The wrong players have gotten hot in March.
Rodney Stuckey had 34 points for Indiana on Tuesday night. Gigi Datome and Jonas Jerebko are playing key roles as Boston tries to make a surge for the postseason. D.J. Augustin is playing important minutes and hitting shots for Oklahoma City.
At the same time, the current Pistons have fallen apart, just when it looked like they had a real shot at ending their playoff drought.
Things might have hit rock bottom Tuesday in Los Angeles. Facing a Lakers team that had lost five straight and is just playing out the string, the Pistons only managed 35 points in the second half and lost 93-85.
"We literally could not make a shot," Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy said after the game. "I thought our defense and rebounding was a lot better in the second half, but as I just told the guys in the locker room, at some point you have to put the ball in the basket."
Detroit's seven-game losing streak has dropped them 5.5 games out of the final Eastern Conference playoff spot, and they only have 19 games to pass four teams. That's not going to happen, especially for a team that has now lost to the Knicks and Lakers in the last two weeks.
Van Gundy knew that by trading four players for Reggie Jackson and Tayshaun Prince, he was making it tougher to win this year, but was hoping to improve Detroit's chances of building a winner in the years to come.
The key is Jackson. He was brought in to be the point guard for the next several seasons, but that will come at a heavy price. He will be a restricted free agent this summer, and is expected to command an eight-digit annual salary. Even with the salary cap projected to jump in 2016 because of new broadcast revenues, that's the kind of investment that a team can't afford to get wrong.
The problem? Jackson isn't playing like an NBA starter right now, much less someone with the All-Star potential that the Pistons -- and many other teams -- see in him. In the losing streak, which makes up seven of his eight games with Detroit, he's shooting 35.3 percent from the floor and is 6-of-25 on 3-pointers.
Against the Lakers and Jordan Clarkson, Jackson was 1-for-9 with five turnovers and three assists. He was benched for much of the second half in favor of rookie Spencer Dinwiddie, even though Dinwiddie couldn't hit a shot and was struggling to guard Jeremy Lin.
"He didn't look good at any point tonight," Van Gundy said of Jackson. "He just wasn't in the game. It seemed to be that he was pre-determining what he was going to do, and not playing with any instinct whatsoever. It was a really rough night for him."
Van Gundy tried both Dinwiddie and John Lucas III, but they combined to go 1-for-9. That position alone was enough to ruin the efforts of Andre Drummond and Greg Monroe, who had 38 points and 30 rebounds.
"Right now, all we've got on a consistent basis is our big guys," Van Gundy said. "Our point guards went 2-for-18 and 0-for-9 on threes. That makes it very hard to win games."
Monroe, an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season, couldn't explain the offensive failure.
"It is tough -- we just couldn't put the ball in the basket," he said. "It's frustrating. I believe we had open looks. Guys aren't taking bad shots. We just have to put them in.
"The starting five just have to be better on both ends of the floor."
A lot of that improvement will have to come from Jackson, who now only has 19 games to prove that Detroit's scouts were right to recommend him as the Motor City's next star point guard.
