Pistons open season with lots of ugly shooting and a loss to the Nuggets

Denver Nuggets 89, Detroit Pistons 79

Brandon Jennings – D

Jennings didn’t play entirely terribly — when he played. However, D.J. Augustin was significantly more productive so Jennings only played 41% of the available minutes. Jennings is clearly the superior talent. Losing out to Augustin is not a good sign.

Also, Jennings ran flat into Drummond on a defensive rotation, screening him and setting Mozgov up with a wide open shot. Mozgov missed, but that was still ugly.

Andre Drummond – C

Drummond was limited by foul trouble and only played 27 minutes. For so little time, his final line of 11 and 9 sounds pretty good, but both teams shot so poorly that this game featured 96 available rebounds. Grabbing 9 is nothing special. Especially since that barely had him halfway to keeping up with Faried’s pace.

Besides failing miserably to beat Faried on the glass and the foul trouble, Drummond stunk it up from the line, hitting one of four free throws. Also, he managed to lose Mozgov on a Denver inbounds play with just two seconds left on the shot clock–inexcusable. But he did have a couple absolutely vicious dunks, particularly a gorgeous up and under to tie the game at 44 apiece.

Kentavious Caldwell-Pope – D-

KCP needs to shoot better, but he should also work on his passing. He threw Drummond an alley-oop that was at least two feet too high. That’s no easy task. Just ask Darell Arthur who tried to throw an oop over Drummond and found that Andre can get his hand up really, really high.

I can’t decide whether Caldwell-Pope was really the biggest reason for this loss. He shot appallingly at 1-8 from three and 2-11 from two. But it didn’t look like he was forcing shots. It was just that he didn’t have any teammates who wanted to take those shots. Well, no one except for…

Josh Smith – B-

Smith single-handedly kept Detroit in this game. I hated both the quality and quantity of shots he took (9-22, with most of those from distance), but none of his teammates were consistently able to manufacture opportunities.

Kyle Singler – C-

Singler played an entirely unremarkable game. He hit a couple threes, played mediocre defense, and somehow spent almost 30 minutes on the floor. Singler and KCP look to have some defensive chemistry, though. They were switching with each other and helping each other perfectly.

Jonas Jerebko – C+

Jerebko pretty much duplicated Singler’s 30 minutes in 12. He probably should have played more.

D.J. Augustin – B-

Augustin was fantastic in spurts. The the Nuggets put Alonzo Gee on him and he became pretty much useless. That still makes him arguably the best Piston in this game.

Caron Butler – D-

Butler was terrible. He missed all his shots and didn’t contribute much else. Sure, he pulled down six boards, but he was taking some of those from teammates, including one he fought with his own teammate for and dropped out of bounds.

Joel Anthony – D+

Anthony was a perfectly fine big body, but I still fail to see how he was any better than Thabeet would have been.

Spencer Dinwiddie – D+

Dinwiddie didn’t look lost on the court. It’s hard to say much more than that, though, given how slow the game went and that he only player eight minutes.

Stan Van Gundy – F

Ugh. The Pistons looked awful. They didn’t appear to be playing any kind of system at all. They played like a pickup team that just met.

Look, the Pistons had most of the luck on their side in this game and couldn’t capitalize. The refs calls definitely favored Detroit. And two of their shots blocked by JaVale McGee went in anyway. Furthermore, the Denver offense was far from clicking. Nevertheless, the Pistons went through a five and a half minute stretch in the third quarter without scoring a point.