Detroit to win the East?
Detroit is officially the first team
this season to have reached the conference finals. Well, if you look to
what happened in the last few seasons, this can be considered
everything but a surprise. The roster is basically the same for
seasons. If we look to their six players most used in the playoffs
(Rasheed, McDyess, Maxiell, Prince, Hamilton and Billups), the last one
to join the team was Maxiell in the 2005 Draft! And this fact makes
them so close that this alone makes them already a very dangerous team,
as they know their teammates so well that they could play blind-folded!
Also this fact turned them into a very dangerous team in ball games,
where they can easily comeback from big deficits without any kind of
panic, like it happened in the Game 4 of the series against Orlando,
where after trailing by 11 points at half time, they simply started to
play with more aggressiveness and they were able to come back into the
discussion of the game and win it by one point. This is the main reason
why they have to be considered as a natural contender to win this
season's NBA final. Besides the Spurs, no other team is so good as the
Pistons in the post season and no other team has the experience that
they have in the decisive games of the season. In case you haven't
noticed, Detroit has reached the Eastern conference final every single
year since the 2003 playoffs. No other team has even came close to make
such thing during this period.
But ok, now they are into the conference finals, but can they
advance into the NBA final and win it? Why not? First of all, besides
having the most experienced team in the league, they have also showed
they are motivated enough to fight for another ring. Their opponent in
the conference final will be either Boston or Cleveland. The Celtics
looks far from the level they have showed in the regular season and
they have already dropped five games in the post season. Even if they
win this series against the Cavs by 4-2, they will reach the conference
final having played more three games than the Pistons, so it would be a
very hard task to win three very long series in a row, as nobody is
expecting Boston to beat Detroit by 4-0 or 4-1 in the conference final,
right? The Celtics are yet to win a game on the road and they have been
keeping themselves in the post season, thanks to their home games. But
Detroit has already won at Boston this season and they are one of the
strongest road teams in the league. It would be a very hard task for
Boston to win four home games in a row against Detroit, especially in
the post season, where all four games would probably be ball games,
where the Pistons are extremely strong.
But if the opponent of the Pistons is Cleveland? Well, Cleveland
has defeated Detroit last season in the conference final, which was
considered as a big upset, but the team of Cleveland has changed and
they can't isolate Billups like they isolate Rondo in their current
series against Boston, as that would be the end of them. Lebron pretty
much decided the conference final last season on his own, but that
would give an huge motivation for Detroit to try to stop him in a
potential conference final this season between these two teams. As
Detroit would have the home court advantage in this series, I think on
a close series, they would end up winning and going into the NBA final.
So, is Detroit the new favorite of the East? Well, probably but
it's way far from a done deal. Both Boston and Cleveland have enough
basketball to beat them, but Detroit can now rest and watch the rest of
the series between Boston and Cleveland from the tv and that's an huge
advantage for them.