The Detroit Pistons needed a hefty dose of motivation from their head coach during halftime of their game two battle with the Orlando Magic on Wednesday night
When the Detroit Pistons entered game two against the Orlando Magic already with an 0-1 disadvantage in their first round series, the stakes felt remarkably high for a squad that hasn’t won a playoff game at home since 2008.
But on Wednesday night, the Eastern Conference’s top team bounced back with an emphatic 98-83 victory over the Orlando Magic, a win that had a slow build with a 46-46 tie at halftime before the Pistons pulled away in the second half.
After the Pistons started the postseason slow with a loss on Sunday, Detroit head coach J.B. Bickerstaff was not happy that the team was still tied with the Magic after two quarters of game two. That’s when Bickerstaff lit a match under the Pistons to help the Motor City group climb back onto even footing with the Magic.
“He really got on us in the locker room,” Pistons forward Tobias Harris said of Bickerstaff’s halftime speech. “ There is no more my bads. It’s like, they’re out there hustling, getting offensive boards on us, and there’s too many of them. For us as a group, we know that’s not our standard, so he was on us, but we obviously felt it as a group of we need to be better for each other.”
In game one, the Magic held a distinct edge on the boards and in terms of paint scoring, and Bickerstaff was unhappy that game two was trending in a similar direction at the midway break. But after the passionate halftime meeting, the Pistons were able to jump in front with a dominant 30-3 run to open the third quarter and Detroit never looked back.
“JB had some words in the locker room,” Pistons big man Isaiah Stewart said. “I think that lit a fire into us to press even more and just separate ourselves. He does a great job at doing that. He knows to say the right things to get us going. He don’t want to hear no more my bads. He don’t want to hear no more mistakes. He don’t want to hear any of that, so just go out there and do your job to the best of your ability, and that’s what we focused on in the second half.”
Bickerstaff has preached accountability as a core tenant for the Pistons all season long, and he challenged Detroit to come out in the second half prepared to fight for their first win at home in nearly two decades. After the game, the Detroit coach deflected the credit for his team’s 15-point win away from his halftime speech and more towards the defensive tenacity that the Pistons displayed in the third quarter, but it’s clear that the intermission of game two sparked a distinct change on the court.
“We’ll keep that to ourselves, but we just played defense,” Bickerstaff said. “It’s that simple. When we play defense at the level we’re capable of, it triggers everything for us. We can be an elite defensive team, a disruptive team that pushes and gets us transition easy baskets, and that’s what we did.”
The Pistons blocked seven shots in the first quarter to set the tone early on in front of the Little Caesars Arena crowd, and Cade Cunningham did his best to generate some offense with 15 points in the first half. Cunningham finished the Eastern Conference playoff battle with 27 points, 11 assists and six rebounds on the night in a strong follow-up to his 39-point outburst in game one of the series, but the All-Star would surely favor the outcome of his most recent performance.
Outside of Cunningham's strong showing, Harris had a key veteran performance in the postseason with 16 points and 11 rebounds in game two, picking up a little bit of the slack for Jalen Duren as the All-Star center struggled to match his usual production with 11 points and nine rebounds.
With last night’s win under their belt, the Pistons are now 1-1 against the Magic with the series moving back to Orlando for a pair of games. The next installment in the series will be on Saturday, April 25 at 1 pm.
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