If there's one word that basketball fans in Detroit hate to hear, it's "complacent." That's the label, fairly or not, applied to the Pistons whenever they lose yet again in the Conference Finals. Personally, I hate the label -- teams lose in the playoffs before they're not good enough, not because they don't "want it" enough -- but if Joe Dumars is using it, who am I to argue?
We spent a portion of this summer speaking about complacency and when you come in and make your practices intense and competitive, that's a part of getting your team out of that. You can't just wait until games to say, OK, we're going to be intense and competitive. Mike [Curry] and I spent the whole summer talking about this. You can't come in and have practices totally opposite of how you're going to play the game. There has to be some carryover there.How has Michael Curry made his practices more intense? For one, by insisting that every drill has a winner and a loser. Instead of putting his players through the paces of a mere shooting drill, he pits half the team against the other. Players don't always like to practice, but they never like to lose, and Curry hopes that sense of competition will help keep his team mentally sharp.
"It's a long season, and what you want is to develop an edge that carries you through the season," Curry explained before Thursday's preseason finale. "I feel that competing in these drills help develop that edge." Does it work? Amir Johnson thinks it does. "Yeah, it does. It's just more intense, more cutthroat," he said. "We go hard in practice."
In addition to maintaining intensity in practice, Curry is instilling more accountability during games by using a grading system (on a scale of zero to 100) that rates each player's performance.
He explains: "I think the grading system is to make sure that everyone is on the same page in which you're trying to do out there on the court. And because everyone knows what everyone is doing, when someone messes up you don't have to look around to figure out how you're going to correct that mistake.
"It helps you as a staff to hold everybody accountable," Curry continued. "When something causes us a problem [and] we're grading out well, it's much easier to change what we're doing coverage-wise, instead of changing [coverages] just because one or two guys don't think that it's something that's good to be doing at that time."
