Were Those Really the Pistons?

Has anybody seen the Detroit Pistons?

Personally, I’m mad. I would ask for my money back from Tuesday night’s opener of the NBA Finals, except that I didn’t pay. Still, I feel ripped off, and I’m sure the Piston fans feel the same way.

I came 2,500 miles to see the nastiest, dirtiest team in sports, and the Pistons let me down hugely.

They beat the Lakers easily, 109-97, which is OK. Somebody had to win, and the Pistons were favored and were at home. But if these were the Pistons, there are solid grounds here for a lawsuit based on deceptive advertising.

Bad Boys? Father Flanagan would have been proud of the Pistons Tuesday night. I was disgusted.

The Pistons, remember, are the dirtiest team outside of tag-team mud wrestling. They have separate chapters in their playbook, titled “Cheap Shots” and “Low Blows.”

Nearly every banner in their arena Tuesday made reference to the Pistons’ thuggery and muggery, and the official souvenir stands in this so-called Palace of Auburn Hills sell a full line of Bad Boys wearing apparel--Bad Boys T-shirts, skull-and-crossbones hankies, autographed blunt instruments.

If ever a city has bought into a team’s image, has embraced an outlaw personna and taken great pride in its team’s low reputation, it is Detroit and its beloved Pistons.

The fans love it when the Pistons play dirty.

Yet, this time the Pistons won without breaking out their “A” stuff. Or their “B” stuff. No Lakers were clotheslined or low-bridged or blindsided. No fights broke out. There wasn’t even much glaring between the two teams.

Clearly, the Pistons are a team with an identity crisis. They came out Tuesday night and played--get this-- basketball .

They rebounded aggressively, they played defense physically, but cleanly, and they ran and they shot.

OK, Laker forward A.C. Green got a tooth loosened by a UFO, possibly a Piston elbow, but he didn’t see who did it, and police arrested no suspects.

Dirty game, A.C.?

“The game was pretty much played the way it should be played,” Green said.

In legal terms, yes. Artistically, the Pistons were painting the Mona Lisa while the Lakers were drawing stick figures.

Maybe it’s all a Piston trick. A set-up. Going into the series, the Pistons wept openly about the unfairness of their image and how it causes officials to pick on them and take away their two primary strengths--assault and battery.

So, the officials actually called 28 personal fouls on each team.

All the Lakers and Pistons talked after the game about how the Pistons had taken the Lakers out of their game.

In reality, it was the other way around. Out of fear that the officials would lean in the favor of the finesse-burdened Lakers, the Pistons left their brass knuckles in the locker room.

If they’re not careful, the Pistons are going to pick up a nasty reputation of being a great basketball team.

The Lakers, obviously confused by the abrupt change in Piston strategy, were thrown completly off-stride. Laker fast breaks? You could count them on the fingers of a catcher’s mitt.

The Lakers’ vaunted defense? The Piston backcourt of Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars and Vinnie Johnson made shambles of the same defense that earned such acclaim in the earlier rounds of the playoffs.

The Piston fans managed to put aside their disappointment in the lack of dirty deeds long enough to scream the Lakers out of the building. During the fourth quarter, one woman, a courtside regular, performed a dance that included moves that not only can you not show on television, but in several states they would be illegal if performed in the bedroom.

That’s as close as the Pistons came to breaking the law.

With all the hype about Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn--who, to give them their due, truly are cheap-shot artists--we sometimes tend to forget that the Pistons have some talent, too.

They can actually play. The Lakers were reeling from the loss of Byron Scott with a pulled hamstring, but it’s doubtful that Byron and three Laker ballboys could have stopped Vinnie Microwave Johnson when he started stirring molecules in the fourth quarter.

The loss of Scott, and the makeshift Laker lineups caused by early foul trouble to Michael Cooper and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, had Magic Johnson looking as frustrated, despondent and dejected as he has looked in a long time.

Tuesday night, Magic was Count Basie conducting a jug band.

“It was tough,” Magic said. “It was a tough evening for us.”

And that was without any bad stuff from the Bad Boys.

Are they saving it? Will they wait until the Lakers get untracked before hauling out the nefarious tricks?

Or have the Bad Boys gone good? Father Flanagan said, “There’s no such thing as a bad boy,” and maybe he was right.

If so, why don’t they tell people, before we come all this way?

Can I get a refund on my Bad Boys combination can-opener and crowbar? Bad Boys, my foot.