Pistons vs. Wizards final score: the preseason wraps with a loss in Washington

Well, hopefully this isn’t how it’s going to look during the regular season. Our Detroit Pistons relied heavily on the veterans to get us to .500 record in preseason, and the results were ugly for both the veterans and for the youngsters.

You can argue for the merits of fighting tooth and nail to a .500 record, but most people just want to see the young players play. We understand that for them to grow, we need to win some and play them with vets, but there should be a better way to mix the vets and the youth in the rotations. In case the Pistons masterminds haven’t heard that yet: racing with broken teams like Wizards for the eighth or tenth seed on backs of older players who sooner or later will pay for this with their health isn’t exciting, like at all. Let the Wizards race for those seeds with Hawks, Bulls, Hornets or even Cavs instead, and allow us watch our young ones to play more!

Outside the obvious anti-excitement of this final preseason game, including risking injuries to veterans, inhibiting development of youth and undermining our chances for adding better prospects to their ranks, it also produced a sluggish performance. The game was a little brick fest on our part with vets like Blake, DRose, Jerami and Wayne together missing 29 of 45 shots. DRose also committed 5 of the team’s 20 turnovers.

This not-too-good performance spread to most of the youngsters who played as Killian went 4-for-11, Sekou missed his only two attempts and Svi missed all but one of his four shots inside the arc and turn the ball over four times.

The defense wasn’t pretty either. Bradley Beal and Russell Westbrook (who debuted as a Wizard) got to their spots too easily. Our players weren’t rotating particularly well to cover the perimeter as Wizards not only made but also missed many open looks. The interior defense was leaky too as Washington scored 40 points in the paint.

From the good news, we rebounded very well. Jerami – the same Jerami who’s supposed to not be a good rebounder – was leading the way with nine boards. Mason and Josh added eight apiece. The team as a whole registered 51 rebounds. Josh had another good game adding 13 points (on 4/8 shooting including 3/7 from the long line), two steals and a monster block to his impressive achievement on boards.

The team will now get some rest, get a few more practices and hopefully make some tweaks necessary to avoid losing so disappointingly in the regular season.