The Beautiful Brutality of Pistons-Magic It seems almost paradoxical to describe the unfolding Eastern Conference first round showdown between the Orlando Magic and the Detroit Pistons as anything resembling beautiful. After all, two teams built to play in the modern, wide-open era of the game find themselves reduced to something far more primal. While certainly ugly in appearance, the basketball being played here is, however, beautiful in its brutality.
This matchup, perhaps more than any other in this year’s NBA playoffs, calls for comparison to boxing. This is, quite literally, Hagler v Hearns from 1985, only now with a basketball being thrown into the mix. This is a heavyweight fight. This is a match for the ages.
A Series Written in Defense The Beautiful Brutality of Pistons-Magic
After winning game 4 on Monday by the score of 94-88, the series stands tall at a score of three rounds to the Magic, one to the Pistons. Indeed, this may already be a series that is heading for a knockout, and yet the author of this particular chapter will likely surprise you. His name is Jamal Cain—a player whose very presence in the NBA is likely a complete mystery to those watching.
Cain has played a mere 121 games over the course of his entire NBA career to date. That includes four playoff games, during which he’s bounced around from the Miami Heat to the New Orleans Pelicans and now Orlando where he has seen action in only 40 games over this season’s regular season. Nothing to write home about there.
Except, of course, for the fact that this week he delivered some of the most exhilarating basketball we’ve seen from the playoffs in recent times. Specifically, the tomahawk dunk he laid out against the Pistons’ Jalen Duren, which was executed flawlessly and brutally. It wasn’t just another highlight reel dunk manufactured for social media. It was a real thing—an absolute banger against a man who is definitely an All-Star, to boot…Read more
We’re going to guess that the Pistons had to get off the canvas and continue fighting after that, but it wouldn’t be surprising to hear from Jalen Duren that the rest of the game was a bit of a blur.
The Statistical Indictment of Offense
The numbers bear witness to what looks increasingly like a catastrophic offense collapse. The Pistons, the No. 1 seeds that no team wanted to face in these playoffs, are now sitting right on the edge of being one of only eight teams in NBA history to lose to an No. 8 seed. It hasn’t been pretty.
For starters, let’s talk about the number of turnovers. The Pistons have committed a staggering 130 turnovers over their first four playoff games. In regular-season action, they’ve managed to score a whopping 117.8 points per game. Here, they’re lucky if they can crack 98 points per game. That’s a huge decline, representing the largest such drop-off by any No. 1 seed through four playoff games in the league’s entire history.
In the meanwhile, Jalen Duren—their main source of offense during the regular season, averaging a whopping 19.8 points per game—is scoring less than 10 points per game in these playoffs. Cade Cunningham, on the other hand, turned the ball over an astounding eight times in one game and is shooting only 28 percent from three. Meanwhile, Tobias Harris has fallen to a mere 14 percent success rate from three.
On Monday, the Pistons scored a mere 98 points against the Magic. More than half of those (some 52) came from the free throw line alone. Their success rate was abysmal, as they’ve scored 38 percent from the floor and only 20 percent from distance.
How Bad Can This Be?
But the numbers really start getting scary when we turn our attention toward the Magic.
Orlando shot 32.6 percent from the floor on Monday. For reference, that’s the lowest such shooting percentage in a playoff victory since 1980.
If we try and break things down further, we’ll see that Paolo Banchero, the star player for this team, shoots 37/26 in this series. In the last three games, he has connected on 17 of 52 attempts. In the fourth game alone, he has managed 14 misses in 18 attempts.
What’s more, Banchero usually plays together with Jalen Suggs—who appears to believe that he’s Klay Thompson—who shoots just one in 15 from distance. Suggs, bless his optimistic soul, shoots 10 threes per game on average, making just 1 out of every 4 attempts.
The Beautiful Brutality in Numbers
Sure! Please provide the paragraph you’d like me to rephrase. Even as the numbers tell a terrible story, this is how playoff basketball is supposed to be played when two defensively oriented teams meet.
Both teams are fighting each other. Each game looks a lot like a rugby scrum—with zero room in between. The game itself has been boiled down to fundamentals. There’s hustle. There’s physicality. And there’s competition.
If you’re a fan of old-school NBA basketball—filled with names like Charles Oakley or the Davis brothers from the Indiana Pacers—and remember the feeling of seeing somebody yell “fight!” on the playground on a school lunch hour—this is your series. Analytically, this may be a mess, indeed. Shot selection? Terrible from either side. Execution? Horrific to the point where even analytics people weep.
But to those who know better, this is poetry. Dark, ugly, brutal poetry.
The Story of Defense
So why did we know this was coming in the first place? Because both teams have always been known for their defenses. But even if we account for this, the offense displayed by both teams is horrifically bad. Yet here’s the thing. Of all the teams in this NBA playoffs season, Orlando is one of the few teams—which likely makes them the only team—that has the combination of size, strength, and nastiness to go into the middle of this ring and beat the Pistons at their own game, and this is precisely what has happened.
Interestingly enough, it was expected from the start of the season that Detroit would face the Charlotte Hornets, because the latter had a ton of fun in their gameplay. But if this were the case, the Hornets would have been beaten to the point of exhaustion. This isn’t a fun and games series. This is manly basketball.
The Final Round and the Countdown
Detroit finds itself now on the ropes. So far, in NBA history, there have been only 13 teams that managed to recover from being behind 3-1 to win the playoffs series. So, the statistical odds are definitely against them.
But, alas, if there’s any chance of this happening to Detroit—the odds of which would make this the 14th team to do so in NBA history—the only path open to them is one path, which can best be described by one simple word: swinging…Read more
Keep swinging and hope for miracles.
