Tuesday's 97-96 loss to the Miami Heat was more than just the fifth straight defeat for the Detroit Pistons, and either in nine games, but a catastrophic memento of what their season has been thus far.
The Motor City entered the game with a chance to sneak into the playoffs by knocking off the eighth-seeded Heat, but the result was a five-point swing in the last 30 seconds — a tough pill to swallow for head coach Stan Van Gundy.
First, second-year forward Stanley Johnson was assessed a delay-of-game technical foul for not giving enough space for a Heat inbound pass, with Goran Dragic scoring the free throw, followed by a jump shot to cut the deficit to one.
“You might want to get a film clip of that, because you won't see that call in the last minute of a game for about another five or six years,” Van Gundy said of the call by referee Marc Davis for Johnson's violation, according to Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “You might want to get a film clip and save it for the archives.”
Then Johnson was tied up at the sideline in mid-court, with the Heat gaining possession, resulting in his fifth turnover of the quarter.
“That's my fault,” Van Gundy said of not getting his best ballhandlers on the floor and taking a timeout to advance the ball to mid-court, instead of having to race across the time line to avoid an eight-second violation. “The whole thing is my fault. We should have just advanced the ball and I should have put Beno [Udrih] in the game for Stanley at that point. That was my fault.”
Heat center Hassan Whiteside would then get the game-winning basket, burying the Pistons' postseason chances that much deeper with the loss.
“We would have won the game,” Van Gundy said, “if I would have done a better job.”
Game management along with some faulty play by the best-paid players on the roster have played a major part in the regression of the Pistons, who have fallen out of groove completely and undone the effort they put forward throughout February and early March.
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