The NBA Is Better Than Anything You Like

I mean, come on. That is just too perfect.

If you're like me, you've been watching the Pistons all season with a sense of wonderment. Objectively, it's not really surprising that the Pistons are as good as they are: In this era of free agency and flawed-fundamentals professional basketball, a championship nucleus that has been in place for three seasons and trusts its ability to win by executing basketball basics has an inherent advantage. But then you have to consider who these Pistons really are--a resilient group that has oftentimes created its own adversity (consciously or not) so that it could subsequently generate the motivation necessary for winning. It has been a lovable, maddening team that will win eight out of ten games against better teams and then drop six out of seven while playing the Knicks and Hawks of the league. Succinctly put, things are rarely easy with the Pistons.

But that hasn't been the case this season. While racing out to a league-best 16-3 mark, the Pistons have looked, well, like a finely tuned machine. When cut to the core, this team may still be a scrappy gang of underdogs best epitomized by Ben Wallace; however the gang has been closer to the Dip Set Byrd variety than the Get-Along kind. (Sorry, I just had a Bill Simmons/Scoop Jackson moment--a tired AND semi-incoherent reference. I have no idea what I just "said." I simply have Anchorman and the mantra "byrd gang" stuck in my head and needed to momentarily relieve myself. Ay!)

In previous seasons when Brown DMC was still the coach, it took Herculean efforts to reach 100 points; guys would get yanked if they weren't "playing the right way" and running DMC's unimaginative offense; and every deficit engendered anxiety because you never knew when the isolations and curls would stop working. These are not those Pistons. These Pistons score--Detroit is the seventh-highest scoring team in the league. These Pistons run--off of steals, misses, and even makes. And these Pistons control a game--you rarely get the sense that Detroit is losing at any given time because of anything that an opponent is doing.

Best of all, though, these Pistons are fun to watch. They genuinely seem to enjoy playing with each other; they play hard; and they have so much personality. Just look at the photograph above. Or, consider that on a night when their PG scored 28 points, he handed out 19 assists, three of the other four remaining starters still hit for double figures, all but the offensively inept one shot better than 50% from the field, and said offensively inept starter showed up in red goggles that he must have found in his cereal box that morning.

In what other league is a team this good also this charismatic? Jesus Christ, I love the NBA!

My only concern with the Pistons is that their field-goal-percentage defense has slipped to 16th in the league at almost 45% per game. But, it's still early...