You can’t cry out “COMPLACENCY!” every time the team falls behind in the first quarter. The Bulls are a great team playing at home. That being said, some thoughts:

The Bulls offense is awful with Ben Wallace in the lineup. They really need all five players to be scorers.

We should tweak our pick-and-roll defense against Chicago. Perhaps have another wing slide over to help so our older bigs don’t have to step over the screen and then race Tyrus Thomas and Joakim Noah back to the basket. Better rotation from the other bigs would help too.

Bad defensive rebounding.

No movement. Someone asked if you can have too many scorers. No. And you especially can’t have too many players that can shoot and pass selflessly. The problem is there’s no movement. In their desire to exploit mismatches, they end up having one guy posting up and everyone else standing around. If we ran an offense like the Jazz or the Lakers I think the team would be unstoppable.

Boy, I hope you guys are right about Amir Johnson. If he can be as good as Tyrus Thomas (who I despise, by the way), I’ll be very happy.

Any thoughts on who will be the first NBA player to knock Joakim Noah out? Ruben Patterson? Artest? Stephen Jackson?

I know it’s hard to put the bench in the game while you are down, but I think we needed more bench minutes. We lacked the energy off the bench, the bench barely got any minutes.

Can you have too many scorers out on the court? If you can, we might. I’d like to keep Rip and Prince from being on the court together to much, and see how that works. Prince was great without Rip here, I think we have to many scoring options when both of them are out there. Put a shotblocker/postup player (Maxiell, Nazr, and Amir) out there so we can get some better use out of Prince.

Flip Murray can score and is great off the bench, just please stop putting him at point guard. Flip can’t play as an effective point guard, period. When Flip is on the court, please make sure someone else at PG. Price looked great at PG, and with the matchup problems his length causes, it makes it even better. How long is it going to take them to figure this out?

It’s no surprise when we are down, Saunders forgets to use the bench.
You can’t expect to get much out of the bench, when you don’t let them play. Now if we played some better defense and used our bench’s young guys to outrun the Bulls we probably would have won. Let’s just hope he remember we have a bench against the Clippers … maybe even call a timeout when we look lost out there to remind them to focus and play with intensity. If it wasn’t for Sheed that would have been much worse.

Because they are also a 50 win team that plays like a 60 win team at home.

What I noticed . . .

By now, with Chauncey, Rip, Tayshaun, and Rasheed, it’s like watching poker superstars do their thing. Rasheed could be likened to a blend of Hellmuth and Matusow, given the outbursts.

However!

When Rasheed’s trying to calm Rip down on a couple of plays, that tells me something about where Rip’s head is.

It’s like Rip got a series of bad beats, and he was steaming about it. That steam kind of didn’t help . . . it just made him, in particular, play with less skill.

For all the awesome Rasheed did, Rip kinda undid. Rip even managed a damping effect on Tayshaun.

My level of concern with Detroit’s direction, after these opening games . . . minimal. I’d like more attempts in the paint from everyone. The collective shooting effort is just about average. The defense seems to work pretty well. It should be a decent run.

I think Tayshaun playing transparent had a bigger effect on the Pistons lost last night. 1 FG made and 5 points is not something im expecting out of Tayshaun, i hope he picks up the intensity tonight against the Clips.

Still, other than Sheed it was a rough game for the Pistons and they still had three good, open shots to tie/win at the end against a desperate team at home. I sure don’t have any fear right now that the Bulls are a team for Detroit to fear in a playoff series.

And is anyone else already sick of watching Rip bitch about every call? Especially when he makes an obvious foul? Even Sheed was pulling him away from the officials last night.

~Jalen Rose on ESPN.com

WHAT?!

The free throws weren’t falling, but really where was this “new team” that’s supposed to push the ball? The Pistons we’ve known for the last 5 years fall into this feeling-out-the-opponent-in-the-first-quarter mentality. We’ve slowed it to a half court game by default since Carlisle… Why? Why, still, after Dumars has mandated that complacency is out the window, do we stand around in the FIRST quarter???

Forget the half court offense, for now, push the freakin’ ball. Good things will happen.

Granted, things weren’t going the Pistons way, but there’s no excuse for us to be losing to an injured Ben Wallace, 2 backups, Heinrich, and Deng after 1 quarter.

It’s also tough to fault McDyess for not being aggressive enough. When your other front court option drops 36, your going to do a bit of standing and watching.

Tyrus Thomas looks amazing during some games, and then disappears during others… Completely. To the point where you have to think he might have head issues.

I think that Ben Wallace is just going to start slow. He always has, and he is getting older. If he wants to have juice left for the playoffs, this makes the most sense.

A) Complacency… or laziness. And how are we different this year?

B) Flip Murray sucks, tunnel-vision coupled with bad decisions. He’d be great if basketball was 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3. Unfortunately…

C) Saunders is his same old anal-retentive self. He gets caught in this cyclical mentality based on the fact that if we’re behind we need to play our starters. At face value that seems rational, but our starters are who created the deficit to begin with. If we’re down by 3+ points after the first period why not sit the starters? It A) would definitely give our bench time on the court to develop, B) send a message to the starters that “Hey, you want to play lazy in the first quarter. Fine. Say hello to the bench.” and C)It just might get us back in the game. At least Maxiell, Hayes,… and *gulp* Murray(soon to be Stuckey) try. Now, look at what happened last night: our starters averaged 38 minutes, our bench didn’t develop, AAAAND we lost the game.