Weekly Treat — New Attitude With Pistons

I remember watching the Detroit Pistons back before they booked their tickets to the Eastern Conference finals in September. The teal jersey, Don Chaney and Oliver Miller eras all still are burned into my memory. Back in those days, there was one guy who always hung around in Detroit and cracked the starting lineup, despite the fact that he put the “offensive” in offensive skills.

Michael Curry was not the kind of player you paid to go see on a $99 family Friday night special. From 2000-03, Curry started 210 of 246 games for the Pistons while averaging no more than 5.2 points per game.

Even Ben Wallace was a better scorer.

Curry cracked the starting lineup each year for two reasons: He helped the team to a pair of Central Division titles and he could make the greatest scorers look mortal. When you don’t score or block shots into the upper deck, you’re pretty low on the fan favorite poll. There are plenty of people who thought Michael Curry would be better served scrubbing the hardwood rather than playing on it.

But Curry has something that few players have — toughness. Curry, the first-year head coach of the Detroit Pistons, will bring that same attitude that kept him on the floor as he tries to get the Pistons up off of it. In almost no other organization are six straight conference championship appearances considered a failure, but there’s an attitude change that needed to be made with a languishing core of players in Auburn Hills.

Curry has promised to ratchet up the defensive intensity to what it once was in Detroit. There was a time immediately following the acquisition of mercurial forward Rasheed Wallace when the Pistons had the most dominant defense I had ever seen in my short history of watching the NBA (my more basketball-astute dad assures me no other team has been as tenacious as that 2004 group). At one point, the Pistons held opponents to less than 70 points in five straight games during the tail end of that season. No other team had done that in more than two games.

Each year, as I’ve watched the Pistons struggle against teams with superstars in the conference finals, I’ve asked why they can’t return to the same intensity as in 2004. The core group of defenders is essentially the same, with the exception of Ben Wallace and Mike James, yet the hustle hasn’t been there.

If there’s one person who knows about hustle, it’s Curry. Detractors will question his X’s and O’s knowledge, but there’s a new sheriff in town who is preaching full-court defense and conditioning, two things that former head coach Flip Saunders wasn’t too fond of. There’s no way this year’s Pistons will loaf like the teams of the immediate past.

If they do, maybe Curry could throw on a pair of shorts and show the young guys how he used to do play defense — with toughness, attitude and hustle.