I’m trying to figure out if there’s any correlation between these two events that just happened concurrently:
-Boban Marjanovic played 27 minutes and scored a career-high 27 points
-The Pistons beat the heavily favored Rockets
Ah, now that I think about it, probably not. There’s no way that those two things are in any way related. None. It was just a fluke that as soon as Stan Van Gundy realized that Andre Drummond hardly contributes to winning basketball and gave minutes to the guy that produces every single time he gets in the game that the Pistons finally played to their level of talent and beat Houston. A total fluke.
NOT.
Thanks to Can’t Van Coach, this Pistons season will be a big “what-if”. What if Marjanovic got minutes the whole year? Would the Pistons be in the playoffs? We can’t know, but the evidence is compelling for “yes”. We’ve now seen what happens when Marjanovic plays big minutes. We’ll, we’d seen it before also: he gets buckets, and if it’s not already garbage time by the time he gets in, it leads to wins. There are hardly any players in the league who can deal with Marjanovic’s length and girth. The Rockets bigs certainly couldn’t. Meanwhile, Drummond is content to lob hook after hook that have little chance of doing anything but clank heavily off the rim.
Man, if I’m a Pistons fan, I’m kind of pissed right now.