The Detroit Pistons have made historic improvement this season and JB Bickerstaff has been a big part of it.
Modern NBA coaches wear a lot of hats, from managing personalities, motivating players, being life counselor and coach and that’s before you get to strategy and X’s and O’s.
Bickerstaff has worn them well, and if you haven’t noticed by now, the man can coach defense.
The Pistons jumped from 30th in the league in defensive rating to 12th in just one season, and that’s without adding anyone known for defense in the offseason.
The players have bought-in and the Pistons are rolling, with players who know and accept their roles and chemistry we haven’t seen in the Motor City in a long time.
Bickerstaff has also been good at the seemingly small things that ultimately help win games and two in particular stand out.
Winning coaches' challenges
Data about individual teams and coaches is not made easily available by the NBA for some reason, but I scoured through the numbers to see if they matched the eye test.
Just watching the games, it seems like coach Bickerstaff wins most of his challenges and the numbers support it, as he’s won 61.9 percent of them this season, slightly above the league average.
Most of the challenges he has lost have been late in games, when coaches often challenge riskier plays just to use one if they haven’t already.
We saw it in the last game against San Antonio, when Jalen Duren was erroneously called for a foul at the rim only to have it overturned, with an offensive foul assigned instead.
Duren was rolling, so this kept him from picking up a crucial foul and amounted to a four-point swing in the game.
These details are winning plays.
Using timeouts and setting up plays
Again, data is hard to come by when it comes to points per possession after a timeout, so I’ll have to use the eye test on this one.
The Pistons have been far more organized coming out of timeouts and usually get a good look, which is how you stop runs and/or keep momentum in a game.
Bickerstaff has been great about getting his shooters open looks at the top of the 3-point circle out of timeouts, getting Tobias Harris mismatches in the post for high percentage shots and even setting up a couple of lobs, one to Ausar Thompson that didn’t count (it was just after the buzzer) but was one of the plays of the year anyway and one to Jalen Duren in a wild game against Miami.
Coach Bickerstaff has also used timeouts wisely, picking his spots to use them when his team is flailing or letting them play through it when he feels they can, as he did in the win against San Antonio.
He’s been great at sniffing out the other team’s runs and not letting them happen. Coach Bickerstaff generally calls them early, before his team goes down too much and then gets a quality shot out of the timeout.
This is a monumental improvement from last season, when the Pistons were terrible in that department. Again, just the eye test, but watch the games and see if it isn’t true.
JB Bickerstaff has pushed all the right buttons this season and is one win away from tying the win total of the last two seasons combined.