How the Detroit Pistons can stay afloat until Blake Griffin returns

Blake Griffin is out with knee soreness for a while but the Detroit Pistons finally has some depth to tread water in his absence.

The NBA season has finally started and it isn’t starting well for the Pistons. Blake Griffin is out with knee soreness, at least through the first week of November, but the team finally has some depth to tread water in his absence.

Health was a talking point all summer. This roster carries more injury risk than usual. The front office knew it too. Health was the major reason the national media was so down on the Pistons when giving predictions.

Now that it actually happened it feels like all the predictions will come true and the Pistons will fail to make the playoffs. But don’t hit the panic button just yet. Griffin’s injury is kind of a mystery. They weren’t expecting him to miss any games.

Then this happened.

It seems like the Pistons are just taking precautionary measures to make sure this issue goes away. Or they are hiding a much more serious injury. But let’s not go there yet.

He’ll miss at least the first five games against Indiana (twice), Atlanta, Philadelphia and Toronto. On the first weekend of November, which is probably the time he’ll be re-evaluated, the Pistons play Chicago and Brooklyn. The week after that, they play three games against Washington, New York and Indiana for the third time.

That’s 10 games against Eastern Conference teams, three of which are projected near the bottom, one is the unanimously projected second seed and the other six are in the same tier with the Pistons, fighting to get into the playoffs.

That’s not an extremely hard schedule but those are extremely important games. A slow start could put the Pistons in a hole they’d be trying to get out of all year. We all saw what happened at the end of last season when Griffin had injury problems.

But the Pistons are not the same team they were six months ago.