Pistons vs. Nets final score: Brooklyn wins must-win game and makes it look easy

Full disclosure, due to illness I fell asleep at halftime of the 103-75 drubbing the Brooklyn Nets put on the Detroit Pistons on Monday night in Brooklyn. I was sick and eventually my body just decided to go into hibernation mode. I promise it wasn’t the game that made me sick, but I can’t speak for the rest of the viewing public.

The Pistons also went into hibernation mode, with everyone coming out of the game not with only a season-low points total but also looking like the worst version of themselves on a basketball floor. Yeah, it was Detroit’s third game in four nights, and the team was on the second end of a back-to-back.

After a cream-puff part of their schedule, though, you’d hope the Pistons would keep the good play going against elevated competition. Instead they lied down almost immediately.

As Dwane Casey said after the game:

The Pistons not only couldn’t seem to do anything against an aggressive Nets zone, but it seemed like they couldn’t be bothered to try.

By my count, Detroit attempted 25 shots outside the paint and below the 3-point line, making six. That is not the shot spectrum Casey has talked about in the past, and it’s not how Detroit has been successful for the past month-plus. By contrast, the Nets shot five such shots.

I can’t really put into words just how awful Detroit played — and that is only based on the first half that I saw. But for the game they shot 27.8 percent. Blake Griffin was 1-for-10 and the sweet shooting duo of Luke Kennard and Langston Galloway was 1-for-7 and 3-for-11, respectively.

I guess the only thing you can say is that Andre Drummond stretched his consecutive double-double streak to 19 games. That is the longest such streak of Drummond’s career and ties him with Bob Lanier for longest streak in team history.

The win vaults Brooklyn into the sixth spot in the East and the Pistons down to seventh. However, as previously discussed, this was essentially a must-win game for the Nets, and they played like it, as the team embarks on maybe the toughest stretch to end a season that I have ever seen.

The Nets were led by noted Piston killer Spencer Dinwiddie with 19 points and several highlights from Rodions Kurucs, who turned three steals into breakaway dunks that fired up an already pumped Brooklyn crowd.

The Pistons next play the Miami Heat on Wednesday.