00:00Carson Anderson, hello and good morning. Happy Monday. A Monday following a Piston first round playoff win. How about that?
00:09Staving phase three successful as the Pistons come all the way back from 3-1 down with a stave, a
00:18stave, and a stave and a knockout blow to the Orlando Magic.
00:23Scott Anderson, how'd that make you feel?
00:26Ah, great. I was so jacked up watching it last night. It was just fantastic to see them trail after
00:39one quarter, but only by two points, but then start to kind of impose their will a little bit and
00:46get a great halftime lead of 11 points or whatever it was, 11 or 12 points, and then add to
00:51that in the third quarter.
00:54Never really having it come into doubt. The Magic, they were done. They were spent. They were demoralized after what
01:03happened on Friday night. They did their best in the first quarter of game seven, and then that was it.
01:09They were kaput. That's amazing.
01:12There are so many things about this series that are really, truly amazing, but I did some of my own
01:19research, Doug, over the weekend.
01:21Did you?
01:22I did. I yelled into Google and my phone, and it spit out these numbers.
01:26I was curious what the lowest point total in a single quarter in NBA playoff history was, and the answer
01:34is seven, and one team, I think one or two teams had it eight, and then there was like a
01:41nine, and then it jumped up to 11.
01:42But these are the lowest point totals in a quarter in NBA playoff history.
01:47The Pistons gave up eight points in the fourth quarter of that game on Friday night. Eight. The Magic made
01:56one basket in the fourth quarter.
02:00They went 0 for 23 at a stretch. That's a record. The one basket made. That's a record.
02:07The eight points in the quarter is off by one point. Also interesting of note that the third quarter, they
02:14held them to 11 points, which now ranks like fourth in NBA history.
02:19That second half performance is one for the ages, and it's hard to believe what happened in that game. It
02:28really is.
02:28Being down by 22 at half, being down by 24 overall at one point, and battling back the way that
02:34they did, where they just didn't give up.
02:37Yeah, I heard them talking in the morning and driving in about, you know, Jim's takeaway is that they're hard
02:42to kill. It's just a team that's hard to kill. Yes, they are.
02:46And, you know, I've said for years that, look, the NBA, it's a game of runs, and if you're up
02:51by 20, it depends when you're up by 20.
02:53If you're up by 20 in the first half, you can overcome that because it happens all the time.
02:57I wouldn't have expected it in game six, you know, of a game where you can knock out your opponent
03:03and do it in front of your hometown fans to advance to the second round.
03:06I didn't expect the Pistons to come back, and yet they did, and so when game seven came around, I
03:13was fully chesty about game seven.
03:16I just thought, this is it. They've got them.
03:18They totally sucked their soul from them on Friday night with that effort, and I know that the Pistons can
03:25duplicate that.
03:26What I was also pretty damn sure was that Orlando could not duplicate what they did in the first half,
03:31and that's what they needed to do to have a chance to beat the Pistons in game seven.
03:36So last week, I talked quite a bit about teams have to eventually show championship DNA.
03:46You have to eventually prove your playoff brawn, your playoff resilience.
03:53There's a toughness that you have to showcase, and the Pistons were as backs against the wall as you can
04:03really be, and found a way.
04:06They found a way, and they figured it out in terms of just showing that they can do it in
04:14the postseason.
04:15They showed it to the basketball world, but more importantly, they probably showed it to themselves, right?
04:20They'll say all the things that I heard at some of the postgame stuff.
04:23We never had a doubt. We always thought we could win.
04:26But when you're down three to one, obviously, your margin for error is reduced to nothing, and you can't have
04:33a bad night.
04:34You can't afford slip-ups.
04:41The fact of the matter is, they showed that championship DNA, and now they got something in their back pocket
04:51that they can count on,
04:54and that is, we know we can do this.
04:56We know we can do it in these kinds of high-stakes games where the premium is at its highest.
05:04There's nothing bigger than you lose your seasons over, and they did it three times.
05:08Yeah, I think when you go back, and the funny thing is that there's no time to really dissect the
05:14series
05:14because, hey, guess what comes up Tuesday night?
05:16They're taking on the other team that they had to play in the game seven.
05:19That's Cleveland.
05:20But I think when we go back and look at it, I think one of the things I understand about
05:24this series
05:25and why I was kind of calm about this, I kept telling myself and telling our listeners
05:32that we haven't seen the Pistons play their game yet.
05:35And I don't think that Orlando is necessarily doing something that completely restricts them from getting there.
05:43But even if Jalen Duren wasn't going to be 20-10 Jalen Duren,
05:47they found other ways during the season to win games with different combinations of people,
05:51and they just needed to play better offensively.
05:54The Pistons throughout this series had so much more room to play better offensively
05:59that I thought, okay, it's going to click at some point.
06:02And then it did when they were down three games to one.
06:05In the second half of game six, it really kind of clicked in there.
06:10But they just battled back.
06:12They kept battling back.
06:13And you knew the defensive effort could always be there.
06:18They can always dial it up a little bit more.
06:21And they were able to maintain that extraordinarily high level of defensive play
06:27and finally get just average offense.
06:30It wasn't spectacular offensively.
06:33It was average.
06:34You've got a superstar that needed to be a superstar.
06:36Well, guess what?
06:37Cade averaged 32 points a game in the series to go with seven assists.
06:41But he didn't have his first – I don't think he had a double-double until the last game.
06:47This was a team that just needed to – water needed to find its level.
06:50Tobias Harris ended up being that number two everyone was clamoring for.
06:53Who's going to be number two?
06:54Hello, this guy over here who never went back-to-back games with 20 points in the season
06:59but went five straight with 20 points, including 30 in game seven,
07:04and averaged almost 22 a game.
07:06And then you got in game seven,
07:08this was the Piston team we saw throughout the 82-game season
07:11because Duren shows up with his first double-double with the 15 and 15.
07:16Danis Jenkins pours 16 points coming off the bench,
07:19and that's the Danis Jenkins that we all saw over the last couple months of the season
07:24knocking down some big-time shots, and the defense was always there.
07:27There's a lot to love about the way this Piston team came back,
07:30and there's still a lot to prove.
07:32Like, you know, this isn't a punch-button second-round series.
07:37Maybe Cleveland thinks so.
07:39Remember, Detroit is not in their class.
07:41A quote, an unattributed quote that came, and it hasn't been denied,
07:47but it was a Cleveland writer that wrote that story back in, I think it was early March,
07:52where Cleveland played Detroit, and in the postgame,
07:54some Cleveland player was overheard and quoted as saying,
07:57Detroit is not in our class.
08:00And there's also speculation that Cleveland manipulated the end of the season
08:05to make sure that they got the Pistons in round two,
08:07that they wanted the Pistons in round two.
08:10Well, they almost didn't make it to round two.
08:13That's the thought bubble over the Cleveland bench that is,
08:17I think, looms large for the Pistons is, hey, they wanted you.
08:21They don't think you're in their class.
08:24What do you, you know, what do you bring into the table?
08:28What does that do for Detroit, I guess is the question I want to get into,
08:33is that stuff even matter.
08:35But your overall thoughts.
08:37Now, there's something else.
08:39There's narratives that get put out there during a series when it's 3-1.
08:45And there are, you start to have beliefs about what went wrong, okay?
08:50And we all, in our minds, trying to figure out what went wrong.
08:53How did they get down 3-1?
08:56Whether you explicitly posted on social media, told your friends,
09:02called this radio station, sent a text.
09:06Who gets the my bad today?
09:08Who from the Pistons?
09:10There's a lot of options here.
09:11Yeah, that's right.
09:12Of people that change the narrative.
09:14And, you know, we always talk about the long-term versus the short-term.
09:20The long-term results help create more accurate long-term predictions and conclusions.
09:26The short-term results can lead to some wild stuff.
09:30Like the call we got last week.
09:35Cade doesn't have that dog in him, was the call.
09:38He doesn't have what it takes, was the call that we got.
09:42And we got texts last week about that.
09:45I suspect that those people would have their my bad for Cade.
09:50So who in your mind do you kind of owe a my bad to?
09:54Whether you said it out loud or not,
09:55you started to believe that maybe this guy wasn't good enough
09:59to at least get them out of this series.
10:01Because there's a lot of options on this Piston team
10:03of people who were being called out last week.
10:06And they changed the narrative, which is great.
10:08And look, this is not I told you so.
10:10This is deep inside.
10:11You feel better about blank.
10:14Whatever it is with the Pistons.
10:16Well, there certainly are a number of candidates you can choose from.
10:19And there's one in particular that storms to the top of the list for me.
10:26And I'm looking forward to revealing that.
10:29Yes.
10:29We will get to that.
10:302, 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 97, 97.
10:33Mondays, of course, mean champ and chump.
10:35Get your champ and chump at a weekend in.
10:37Who should be singled out for having the best weekend.
10:39Who should be called out for having a weekend that stinks.
10:41We call it champ and chump.
10:42And we do it every Monday.
10:43And there's lots to choose from.
10:44I have to admit, little struggle a little bit with the chump.
10:47But locked in on somebody.
10:48Who's your champ?
10:50Who's your chump?
10:512, 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 97, 97.
10:53We tally up the votes and post on our website on Tuesday who the people select as champ and chump
10:58of the weekend.
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