Man, the Pistons sure are looking good since they got Blake Griffin. Now, the seemingly obvious explanation for their improvement is that Griffin is a great player and great players make teams better. I don’t buy that. Griffin is good, but he’s not so good that a team that was looking like garbage suddenly would become unbeatable. Prepare your mind for revelations of a higher order:
Griffin made the team better, but only in the sense that all the rest of them are trying really really hard to impress him because they know he’s from L.A. and they don’t want to look like losers. Bam. There it is. The truth has been laid bare for all willing to see it.
Stanley Johnson is one of those players. It’s no coincidence that as soon as Griffin comes on the scene that he goes bananas and scores 26. He knows that if he doesn’t do something like that, Griffin will think that he sucks. That may even be the truth. Maybe, reality will catch up to him and he will regress back into the vast tar pits of sub-mediocrity. But for now, he’s playing better than he ever has, and the Pistons’ 8th seed dreams are still 100 percent alive.
At least if they get the 8th seed they won’t get swept by LeBron again.