Written by joehullbert at The Lottery Mafia
So far, it appears Stan Van Gundy has the Detroit Pistons primed for a playoff push.
I am not a guy who likes to blow my own trumpet, but I was high on the Detroit Pistons coming into the year. Stan Van Gundy made a brave decision to offload Josh Smith in the middle of last year and he let the offensive guru Greg Monroe leave in free agency. Both were moves that freed up space for Stan to build his famed ‘four out one in’ type of roster. They may well cool off, but for now it is abundantly obvious that they are one of the better teams in the Eastern Conference.
This team is built defensively around Andre Drummond and he has been truly monstrous so far as he is averaging 19 rebounds per game. This number will go down, but Drummond has stepped into the role of being the most monstrous defensive center in the NBA. The team has a defensive rating of 85.7 when he is on the floor and he can make up for the defensive deficiencies of the stretch fours in the system such as Ersan Ilyasova and Marcus Morris. Van Gundy is a hard coach and without even using analytics you can see this team looks more motivated and more assured on the defensive end of the court without Greg Monroe who is frankly a defensive liability.
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