What else is there to say really? When Matt Barnes rebounded the ball after the Pistons’ last real possession, I glanced at the game clock and thought, “drat, there’s enough time for him to get all the way to the other end.” Then he inexplicably heaved the ball from half court with more than two seconds to go and it looked like a Pistons win on a boneheaded shot. And then it went through. The Pistons got the ball back with 1.1 seconds and couldn’t run a good enough inbounding play to get off a decent shot. Game over.
The other major factors in this game were rebounding, turnovers, and free throws. The Pistons got beat up on the glass by a far inferior rebounding team. They can’t let that happen. They should have been able to salvage that because the Grizzlies played an uncharacteristically sloppy game and threw away the ball many times even without defensive pressure. But the calls really hurt Detroit. Apart from a really iffy foul that sent Steve Blake to the line at the end of the third quarter, most of the 50/50 calls and even some pretty obviously wrong ones went the other way–even though you wouldn’t know it based on Memphis shooting just 13 free throws. The Grizzlies were just not very aggressive. But this was winnable with just a little more effort on the glass.