Pistons still waiting to come together with Iverson

NEW YORK -- The only time I got a smile out of Michael Curry on Sunday afternoon was when I suggested he make it his business to find out what Arron Afflalo does on Saturday nights, and then mandate it as a team function.

"He's probably trying to get to a gym and get some extra shots," Curry said in a rare moment of levity after the Detroit Pistons' fifth consecutive Sunday loss, 104-92 to the Knicks.

Rookie coach Michael Curry is about to put the team in the hands of second-year PG Rodney Stuckey. (Getty Images)

Affalo was one of the lone bright spots Sunday for the Pistons, who stumbled into Madison Square Garden for a noon start and fell behind by 29 points before their last REM cycle was over. They certainly weren't the first NBA team to spend a night in New York and forget to show up for the game, and they won't be the last.

But the Pistons have bigger problems than wakeup calls. Fifteen games after acquiring Allen Iverson in a cap-clearing move that cost them Chauncey Billups, floor general of their 2004 championship team, they're no longer the Pistons. Yet they still seem to believe they can flip the motivational switch whenever they feel like it and coast into the playoffs. So in that respect, the Piston way -- not taking every game or opponent seriously -- has become sort of an out-of-body experience.

New bodies, same experience.

"I don't think that's really fair to say that they're already established, because this is not the same team that won a championship," Iverson said. "You've still got Rip (Hamilton), and you still got Tayshaun (Prince), and you still have 'Sheed (Rasheed Wallace). But there's other guys that haven't been there, that haven't been in those wars. We've got to put the whole team together. It's not just myself and those three guys out there playing. You've got other guys in there that are playing as well. It's just a work in progress."

Work, yes. But progress? The Pistons are 7-8 since acquiring Iverson, whose freewheeling, ball-dominating style is a departure from the precise, methodical, share-the-ball Pistons of old. A.I. has always been delightful to watch, and he has always been a handful, too. Already, he has been fined for skipping practice -- practice?!?!?! -- on Thanksgiving Day and has complained mildly about a reduction in minutes. Only five weeks into this strange union of Iverson's star power with the team that prided itself on having a lot of good players, but no great ones, his arrival already has prompted a lineup change.

When the Pistons try to regroup Tuesday night in Washington, Curry is leaning toward starting Rodney Stuckey at the point with Iverson at shooting guard, Prince at power forward and Kwame Brown on the bench. The Pistons have been even more inconsistent than usual, prompting Prince -- the voice of reason in the locker room -- to use the words "mindboggling" and "troubling" to describe where things stand.

"Our team has made a major change and we're in transition right now," Pistons president Joe Dumars said Monday. "We'll get better as the season unfolds."

The transition Dumars so boldly made in dumping Billups and his $36.3 million stretching out through 2010-11 was as shrewd and forward-thinking as it gets in this what-have-you-done-for-me-yesterday league. Clearing cap space by acquiring a huge expiring contract -- in Iverson's case, $21.9 million -- is a tried-and-true rebuilding tactic. When the expiring contract is attached to Theo Ratliff, Joe Smith or some other fading veteran, the case can easily be made to fans reaching deep into their pockets that it's the right move for the future.

Rarely, though, does a team engage in such accounting practices and remain saddled with the expectation to win now. Rarely does the cap-clearing contract come attached to a talent still star-studded and viable, like Iverson. Thus the Pistons, with a first-year coach in Curry and the remnants of the '04 championship roster still hanging on, are expected to sign LeBron James and Chris Bosh in the summer of 2010 -- and oh, by the way, make their seventh and eighth consecutive trips to the Eastern Conference finals in the meantime.

"Our goals are always to see where we stand at the end of the season," Dumars said. "We never worry about managing expectations."

That's fine, but it doesn't mean the expectations aren't there.