Driving to the Basket: A Detroit Pistons Podcast - Episode 126: Recent Developments

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

This episode explains the podcast's recent hiatus, criticizes Dwane Casey, and discusses whether or not Bojan Bogdanovic should be traded.

Welcome back, everybody. You're listening to Driving to the Basket, part of the Basketball Podcast Network. I am Mike, your host. I'm back from what I suppose amounts to a pretty lengthy hiatus by my standards. I want to explain myself a little bit in that capacity because I've always prided myself on keeping new a consistent schedule. I really, really appreciate you folks as listeners and just want to be regular with the show. So I believe I've recorded, excuse me, I've posted an episode only once in the last five.

weeks. I've actually recorded twice in the past five weeks. First absence was because I set the episode to draft. Generally, I'll record the episode on Monday or Tuesday night and then set it to draft, excuse me, set it to post in the early hours of the next morning on Wednesday morning, so not the next morning, but Wednesday morning, which is when I always post. And in that instance, I set it to draft rather than setting it to post. I didn't realize that until I went to post the next episode a week later. So missed that. week. Didn't feel too bad about it because I really wasn't satisfied with the episode. But then the next week, I recorded with Jack Kelly. Always a great time to record with Jack.

Week after that, I actually had the pleasure again of sitting foreside of Pistons versus Nuggets. I live in Denver. It's not because I'm special at all. It's because my friend, excuse me, my cousin has a friend who has four side steeds for them through his company. He wasn't able to go to this game. He called my cousin and said, hey, do you want the tickets? And of course, he said, well, yeah. So that was a cool experience. I got the sit court side for a similar reason for half last season at the ball arena. So that night I was like, okay, well, you know, I want to get back and be able to talk about that on the show. Then I fell asleep in the couch. And maybe one of my failings that if I don't post on Wednesday, I would probably think, okay, I'll just do this next week

instead of, you know, posting a day or two later, which is kind of silly. It's, I can get a little bit rigid in my head like that. And the next week, move on. And I'm leaving for, I'm like, okay, I'll record an episode before I go out of town for Thanksgiving. And I left way too much stuff to the last minute by the time I was going to sit down and record. It would probably be about 1130 at night. Didn't get to that. Next week, I wasn't home on, you know, until Wednesday night. And then I don't even remember what happened last week. But I'm going to get, do my best, absolute best to get back to posting on a regular schedule. That said, these weren't the only reasons why I didn't post or that I've been inconsistent way.

Well, not so much inconsist and I haven't posted in three weeks. So one is that, to be completely honest, this season has not brought with it the joy that watching Pistons basketball typically does for me. Some of that may be because my expectations for the season were pretty much shattered when Cade became injured. I mean, that sucks for everybody. I mean, I know all of us were looking forward to seeing what he was going to look like in his sophomore year. And in the event, I believe we've got 19 games. He really didn't look like himself

for much of that period, which makes sense. He was playing with the stress fracture and one of his legs, a tibial stress fracture. So that sucks. Things have been sort of a mess. Maybe I'm getting a little bit tired of the Pistons being kind of a bottom feeder team. I really didn't mind that the last three seasons. In 2019, 2020, like, you know, Blake Griffin had his thing. He came back. But from injury, he looked really bad. And then he kind of settled on to, I believe, have surgery again. He missed the rest of the season. Reggie Jackson was out from the very beginning of the season.

This was back when the Pistons were a treadmill team. But, you know, I'd always look forward to the season going into it anyway. It's like the Pistons will go in and do their best. And, excuse me. And at that point, there was no, you know, it was unthinkable that the Pistons would rebuild. But eventually, like, it became clear that things were not going to work out. And even Tom Gores, it did come to realize that they dumped Drummond, which was for me a great day.

I was glad to see him go. And it just became very clear that the pistons were pivoting to a total rebuild. It's like, awesome. You know, now we're going for draft position. And so lose every game, you know. And so then, you know, I was perfectly content with the losses. I mean, that was not a development roster. But, you know, it's like we've got to get good talent on this team and you're going to get that through the draft.

So, of course, that season got cut short due to COVID. and we didn't get to watch the Pistons for like nine, I was eight months, I believe. It was an incredibly long offseason. We came into the 2020 draft. There's a lot of excitement around that. And then COVID season where the roster, excuse me,

they hired Troy Weaver in the interim in that offseason. And then we had the COVID season in which, you know, gradually more and more emphasis was given to the young players as the veterans were sent to other teams. Derek Rose got traded. And Blake Griffin was bought out. I mean, those are both huge things. and the team was more and more on the road to a total youth movement.

You know, really, really once you saw Griffin brought out, I feel like we all knew that, you know, okay, you know, we're 100% of this now. And absolutely, it was a fan of the Pistons losing during that season. It was all about that, you know, you want to get that high pick in a super strong draft. You get Kate Cunningham. Fantastic. There was some excitement there. Absolutely, like, just, you know, to say the least, some excitement.

And last season things don't really start out of his plan. Last season was pretty ugly. You know, whatever you need to find that second guy. You're almost certainly going to find him in the Drafoos games. And there was some fun stuff last year. You know, watching K, for example, was great. And, you know, there was some feel-good moments like that that went against the spurs on the year's day. I mean, Sadiq Bay had a pretty good three quarters of the season after that first really difficult quarter of the season.

And stuff isn't coming to mind right now. But again, you know, it's like it's development. cool. And then we get to this season and maybe I'm getting a little bit tired of it. And I just think that my expectations are very disappointed. I did not expect the business to be a winning team. But I expected, do you know what? We'll come in.

We'll see some solid development from the youth. And, you know, yeah, Kate happens. Other players have struggled. And I still got to put up with Dwayne Casey's coaching. I will never, I mean, you guys know my opinion on Dwayne Casey. I think he's a pretty poor. coach on the offensive side of things. His rotations kind of suck too. It's not as big of an issue to me. But it's really frustrating for me to watch him coach on offense. And that's both because, again,

in my opinion, he is a very below average NBA coach. I don't think Dwayne Casey is an idiot. I think he is just by the standards of NBA coaches, all of whom are pretty talented. You've got to be talented as a coach to coach in the NBA. But by the standards of NBA coaches, I think Dwayne Casey is not gifted at all as an offensive coach. And I think he has proven that since, you know, well before he was fired by the Raptors. This is just an issue that he has. He is unimaginative. He is rigid. He's gotten better with analytics back during its time at the Raptors. He was terrible. And basically he can run a successful offense only if he has like multiple all-star level isolation players who can just create something out of nothing. And in basically an

inevitable facet of any offense that he's running is going to be like, okay, I've got this go-to veteran, I got whoever, I'm going to give you the ball and I want, you know, a big portion of my offense is just me me giving you the ball and saying, please create something. You know, it with Tarosan and Lowry in Toronto. You know, he did it with Blake Griffin's first season with the Pistons. But granted, those Pistons did not have a ton of talent. But just so much of his offense depended upon here Blake take the ball and just score with it, please, or we're going to lose, which is more or less the case. I mean, the Pistons had a short, stretch during that season and much Griffin

because his, you know, come the fourth quarter of that season, his knee had really started to act up and he wasn't playing quite as well in the Pistons had a stretch in which like Roger Jackson and Langston Galilee and Langston Galloway and M. Lucanard were just shooting ludicrous percentages

from three. The Pistons were playing against a bunch of bad teams and they won a bunch of games. And it's like, yeah, in that stretch you don't need Blake Griffin to play quite as well, but you've got unsustainable shooting plus an incredibly easy schedule. Things are going to happen. You know, you're likely to win games. But I digress.

It was Jeremy Grant when he was here, like pretty much his last half, excuse me, one-third or one-quarter of a season. Apparently, you had Troy Weaver. Well, he said, I think. It was Troy Weaver, maybe it was Weaver himself that he spoke to Jeremy Grant and said, okay, I'd like you to be more efficient. It's like, dude, this is something your coach should be telling you. But Dwayne Casey, if he has his go-to veterans, is just going to feed them the ball and say, please score with it. He's a guy who runs.

but I think putting it kindly is a highly simplistic offense who constantly loses control of games down the stretch and resorts to awfulize her ball. And it's just frustrating to watch him coach. And it's frustrating not just because he's a poor coach, but because at this point as Pistons fans, this is our ninth straight season. Well, actually, maybe beyond that,

for me as a Pistons fan, having come back to this team in the 2014-2015 season, this is my ninth straight season of watching bad coaching. in my opinion, Stan Van Gundy at his best. He maybe had a year as kind of like a mediocre coach. Call it two years as a mediocre coach. Who had issues and was going to inevitably put a ceiling in his team. And then two years is an awful coach.

Dwayne Casey has never been anywhere near that bad. I mean, Stan Van Gundy in his last two seasons was one of the worst coaches I've ever seen in any sport. But he was certainly not gifted even before that. You know, you look back to, sure, you might look back to his days with the heat and the magic and say he was an effective coach, and I would say, yes, that's true. By the time, however, he came to the Pistons, and especially as, the team, excuse me, is the NBA transition, which it did after really his first season into the spacing and efficiency era. I mean, he was completely unable to keep up and all of his faults

that came very much to the FOIA. It was just awful. So I've always said it. I mean, I have a much easier time. Like a bad team, and you can expect that the business are going to be bad, in my opinion, this year. Expect that they were going to be a bad last year. You can expect that they were going to be bad the year before that. And that was sort of the point. You know, develop your young guys and be a bad team, get good draft lottery position. it's possible to both have, you know, I feel like I should, I should note this that, you know, it's completely possible to both have a bad roster and have a poor coach, you know, a coach who's coaching that bad roster and is just also not very good at coaching. And that's where

we are, I believe, with Wayne Casey. And does it matter if the Pistons win games at this point? Again, no, I would have been shocked if they had made it to the plan. I was not going to be surprised by bottom three finish. But it's just so frustrating to me to watch, you know, a coach the likes of kids. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's like I was going to say the likes of Casey, by which I mean a coach who's as bad as coaching offense as he is. It's very frustrating to me. I've ranted about this for a little while already.

But that is another reason why this season has been very frustrating to me, because I'm really just tired of it. And that's unusual for me. I usually don't let emotion come into things when it's whatever. I wouldn't put it that way. Obviously, I do let emotion come into things. But I try not to get, you know, it's unusual for me to cross. cross that line where it's just like, I would say, like, I don't mind if Dwayne Gacy gets fired.

This is not the same as me thinking. I want Dwayne Casey fire. The part of me is like that. It wouldn't make any sense to fire Casey this season, but I've got bad coaching fatigue. Now, I know I've been talking about myself for about 10 minutes here, and you listen to the show to hear me talk basketball, for which I'm very grateful. And so I'll just get to one last point. And, you know, the last quick point, rather, which is that it's grow more difficult to do this show is a solo podcast. It's been about seven months since it became a solo podcast since Tommy left the show. Dante left the show about three months before that. I really enjoyed running this show with other people. And for the very vast majority of the show's life, it has been a podcast

with multiple co-hosts. And just not having somebody with with whom to kind of collaboratively come up with content, somebody who's really helping to do. you know, the work on the show as well. And I just like working with people. I mean, that's just another thing. And so I, and I've never really been satisfied with the quality of my solo episodes beyond like maybe one or two of them. And maybe that's just me being, uh, hard on myself. Who knows? But I'm kind of at the point, or I'm definitely at the point in which I'm going to start looking forward for another co-os for the show because I'd really just enjoy doing this. And I have enjoyed, it's not that I don't enjoy doing it.

But on my own, I just enjoy doing it a lot more when I do have a co-host to do the show with. So all that said, let's move on to basketball, though I know I've been talking about basketball already and just harshly criticizing Dwayne Casey. Though that really fit into why it's been, you know, the whole why it's been tough for me to watch the piss and so far segment. So I'm just going to talk some subjects here in really in no particular order. this is definitely maybe on the shorter side as far as episodes go. And man, here's another thing. Talking straight for like 45 minutes to an hour is a little bit tough on the lungs. I don't like the sound of my own voice that much.

But let's talk Boyan. Boyan Bogdanovich, who I'd say is far and away been the Pistons' best player this season. Like far in away, in my opinion. When he came in, I thought, I said on, I recorded an episode, I believe that was a Jack Ellie as well. we talked about, you know, what is Boyon going to look like for the Pistons? And I said, well, he's a good player. I wouldn't expect that he's going to be like 20 points per game, Boyon, with the Pistons,

because they're a very different team, and he's going to have a lot more responsibility. I was completely wrong about that at least so far. I mean, Boyon, if you hear me typing, it's just so I can have his stats out in front of me. I mean, I could tell even without looking at his stats. He's scoring a lot of points on incredible efficiency, especially given his role in the offense. But here we've got the exact numbers. 21 points per game, 51% from the field, 44% from 3.

He's tempting five free throws per game. As one of the better free throw shooters in the league, it's a little bit above 89%. As true shooting percentage, like where we add 66%. You're creating that much and you're scoring that many points and you're doing so, I guess, a perimeter player on 66% true shooting. That is fantastic. On defense, he has his struggles. Whatever.

I mean, this guy is basically the difference between the pistons being kind of like a pretty below average offense and being an absolutely terrible offense. And he is one of those guys, Dwayne Geese, needs to function. It's like, you know, Boyan here, I'll give you the ball and please create something with it. And Boyan can do that. I mean, he's shooting well from, you know, pretty much everywhere. Like, is his field goal percentage you'll look at it? 49% from 3 to 10 feet.

50s, like about 55% from 10 to 16, 10 to 16. feet, so mid-range, 50% from 16 to three-point range. I mean, yeah, I'm reading off basketball references, you can tell, but, you know, 44% from three, something like 70% restricted. It's just, it's just amazing. I mean, the guy's just having an incredible offensive season. So, you know, if the Pist, if he plays well, like, the Pistons have won one game. I mean, I know the Pistons have not, if not, like, won many games, period, seven of them, to be exact, in the first 29 games. But there has only been one game in which he has not played well, and the Pistons won. That was against the Thunder, and that was because aside from Shea Gilgis Alexander,

I pronounced the name, right? Excellent on the first try, Shea. They had like two other guys in the team who didn't shoot terribly. I believe that was Mike Muscala, and I don't remember the other one. Suffice it to say that Thunder were not a good team in the first place, were terrible in the field. So the Pistons didn't need Boyan to play well. beyond that, he has had to have good games in order for them to win. Of late, also, you know, especially with Kate out, Alec Berks, has generally had to have good games in order for the Pistons to win. Not that they have won many games.

Again, I know I said that, and you guys all know it in the first place. So, Boyanah has been great. I'm a little conflicted occasionally, looking and seeing, okay, the Pistons are really winning, when they're winning games, they're doing so largely in the back of a player who definitely doesn't fit the timeline. I mean, Blayon is going to be 34 in about three months. So player doesn't fit the timeline. I mean, he's definitely the guy who depends on his athleticism. And I think that he'll be in the NBA for years to come, though he's already definitely a big defensive liability in the playoffs. He's a guy you can target in isolation and you stand a good shot of beating him.

but at this point still a very effective regular season player. Now, the question comes along like there's been talking to, I'm sure that, like, there's been speculation around this since he came out of the team. Like, okay, yeah, he's probably not going to be on the team past the deadline unless the Pistons are a good team. That was my opinion when the Pistons traded for him. And it's like, okay, you know, he's an effective score. He has his issues on defense in the playoffs, but teams might want him for the rest of the

regular season and, you know, maybe bring him off the bench in the playoffs. and, you know, you find good use for them. Like on defense in the playoffs, if you are a defensive liability, I mean, teams in the playoffs will ruthlessly target at really any weak as they can on either end in a way that they won't in a regular season. So if you're a liability on defense, you will be attacked and you will be attacked regularly. The other team has good ISO players that can unhinge your entire defense.

Boyam was one of the reasons why the jazz struggled so much in the playoffs the last two seasons on defense. But, like, it comes at this point, like we hear that there's significant trade interest. And I guess where I'm getting to in the segment is do you trade boy on Bogdanovich? Like you can probably, you know, get a first round pick of some ilk for him. Like, maybe a not so good prospect. Like, who knows? I would expect the pistons.

I'd feel, I'd be shocked if the pistons were not asking, you know, at least one first round pick. But not all first round picks are graded equal, of course. Like a first round pick in a 25 to 30 range. I mean, that's basically second round pick. You're happy to get a solid role player at that point. I mean, very good players have been found in that range, but your chances are very, very low. So of getting like a really good player.

You know, you can get like a solid starter at that range. But again, your odds are not high. Now, if you want to ask my opinion about it, and presumably you want my opinion, since you're listening to be talking about basketball, you've tuned in in this podcast episode. And I'm, if, you know, I would have like three months ago been surprised. I think it was traded for, yeah, about three months ago.

I think it was in September. Yeah, late September. So two and a half months I would have been surprised to hear myself say this. Would I trade Boyon for anything less than like a pretty darn good package? I don't think I would because you trade away Boyon. And like last season it would have been like, okay, you know, make the Pistons even worse. I mean, the Pistons are going to be bad no matter what.

But he's basically, you've got a bunch of young players around him for the most part. It's like he and Alec Berks, I believe, are the only veterans getting at a large share in the offense. I mean, Corey Joseph is out there. Man, am I forgetting somebody? I don't think I am. Yeah, so, yeah, I went and looked at the roster, even though I was fairly certain about this. I mean, Corey Joseph is playing a very small minute.

So, yeah, it's Alec Berks and Boyon. And Boyan is just playing such an enormous role in Boeing. And playing, whatever, you know what I'm trying to say, and holding up the offense and making it not be completely terrible. He's got a bunch of young players around him. You take this guy out of the offense. You don't have catered around for the rest of the season. You're going to see the offense.

turn incredibly ugly in a way that I don't think is good for the development of the young players. So if the Pistons get an offer that it makes absolutely no sense for them to refuse, then of course, you know, in that situation, you trade him away. You're probably going to be bad even with him around, but you'll be even worse without him. And that helps you to get very good watery odds in, well, the Pistons, I think we'll have very good lottery odds either way, but helps you to get good watery odds, a better chance at very high watery odds in a, God, I can't believe I just said watery odds three times. second, sorry about that, in a very, very strong draft, especially in the top two. So I know that you only

have like a 14% chance at, yeah, definitely very close to 14% shot at number one overall pick, even if you are one of the three worst teams in the league. But the worse you are, the less you can fall, basically, if you're the worst team in the league. Fifth is the worst that you can get. And you definitely want those top three odds. In any case, I'm not telling anything to Pistons fans that you guys don't already know, having, you know, lived through the last three draft wateries. So, yeah, so if the Pistons don't get that offer, then I would keep him around just because, yeah, you take him away and then suddenly everything is a mess. And I just don't think that is good for the developments of Jaden Ivy or any, you know, or, you can't say Sadiq Bay or Isaiah Stewart, Killian Hayes, Marvin Bagley, whatever, any of these guys, when your offense becomes that bad. And again, part of this comes back to Casey in that he will invariably get less than the sum of his parts on offense, invariably.

And he needs Boyon in order for the Pistons to avoid becoming a complete disaster. And they'd be bad without Boyon. They're bad with him. Though since Cabe went down, I think they've been hovering around 20th, maybe a little bit higher than that. So would I trade him at this point? Unless the Pistons get a great offer. And we're two months ahead of the trade deadline. There's a lot of chatter about the trade deadline for being so far away.

away from it. But at this point, get a great offer. Yes, if not, no. But, you know, all kudos to Boyon, who at the age of 34 is having the best season of his life while taking on the most offensive responsibility he really ever has. So, yeah, that's where I'd go with Boyon. Of course, hopefully the Pistons are on the plan next year. Hopefully the Pistons are a real playoff team the year after that and hopefully a contender the year after that. And if you're a contender three years down the line. You have a 37-year-old boy on Bogdanovich, and I don't think he's going to be quite that useful at that point. So you're basically just keeping Iran for the sake of development, and I think that's a solid reason. Now, a quick work from our sponsor. The NBA season is heating up,

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Codd PPN, place a $5 pre-game money-line bet on bet on any NBA team to win their game and get $150 in free bets if they do. That's code TPPN, only a trafficking sportsbook minimum and major eligibility restrictions applies is shown up for details. And now we move on to candidate number two. It was Alec Berks, who has also been very good for the Pistons, the guy who's been able to create offense effectively off the bench. And he's been one of the better, I never liked the term sixth man. I feel like sixth man is a little bit outdated,

and that in the older days of the NBA, it was this guy who came off the bench and just shot on really high, you know, in high volume alongside the bench unit. No, in the older, older days of the NBA, it wasn't even necessarily that. Like Dennis Robben was six men for the bad point. pistons for a while, bad boys pistons for a while, excuse me. But, and I feel like these days the only guys you really have functioning in that role are guys like Jordan Clarkson and Tyler Harrow.

Jordan Clarkson, excuse me, and Tyler Harrow. But Alecbergs has kind of, has definitely been filling that role for the pistons. He comes off the bench, takes a bunch of shots and sinks them with a good degree of efficiency, all creating quite a bit of his own offense. Now, do you move him if you get a good offer? In that case, I would say yes, the Pistons. It'll be a worse offense with him, but I think that's fine. You lose what he gives. I mean, 13 and a half points per game on good efficiency. He has nothing to sneeze at, but I think that you can lose him and still be okay in a way that losing boy on you will not be okay.

And again, development, the season's all about development. I felt that in the very beginning that just like the, as was the case in the last two seasons, really the bell weather in terms of success, but the season was going to be development of youth. along those lines, I'll mention this. Okay, I settled this stuff going into the season about how Hamidu could be, you know, a real big factor for the business going forward if he learns to shoot and how he'd probably be out of the rotation after a couple months if he did not. Unfortunately, he did not.

This is not something that really disappoints me. I knew it was a long shot. It's a little disappointing because I feel like comedy could be really good if he could get that shot together, and that's really all that's holding him back from being, in my opinion, a pretty darn good score. You know, somebody who can score in the mid-to-high teens on good efficiency, but it didn't happen. And the likelihood of it happening, I felt was low and it didn't happen. He used out of the rotation.

So that's just kind of one really minor, minor disappointment. So all that said, move on to, oh, another subject, getting to sick courtside of the business game, which is a cool experience. Those of you were listening to the podcast last year, I think I talked about this on an episode, excuse me, earlier this year in February. It's just a cool experience. you really just get to see everything up close. And it's just a reminder of how all of these guys, the worst NBA player,

I know I've said this a lot in the podcast, the worst NBA player is like a great, great, great basketball player. And I feel like from up close, you get to see how small the margins are. I mean, if you're just a little bit too slow, you know, if you leave a gap of inches, somebody can score through it. and just the level of play is, I mean, it's really something else. I believe that the NBA is the most competitive professional sports week in the world in terms of the number of players in it and just how many minutes they play

and just how big individual impact can be. I feel like it's just the most competitive league in the world. And seeing it up close just really drives that home. I felt the exact same way when I got to see the Pistons play back in February, like from the same seats. So yeah, it's just a cool experience. Very grateful to have gotten to watch game from there. I was telling the family I went with, a couple of whom are big Detroit sports fans,

who lived in Michigan, same as I did. And, you know, then I had another one of my cousins. It's not really a big NBA fan, but he's like, man, I just want to really see Yokic. Do you think they're going to play him a lot. You know, I'm kind of concerned that it's going to be a blowout. And that they're just kind of sit him for the fourth quarter. And I said, no, I actually think the pistons will stay in it until, you know, until down the stretch, they'll probably completely fall apart because that's what Dwayne case he does. It just devolves in a really awful ice ball.

And again, like the pistons were really hanging with the nuggets into the third quarter. And, you know, my family from Michigan there who aren't quite as much keep up with the pistons as I do said, well, what do you think is going to happen? And I said, well, unfortunately, I think it's likely that the pistons will fall apart down the stretch. and they came very, very close to doing that. My personal least favorite possession was watching Corey Joseph just dribble the ball around for 15 seconds and then just try to ISO and fail. There was a lot of ISO ball throughout the entire game,

which for me was even more frustrating from up close. You know, in Dwayne Casey was about, I don't know, maybe like 20 feet away. And I caught a lot of crap for my brother. He's like, dude, you really criticize his coach a lot, but you won't, you know, he's so close by and he won't heckle him. And I'm like, dude, I don't want to risk getting thrown out. These are amazing seats. So, I mean, Michael Malone is no coaching myestro,

but just the difference, the difference in my opinion, you can see between their coaching is like, I don't know, like a pretty good chess player against a bad one. It's not like a chess master against a beginner chess player. Michael Malone is not a very good coach. I'm going to say, yeah, again, I'm talking about the standards of the NBA of NBA coaches. Michael, you know, Dwayne Gasey of bed.

a bad chess player. But man, you know, ball movements, it helps to have yokech, definitely. Obviously, you know, needless to say, I mean, arguably the best offensive player in the world. But they moved the ball and got a good open looks and the pistons did a lot of ISO. And again, very, very close to to blowing what I think was like a 12 point leave with eight minutes left because Casey would not run plays down the stretch. It just evolved into the same prep of like, I'm not going to run plays. And I just want you guys to create offense. And it's probably not going to work. But I'm going to do it anyway. And unfortunately, the Pistons were able to hold on.

I don't mind the wins. You know, my tune might change down the stretch of the season. When the Pistons, I'm quite certain they're going to be fighting for a draft lottery position. But that's still a significant way in the future. But, yeah, it was nonetheless, regardless of all of that, was a really cool experience. And then my last really, which is what's really going to be quite a truncated segment, is, because I plan on talking about him quite a bit more next episode, is Killian Ace. So I've been very, very glad to see Killian make substantial improvements over the last month or so.

He started to play quite a bit better around the time when Kay bowed out for the season. I don't think those two are necessarily related. Killian is playing with a lot more confidence, and he's also hitting his shots. So those are two huge things. Up until this point of his career, he had been consistently one of the absolute worst offensive players in the NBA. So he's been getting a lot of opportunity. He's been making much, much more of it than he had in the past. Do I think he's been playing really well?

Now, I'd say that at this point, Killian is, you know, I'm hoping that he's on his way to developing into a solid NBA point guard for a good team. And that's helpful. Do I think, you know, that, I think that there's a certain context that should be given to it. Like, we've seen tremendous improvement. however Killian started is one of the absolute worst players in the NBA.

And now he's getting close to somewhat becoming a decent NBA role player. He still has his issues on offense. And I'll talk about that in the next episode. But like, I know I've criticized Killian a lot, and I think that was Meriden. I've also said that I thought when he was coming into the league that his ceiling was in the lower end of the top 10 in terms of starting point guards. And I don't think that was a. a very good projection. I think he'll be closer to the top. No, I'm just joking. I don't think that he's going to be a starting NBA point guard for a solid team. But I've been really happy to see

his progress. I've always said there's a good basketball player in there, even if he's not going to be like a notably good basketball player. And that's been fun to see. I'm really happy for him. But I'll say further analysis for next episode. So as I said at the beginning, this is going to be kind of a shorter episode. So that is going to be it for this one. I want to thank you all very much for listening. And as I said, I'm going to do my absolute best to be more consistent going forward. So catch you all in the next episode.