"Brown rips Rip's 3-ball focus- Octovber 20, 2004"

Richard Hamilton has been concentrating on his long-range shooting this preseason and Brown doesn't like it one bit. More than half of Hamilton's field-goal attempts - 7 of 12 - have been 3-point shots.

Hamilton, a career 29.6 shooter behind the arc, has made four of those 25-footers, but that's beside the point in Brown's mind.

"I laugh about this," Brown said. "I think everybody in the league wants to play like him and now he's playing like everybody in the league. Now, how dumb is that?"

Hamilton improved his 3-point shooting during last season's playoffs, making a solid 38.5 percent of his 39 attempts. Brown wants Hamilton to pick his spots to spot up carefully.

"I don't mind him shooting the 3 if he's open, but I don't want it to take away from all the things he's improved on," Brown said. "He's special in having the mid-range game."

Detroit Pistons coach Larry Brown is rightly regarded as one of the best coaches around. But his unwillingness to trust smart, talented starters to play effectively with mild foul trouble was a factor in the Pistons Game 2 loss at Miami. If Brown doesn't rethink his approach to such situations, he could single-handedly blow the series.

Detroit lost Game 2 by the score of 92-86. The Pistons outscored the Heat by four in the three quarters that they did not play with one hand tied behind their back. In the quarter that they did play with a hand tied behind their back, the second, they were outscored 23-13.

Tayshaun Prince did not play one second of that quarter. He had committed his second foul on a dubious call near the end of the first quarter, and because his paranoid coach was afraid he might commit a third, Prince sat out the second quarter.

Brown prefers to have his starters saddled with no more than two fouls at the start of the second half. With 9:36 remaining in the second quarter, Tayshaun was joined on the bench by Rasheed Wallace, who had just been whistled for his second. He too would be a spectator the remainder of the half.

Ben Wallace: Coach Brown brought us something that I think is lost in American basketball, period, and that's fundamentals. Getting down and teaching the game. Not assuming that everyone knows the game. Just not assuming anything. He came in and coached. Right now, I don't think a lot of athletes are being coached the way they should be coached. Some guys are just great basketball players and they have the knack for scoring, so people just allow them to get by with that ability without teaching them anything new, without really coaching them. If you coach a guy and add to those things he can already do, help him understand the game, help him understand how everybody else plays the game, that's a big key. It's a lost art in our league.

Ben Wallace: What about that team...that's exactly what it is, we're a team. We're a group of individuals who came together at a high level and played as a team. We didn't look for anybody to carry us. We didn't look for anybody to do this or do that. We all came out and played collectively as a team. We played as one unit and accomplished our one goal. It's because we all came together that we were able to get it done.

That would be ironic after all the years and all those teams, even after his sublime ascension to NBA Finals MVP last season when the league still did not seem to know quite what to make of Billups.

He had been labeled a bust in Boston, a not-really point guard in Denver, as a role player at best in Minnesota. Even in Detroit, even after he so triumphantly led the Pistons to the title, he has been obscured in a series said to be without stars.

"Chauncey is always a bright spot," Pistons coach Larry Brown said. "I think he's always played great for us, and the bigger the game the better he seems to play. I don't think it was a fluke he was the third pick in the draft, and I don't think it's a fluke that he was the MVP in the Finals."

That praise comes from a coach who in many ways has expressed every doubt there has ever been about Billups. Brown has referred to Billups as the best clutch shooter he has coached. He called him the best "stand-still" shooter in the NBA. Most remarkably to the Pistons, even Brown has come to call Billups a point guard, albeit, one of the new breed of scoring point guards.

"When coach Brown came and explained to Chauncey how he wanted him to play the point, he challenged Chauncey," Billups' backup, Lindsay Hunter, said. "It got a little ugly at times.

"Coach was telling him, 'I'm not trying to take away from your game, but these are the things I need you to do.' "

"Larry's tough," Billups said. "He's as tough as any coach I've ever played for. He's just so demanding and so relentless. And what he believes, you know, if he believes that you can be this kind of player, he's going to make sure he gets you there. He won't let you take any shortcuts, no breaks. He's just very relentless that way.

"Oh, there's definitely been times when I went home and not agreed with him, just been mad at him and not liked him for a few days. I'm sure there's been times for him when he was like, 'that kid just doesn't get it.' But through all of that and all of those times, we've built a great bond and I trust in everything he says."

But if it had not become clear in last season's Finals, this season's Pistons' playoff run has demonstrated Billups' ability to balance looking for his shot and his teammates.

"It's tough because I'm pretty much a scoring point guard, you know, an aggressive point guard," Billups said. "I think these last two years with coach Brown, I've learned when is when and when it's not. So that's taken me some time, but ... the position now, man, there's not too many point guards out there that can't score anymore.

"It's still a point guard position. It's still the quarterback. You've still got to get the ball to the right people at the right times in their spots."

[Edited by - djsunyc on 04-12-2006 2:07 PM]

June 2004
If you go by previous actions, it says the ball is now in the hands of Billups and Mehmet Okur for the rest of this post season to make a statement. Despite the draft selection of Darko Milicic with the second overall selection in the 2003 draft, Billups has been Coach Larry Brown's project this entire season. Coach Brown has battled with Billups, and tried in every way to get Billups to understand when to pass and when to shoot. Okur has been another one of Coach Brown and Coach Mike Woodson's teacher's pets, but Okur has had problems in other areas. Okur has shown a lack of toughness and inconsistency on the defensive end of the floor, while he has yet to show the heart to go at defenders in the paint on the offensive end. Billups has admittedly said it has been tough for him. Billups is a natural shooter with the ability to get in the lane to score, and occasionally make the pass.

Hamilton said, "There's always going to be some resistance when you are asking someone to change."

Billups sometime looks like a 32-year-old man trying to relearn how to walk after a stroke, as he tries to reconstruct his game for the team. The next challenge this off season for Joe Dumars will be how, when, and where does he find a distributor, who can step right in with the ability to score, but thinks pass first and shoot second? The greatest point guard to ever play the game with that mentality was Isiah Thomas. Thomas led the original Bad Boys to the glory days. You will be hard pressed to find a guy with that type of ability these days in basketball. At an early age Thomas went through Coach Bobby Knight, Will Robinson, and Coach Chuck Daly before realizing his skills to make his team better. The greatest players in today's game who may come close to that role is Allen Iverson, Jason Terry, Nick Van Exel, Steve Francis, Tony Parker, Jamal Crawford, and Stephon Marbury. Jay Williams was also that type of point guard before injury.

The other option for the Pistons is to work a trade for a prospect within the draft, but once again you have to remember with the NBA draft you are looking from a prospective point of view. Coincidentally the guy that would fit this mode in the draft would be Marbury's cousin, Sebastian Telfair. Telfair, a 6 foot, 170 pound point guard out of Brooklyn, New York, is arguably the best player in his class. The biggest knock on Telfair is his size, but size didn't stop Thomas from grabbing two titles amongst many other acclaimed awards. Telfair would possibly give the Pistons the future power of the Eastern Conference with Rip Hamilton stepping up as a star within this year's Eastern Conference Championship series and Darko Milicic in the wings. The combination of Telfair, Hamilton, and Billups in the backcourt may give Dumars similar visions of the backcourt he once played in with Thomas, Vinnie Johnson, and himself.

[Edited by - djsunyc on 04-12-2006 2:08 PM]