A Message For Joe Dumars

I hope Joe Dumars reads this. I hope somebody could whisper this to him.

Please don’t change the core group.

There might not be much of this pleading after the 3 straight loss in the conference finals but he actually pulled out the bad weed.

Let me say this before you charge me of being ungrateful: Flip Saunders did a decent job in guiding the team to 3 successful regular seasons, 3 straight conference finals. But this I say, I’d give that accomplishment a full 100% but just 35% from its total produce. Let me translate that last part in layman’s terms. A head coach can only do so much from the bench, from the sidelines, in the locker room. Draw offensive sets, set up defensive schemes, grade the effort given by the players, scatter the playing time and execute a substitution pattern. I also give the assistant coaches 15% out of the 100% total produce. A full 50% to the players.

In this recent loss, I didn’t hate the Pistons players even if they looked bewildered in the last half of the fourth quarter. They seemed lost. Not out of control, just lost.

I can’t seem to comprehend why Rip was made to sit until the less than 5 minutes in the last quarter. There’s no reason why Theo Ratliff was inserted in the mix when what they needed was a quicker guy beside Rasheed to block off the passing lanes. They were resting McDyess, that I understand. But you can’t put Ratliff in for the very reason that he wasn’t in the mix. Why wasn’t Maxiell sent in instead?

It was a chess match as far as coaching was concerned and clearly it wasn’t done on Detroit’s end. You can’t blame the players for this one. And the one thing that clearly annoys me is the fact that everybody is blaming ‘Sheed for this slip. Almost everyone wants ‘Sheed shipped out. The guy did all this season. If he slid a step or two in performance in the last game, then he slipped. Still, he is just one player out there and this guy was trying to defend the inside. You see his effort was there but with the defensive design that the coach drew that there should be help from the weak side didn’t happen.

Joe Dumars was right in saying that “everybody’s in play” because they crumbled altogether. But in this same light, Joe D must rethink it. Rethink it with one what if and give this bunch of starters one more season, just one more to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Have they shortchanged the fans as well as the management for this third straight conference finals loss? I don’t believe so. The same core group gave Detroit a championship, another trip to the finals the succeeding year.

This year was supposedly to be rather significant with the luxury of a stronger bench compared to the team that lost to Miami & Cleveland. But what average fans and the media failed to see was that the trust given to this bench was short-lived and was never evident in the conference finals. During the regular season, they were used as sparkplugs in cases that the starters’ lights dimmed. This never happened in the playoffs.

The substitutions made, especially in the conference finals games where they lost, were rather erratic if not uncalled for. Here’s why I am pointing this out: if substitutions aren’t done right, if you don’t push the right buttons, the outcome wouldn’t be positive.

Here’s what I would rather request Joe Dumars do: clear some more bench space to get that one scrappy power forward, a small forward that’s an anti-thesis of Tayshaun Prince and others for defensive purposes. They Pistons have enough jump shooters to go around with.

Keep the core, clear bench space and look for scrappy, strong and nothing-left-to-lose players.

And, of course, a coach that doesn’t’ crumble in crunch time.