Ouch! Gordon Injured Too

Gordon joins Prince, Hamilton on sidelines with sprained ankle
Ouch!
by Keith Langlois

The good news? If bad news really does come in threes, then the Pistons’ run of injuries is over. The bad news? You couldn’t have picked a worse candidate to join Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince in Arnie Kander’s House of Rehab than Ben Gordon.

Gordon twisted his left ankle three minutes before halftime of Wednesday’s 98-88 loss to Cleveland, to conveniently go with Hamilton’s right ankle sprain that’s kept him out the past 14 games and Prince’s ruptured disc that’s sidelined him for 12 games.

That means players who combine to average 58 points per game – or 63 percent of the Pistons’ offense – and occupy the top three spots on their payroll, accounting for more than 50 percent of Joe Dumars’ salary structure, are now unavailable for the foreseeable future.

Officially, Gordon is day to day – but then so are Hamilton and Prince.

Asked how serious his injury was after the game, Gordon said, “I have no idea.”

Which, if you fed John Kuester truth serum, would probably be his response to the question of where the Pistons are going to get their scoring without Gordon, Prince and Hamilton.

Coaches are conditioned to roll with the punches on injuries, but Kuester admitted the thought “what next?” flashed through his mind when Gordon, after cutting through the teeth of Cleveland’s defense late in the second quarter, crumpled and stayed down until the basket.

“I just went, goodness gracious,” he said. “But that’s part of the NBA. Being honest with you, you never want to see a player go down, and Ben has put that in the forefront right now.”

Scoring wasn’t the biggest issue on the Pistons’ plate in a first half in which Cleveland scored 60 and shot 61 percent. Here’s the kind of half it was: The Cavs led by nine after one quarter, the Pistons scored on eight of their first nine possessions of the second quarter – as sublimely as they’ve played offensively since the opening-night win, their one game all season at full strength – and somehow found themselves trailing by 13.

They held Cleveland to 38 points in the second half and somehow cut an 18-point deficit to five with 1:13 to play, leaning on the scoring of Rodney Stuckey (25) and Charlie Villanueva (19). But Will Bynum, so dynamic off Kuester’s bench for so much of the season, shot 1 of 13 and finished with four points. Those three represent what’s left of the Pistons’ legitimate scoring threats and when one of them is missing 12 of 13 shots, their chances to win are greatly compromised.

“It probably was my fault,” said Bynum, himself dealing with a tender right ankle and a nagging big toe injury on his left foot. “The way I shot the ball was extremely out of character. I had some good shots, but I can’t play like that and Ben go out and expect for us to win. It put too much on Stuckey out there. Part of that was my fault. I need to do a little bit more. If I need to get up and pressure the ball and do something else to get our team going, then that’s what I have to do.”

h Stuckey is averaging almost 17 points a game, Villanueva about 16 and Bynum 14. Kuester said he’s not sure what he does with his starting lineup if Gordon isn’t back by Friday – and that’s extremely unlikely – but rookie Austin Daye started with Stuckey in Wednesday’s second half with Bynum retaining his off-the-bench role.

The pressure on all three to score at or above their averages exists, but Kuester said it’s imperative that they don’t try to shoulder more than they can assume and that the emphasis on defense has to be that much greater given the scoring void left by Hamilton, Prince and Gordon.

“One of the things that can’t happen is that players feel pressure that they have to do more than they’re capable of doing,” he said. “Just continue to play, continue to defend. And if anything, I want them to feel a sense of urgency, not so much offensively as defensively.”

The three players to whom the scoring burden now falls understand the circumstances that have befallen them.

“Still play within ourselves, but we just have to do a little bit more, each and every one of us,” Villanueva said. “I’ve been in this situation before in Milwaukee where we had a lot of guys out. It’s kind of similar here, but it just creates more opportunities for other individuals and you’ve got to take advantage of it.”

The Pistons are almost always going to have at least two, and often three, players on the floor who aren’t going to draw much in the way of defensive attention, which makes it that much difficult for their few remaining scorers to get clean looks.

“I’ve just got to go out there and still try to create for my teammates,” Stuckey said. “They’ve just got to be ready to shoot the ball. That’s one thing I tell Jonas (Jerebko). When he’s in the corner and we pass it to him, he’s got to be ready to shoot it.”

“We just have to create, make opportunities for other people and try to buckle down and defend,” Bynum said. “We’ve got to get stops, try to get some easy baskets, get out and run. I think we’ll be fine if we just keep getting better every day in practice.”

The wild card in the equation now is the opportunity created for the three rookies – Jerebko, Daye and DaJuan Summers – and how Kuester can adapt what the Pistons do at both ends to cover their inexperience and exploit their strengths, which is namely their length and versatility.

If Daye winds up starting, the Pistons will be big and could wind up playing more zone or hybrid defenses. Summers and Daye put two more 3-point shooters on the floor, though losing Gordon takes away their greatest perimeter scoring threat.

“This is where guys like Jonas, DaJuan and Austin find out. This isn’t Summer League,” Kuester said. “but they were getting 18 to 20 points and we have to trust those guys.”

“We’re trying to do different things,” Stuckey said. “We’re trying to play a zone. The young guys, they bring a lot of energy. We’re just trying to change up some things and hopefully it will work.”

Lost in absorbing the shock of seeing Gordon go down was the continued solid work of Jerebko defensively, who spent much of his 30 minutes guarding LeBron James. James finished with 34, but James did a solid job keeping James in front of him and making him shoot jump shots.

Ten of his points came in the first 9:22 of the game, but Jerebko could hardly be faulted for much of that. He turned his head once and got beat for a back-door layup, but LeBron’s first four points came in transition off of a forced Pistons shot and a turnover. His third basket came on a 22-footer from the wing and his fourth came when Jerebko cut off the baseline and forced LeBron into a difficult turnaround jumper.

In the fourth quarter, he again forced him into jump shots, missing three long ones sandwiched around a down-the-middle dunk in which James picked up his dribble at the top of the circle and appeared to take four steps to the basket.