Pistons vs. Cavs preview: JB Bickerstaff faces old team for the first time

The NBA schedule definitely has some interesting quirks. Sometimes, you go months without playing teams from your division, and others, you start off your season with your first two games against divisional rivals and one features your current head coach going against his former team.

After a tough loss on opening night to the Indiana Pacers, the Detroit Pistons have a chance to redeem themselves and give their coach some redemption. The Pistons had control of the game for the first three quarters against the Pacers, but as we saw so many times last season, this team just cannot close games against better teams.

There were some encouraging signs, and hopefully, the Pistons can build on those encouraging signs against a Cavaliers team coming off a blowout win over the Toronto Raptors.

Game Vitals

When: Friday, October 25 at 7:30 pm EST
Where: Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland, OH
Watch: Fan Duel Sports Network Detroit (going to take some getting used to)
Odds: Pistons +10.5

Analysis

The Pistons and Cavs faced off during preseason, with the Pistons coming out on top in a blowout win. However, this is the regular season, which is a completely different animal.

Both teams are coming off a day of rest after opening night, but the Cavaliers had an easy 30-point win while the Pistons had to fight to the end before ultimately falling to the Pacers. Combine that with the fact that the Cavaliers were already the more talented team, and you have a recipe for a tough game.

I already touched on the JB Bickerstaff revenge above, so I won’t focus on that too much. However, hopefully, it can provide some added motivation for a Pistons team that needs any kind of motivation they can get with their tough stretch of games to start the season.

The Cavaliers return pretty much the same roster that they had last season, in which they won their first-round series against the Orlando Magic before falling to the Boston Celtics in five games. They are led by their two-headed backcourt, featuring the undersized but talented Darius Garland and Donovan Mitchell. To counteract their backcourt size discrepancy, they have an elite defensive frontcourt of Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen. Mobley and Allen are also no slouches on offense, just not as dynamic scorers as Garland and Mitchell.

The hope is that the Pistons can exploit Mitchell and Garland defensively with Cade Cunningham and Jaden Ivey to keep them in the game. Both players played well on opening night, but could not make the shots down the stretch that they needed to make, which was a big reason for the 4th quarter collapse. As tough as it is to rely on a couple of 23 and under players for your offense in the 4th quarter, it is what the expectation will be for these two this season as the most dynamic offensive players on the team.

The Pistons showed some promise on opening night against the Pacers in the first half defensively, but their second-half defense left much to be desired. The Pistons missed many shots down the stretch in that game, but the Pacers were able to get back into the game because the Pistons failed to guard shooters on the perimeter and didn’t offer much resistance around the rim.

Lucky for the Pistons, Allen and Mobley are not the same kind of offensive bigs as Myles Turner and Pascal Siakam, so hopefully, they can focus their defense more on stopping Mitchell and Garland.

Even with the second-half struggles, the defense was better than last season and they held a high-powered Pacers offense to only 115 points, but the bar for this team defensively needs to be higher than just being better than last year.

This will be a tough game,, and I would not bet on the Pistons winning. But with how tough their early-season stretch of games is, they are going to have to pull out an unexpected win at some point if they want to avoid sinking their season before it even gets started. Why not do it against JB Bickerstaff’s old team?