The stand out thing here is how the top seven Pistons are bunched so very close together. There is no single superstar, nor a superstar/star pair of players that the Pistons can turn to to win a playoff series. Unlike most other playoff teams, this team has no superstar and a grand total of one star, Stuckey, and one near star, Iverson.
So the motto on the official Pistons web site, "We Work as One", unlike most official mottos, is extremely true in real life: the Pistons really do work as one. They will have to have at least six of the seven involved and playing well, helped out by two or three others, to win a series. But they have been doing this kind of thing for years, although this year Rasheed Wallace and Richard Hamilton have not been as good as they were in many of those years.
The degree of coaching difficulty here is very high, with this long list of great but not dominant superstar players to coordinate, but overall so far, Pistons Coach Michael Curry has done about as well or better than any rookie coach could do in managing this relatively complicated team.
Unlike the Nuggets, who have Billups and Nene to some extent, and who could have Carmelo Anthony if they wanted to, the Pistons don't really have any superstar or near superstar they can go to in the playoffs. They could theoretically have Iverson, but they don't, and it's very wise that they don't, because Iverson as a lone superstar has never worked very well. Iverson is not a superstar for the Pistons because they very wisely elected to make an all out effort to solve the "Iverson Puzzle." This puzzle is the mystery why a Hall of Fame player can all too often, and more often in the playoffs than in the regular season, make your offense worse rather than better, something that normally would be considered absurd.
I will be extensively reporting on this in the weeks and months ahead, but to make a very, very long story very, very short, the Pistons decided that, without on the one hand falling for the lie that "Iverson can not play point guard," and without on the other hand getting hung up on him being designated the point guard no matter what, that they would cut to the heart of where the problem and the solution to the puzzle lies. They would get Iverson to pass more and shoot less, which has happened to what is even for me an incredible extent.
The Iverson haters are going to wish they were never born after I'm finished reporting on what has happened this year in Detroit.
But it's now possible, amazingly, that the Pistons have gone a little too far in doing what establishment and lazy coaches such as George Karl would never dare do at all, which is to make badly needed adjustments in Iverson's game, so that he is much more of a team player and much less of a lone wolf. But this is only the regular season, so if it's true that they have gone a little too far in keeping Iverson's scoring down, they can correct that before the playoffs begin. Not to mention that overshooting the target is a tried and reliable way to make sure the target is achieved when it really counts.
Will the Pistons, who have shocked the basketball establishment by recognizing and trying to solve the Iverson Puzzle, complete their power play by winning a playoff series they are not supposed to win? The jury is still out on all of these things, and there is a believable theory that the Pistons will win at least one playoff series against a supposedly better team with a better regular season record, such as the Hawks or the Magic without Jameer Nelson, because although they have not gotten it perfect, the Pistons have done a very good or perhaps an outstanding job of managing their team and solving the Iverson Puzzle.
Much, much more on these things later.
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