Orlando — Trajan Langdon, the Pistons’ team president, stood leaning against a railing near the visitors’ tunnel at the Kia Center late Monday night. His arms were folded, his face expressionless.
But he wasn’t alone, watching in disbelief as Orlando pushed the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference to the brink of playoff elimination barely a week into the postseason.
On the court in front of Langdon, everyone could see what was wrong: The Pistons couldn’t score to save their season.
They went without a field goal for the final 5:24 of Game 4, save for a meaningless putback from Isaiah Stewart in the waning seconds. In Game 3 here, it was a similar story, as Cunningham’s three-pointer with 3:15 left — tying that contest after a furious fourth-quarter rally — proved to be the Pistons’ final basket.
The only difference was, when the final horn sounded Monday, it was no longer an alarm bell. This time it might as well have been a funeral dirge.
The Pistons aren’t ready to go there, obviously. And after this 94-88 loss to the Magic put them in a 3-1 hole heading back to Detroit, they said all things you’d expect. They talked about their backs being against the wall and vowed there’s “still fight in us.”
But when asked how shocking it is that they find themselves in this spot, Cunningham couldn’t hide his disappointment.
“I mean, going into it? Shocked,” he admitted. “But the way that we’ve been playing? That stuff’s not good enough to win games in this league. This league’s too good. They’re a good team. They’re out-rebounding us. Turning me over. We haven’t hit enough shots. Our defense hasn’t caught its footing. So it’s not shocking.”
This isn’t, either: Only 13 teams in NBA history have come back from a 3-1 deficit to win a best-of-seven series, and just five of those were in the last 20 years. Of course, back in 2003, the top-seeded Pistons did manage to dig their way out of an identical scenario against Tracy McGrady and the Magic, winning three straight to take that first-round series in seven games.
This feels different than that, though. Back then, the Pistons were the better team, and all they needed to do was solve a one-man Magic show in McGrady. Now, it feels like a bit of a role reversal, and as Cunningham goes, so goes Detroit.
Right now, it’s going all wrong. The Pistons’ All-NBA leader had another exasperating game Monday, finishing with more turnovers (eight) than assists (six) — that’s 24 turnovers in the last three games for him — and shooting just 7-for-23 from the field, including 3-for-11 from behind the 3-point line.
“Yeah, it’s frustrating,” said Cunningham, who joined James Harden as the only players in NBA history with seven or more turnovers in three straight playoff games. “A lot of it was on myself. I was frustrated with my own play, having numbers, not making plays in transition, things like that. Things I do best. Just not being able to make plays for my team.”
Problem is, no one else on his team can make plays for themselves. At least not in this series. Not against a big, physical opponent like the Magic, who haven’t simply won the possession game this last week. They’ve also beaten the Pistons at their own game. Orlando scored 23 points off 20 turnovers Monday, and the problems certainly start there. But the Magic, who played the entire fourth quarter without an injured Franz Wagner (calf), also got 16 second-chance points, the product of 16 offensive rebounds.
And just to put an exclamation point on how this series has played out for the shell-shocked Pistons, there also was that highlight-reel dunk Jamal Cain threw down on Jalen Duren in the fourth quarter. After the crowd erupted, the Pistons responded on the next possession by missing three shots, the last two at the rim. The Magic keep meeting the moment, while the Pistons are melting in it.
“We just gotta be in the moment of what this is: This is playoff basketball,” said Tobias Harris, the veteran who once again was Detroit’s only secondary scoring option with 20 points. “We gotta be more ready to just go out there and scrap like we need it. I mean, we’re a little too casual. Everybody knows that in our locker room. We have to be better. Every single guy — all of us — has to be better. Have to look ourselves in the mirror and be better.”
From the start, especially. As Cunningham noted Monday night, “you gotta do your work early.” But in this game, he and his teammates did the exact opposite.
Determined to help Duren shake out of his series-long funk, they tried to force the ball inside to their All-Star center on their first few trips down court. It resulted in three empty possessions — a turnover, a Cunningham miss and an offensive foul on Duren.
Making matters worse, the Magic hit a pair of three-pointers at the other end, igniting another loud Kia Center crowd. And it only got worse from there for the Pistons, who coughed it up on seven of their first 10 possessions. By that point, Orlando led by a dozen and it felt like the reverse of that third-quarter blitz Detroit used to win Game 3.
Still, the Pistons managed to gather themselves and slowly forced their way back into the game. Cunningham asserted himself, the defense tightened and some impactful bench minutes — particularly from Stewart, who’d go on to record a whopping eight blocks Monday — helped turn the tide. By the end of the quarter, the Pistons hadn’t just closed the gap, they’d taken the lead.
They’d even extend it from there, building a double-digit cushion of their own midway through the second quarter. It helped that the Magic went ice cold from deep, missing 10 straight three-point attempts. But that lead was short-lived, anyway, because the Pistons simply can’t get out of their own way. The careless turnovers keep happening. So do the defensive lapses. Duren’s play remains a net negative on the scoreboard. And Bickerstaff still hasn’t figured out his rotation more than halfway through this series.
Problem is, those are the things the Pistons can control. The other issues aren’t. The lack of a true No. 2 scoring option, or even a proven secondary playmaker. A floor-spacing shooter that won’t get hunted on the defensive end the way Duncan Robinson was again Monday.
Those are the issues Langdon wasn’t ready to fully address until he’d watched this season play out. As he put it after the trade deadline, “The hope is that we give ourselves a chance to play some real meaningful basketball in the postseason, and that’ll allow us to assess what this team is and who we are going forward.”
After a 60-win regular season, I’m sure he hoped — and expected — to have more than a handful of meaningful basketball games to assess. But if this is who they are and all they’ve got, that may be all he gets.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
@JohnNiyo
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Niyo: Shell-shocked Pistons digging their own playoff grave
Reporting by John Niyo, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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