around him. Particularly in this first-round matchup against Orlando, a team with the size and strength to more than hold its own in the paint, where the Pistons do so much of their damage.

But no one could’ve guessed it’d look quite like this, with Jalen Duren, the Pistons’ emerging All-Star center, getting outplayed in this series by the Magic’s Wendell Carter Jr., who had another dominant showing (14 points, 17 rebounds) Saturday in Game 3.

Duren fouled out with eight points and nine rebounds in 27-plus minutes. And after averaging 19.5 points and 10.8 rebounds in the regular season, he’s at single digits in both categories in this series. Saturday, it finally reached a breaking point early in the third quarter, after Duren followed up an ugly dribble-drive turnover at one end with a pick-and-roll breakdown at the other. Bickerstaff called timeout and inserted Paul Reed into the lineup, a benching he later said was simply a coach looking for a “spark.”

And that’s the hope here, I guess. The Pistons did show something with that fourth-quarter rally. But they’ll have to show it for a full game if they’re going to even this series before it shifts back to Detroit for Game 5.

Only six times before has a No. 1 seed lost a first-round series to an 8-seed, the last being Milwaukee in a five-game flop against Miami in 2023. And even though the odds still suggest Detroit may prevail in the end — seven of the 12 top seeds to trail 2-1 in a first-round series have gone on to win — the eye test here says otherwise.

So unless they can find that spark Monday night, and fuel it with something other than an occasional burst of hot air like they have the past couple games, this could get out of control.

“We have to win the little moments, the little battles,” said Thompson, who certainly won his share of those Saturday. “Offensive rebounds in the first quarter, they don't feel big, but then you look back in the fourth quarter and you’re, like, ‘We could have done a lot in order to not be in this position that we're in.’ So we have to be better at that.”

They have no choice now. That’s the position they’ve put themselves in, and if they want this breakthrough season to be remembered for something other than a playoff flop, they better find a way to meet the moment.

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