Auburn Hills — Reggie Jackson made another small step in his rehab regiment.
Jackson, who has been out more than a month since having a plasma injection in his left knee and right thumb to treat tendinitis, participated in 5-on-5 non-contact team drills in Tuesday’s practice.
Although Jackson, the Pistons’ leading scorer last season, is progressing according to the original recovery timeline of six to eight weeks, he’s likely still a couple of weeks away from getting back to the lineup.
“Today he did all the non-contact stuff, so he did some game-speed shooting and he ran through dummy offense with us,” coach Stan Van Gundy said. “We had three segments and the defensive segment he did not do, but the offense, he did do.
“It was good to see; it was good to have him back out there.”
The Pistons have gotten off to a 6-5 start without Jackson and with Ish Smith in the starting role. Smith is posting 9.7 points and 6.4 assists, playing 30 minutes per game. The offense has struggled some without Jackson, but the Pistons are 5-0 at The Palace, including Monday’s 104-88 win over the Thunder on Monday night.
For the parts of practice in which Jackson was able to participate on Tuesday, he was fine, even attempting to dunk, according to Van Gundy. That’s an encouraging sign in the progression of returning to full strength, but the timeline still looks like it will be another week or two before he’s back in the lineup.
Van Gundy isn’t rushing the process and unless there’s some unexpected step forward, it’s still a waiting game.
“Nobody’s given me (a timeline). He was at five weeks yesterday and it was a 6- to 8-week thing,” Van Gundy said. “Next week would be the absolute earliest and I’d say that would be really, really optimistic at this point, to think he’d be back Monday of next week. I don’t see it now.
“How long it’ll take is hard to judge. What he seems tentative to me is his turns and cuts. When he opens up, he’s fine and shooting he was fine, but he’s a little tentative on changing direction.”
Die Defense ist aber nur daheim so gut. Auswärts ist man defensiv und offensiv mindestens eine Nummer schlechter. Aber trotzdem natürlich gutes Spiel vor allem ohne Drummond, Thunder aber auch bei einem üblen B2B erwischt. Magic, Knicks, Nuggets, Bucks daheim geschlagen, von daher muss man da auch erstmal abwarten wie gut man wirklich ist.
- 78.3%
This number represents the Pistons' defensive rebounding percentage when their acclaimed big man Andre Drummond is on the bench. What makes that figure noteworthy is that it’s nearly five percentage points higher than when Drummond plays, per NBA.com data. If you need time to process that the team that employs the NBA’s leading rebounder is actually better at rebounding an opponent’s missed shots when he’s not playing I’ll give you a second….
What’s even more perplexing is that this trend isn’t new to this season as the Pistons also posted better defensive rebounding numbers when Drummond sat last year. In order to wrap your head around this development let’s step back and take a big picture look at rebounding in general. Like most raw data -- which rebounds per game/per X minutes qualifies as -- the context in which these numbers get produced is overlooked. Rebounds are no different. This can be explained by what we’ll call “The Nene Effect” (which is definitely a thing I just made up right now, not some real Sloan Conference backed study….I don’t think).
During the course of his 15-year career as a power forward/center, Nene has never once averaged even over eight rebounds a game. Not once! It’s something that actually was attached to the guy as a negative label. After all, if you’re a big man and can’t crack double digits like the glass-cleaners that get all the attention, you clearly can’t be a good rebounder. Right?
Well the funny thing with the Brazilian big man, is that a consistent theme emerges when you comb through the data throughout his career: Nene’s teamswere much better rebounding opponent’s misses when he was on the floor, sometimes drastically so. That means even if he wasn’t getting the rebound himself, which Nene’s individual numbers back up, a teammate was. Nene is (or more was?) essentially the anti-Drummond.
Subjectively, it’s easy to picture how this works. Nene does the hard work of putting a body on the opponent’s most threatening offensive rebounder, leaving space and opportunity for a teammate to grab the ball. Or even doing little things like tapping away a rebound from an offensive player to someone else. Watch Drummond on the defensive end and you’ll see the opposite.
Instead of putting himself in a good position to snag a missed shot, Drummond often just turns and waits to see where the ball goes before lurching after it. Opponents can use this lack of commitment to sneak around him, win 50/50 balls over him or plant themselves in valuable real estate and corral their teammates misses while Drummond stands helplessly behind them.
These extra opportunities for opposing offenses then flows into damaging the Pistons defense as a whole. Because of the extreme gap in defensive rebounding percentage at the start of this season, Detroit is also drastically better defensively when Drummond sits (92.6) versus when he’s on the floor (106.2). This is on the area that doesn’t echo last season -- the Pistons were better defensively when Drummond played -- but there was also a much smaller gap between the defensive rebounding percentages.
With Reggie Jackson out, the Pistons are relying on their defense to hang around the Eastern Conference playoff spots. Right now, that defense is functioning better with the team’s star center off the floor, in part because Drummond’s gaudy rebounding numbers are starting to look more and more empty. If this doesn’t correct itself as the season goes forward and the Pistons stay stuck muddling through the middle of the Eastern Conference, they may be forced to take a hard look at how much value their star center actually holds.
Allerdings! Die Leistungsunterschiede je nach Location sind wirklich extrem.
OffRtg DefRtg FG% 3P%
Pistons@home 102.9 87.4 47.2 36.4
Pistons away 97.1 109.2 41.7 28.2
Detroit belegt zuhause Platz 2 im DefRtg und auswärts Platz 21. Anders ausgedrückt ist der defensive Qualitätsunterschied zwischen home und away deutlich(!) größer als der Unterschied zwischen dem aktuell besten Defensivteam (L.A. Clippers; 93.0) und dem schlechtesten (New York Knicks; 107.5).
Ich habe die Pistons nur gegen die Spurs gesehen und da ließ sich relativ wenig draus schliessen. Kann mir einer erklären, wie dieser enorme Performance-Unterschied zustande kommt? Klar, die Sample Size ist noch sehr klein. Ein Trend ist aber dennoch eindeutig zu erkennen.
Für mich auch unverständlich, ja die hätten Drummond beim Rebound foulen können, aber wenn der 3er von Harris nicht rein gegangen wäre, hätte man das SPiel eh verloren. Das man das ganze wegen eines offensiven Rebounds verliert ist mal wieder bezeichnend. In irgendeinem Artikel stand das 8 von 9 Pistons im Vergleich zum letzten Jahr schlechter rebounden. Echt blöde Niederlage.Warum SVG Drummond für die letzten Possessions runter nimmt und warum Baynes den letzten Wurf nehmen muss bleibt wohl ein Geheimnis.