Driven Thomas Gears Pistons for Repeat

Brendan Malone, an assistant coach for the Detroit Pistons, was going over to Isiah Thomas’s house a few days after his team won the NBA championship in June.

“I only live five minutes away from him,” Malone said. “He’s called me up several times. He has a gym in his house. And I went over. We went through drills for about two hours. After Joe Dumars’ wedding (in August) we came home at one o’clock in the morning . . . he shot from 2 o’clock to 3:30 in the morning.”

Insomnia isn’t the issue here. Obsession is. Ten years and Isiah Thomas is still searching. There was joy on his face when the Pistons swept the Lakers and won their first NBA championship, but also relief.

He said he had found the secret, what made Larry Bird and Magic Johnson able to rise above the competition year in and year out. What made them champions. He wasn’t sharing. It was a decade-long quest, one that made him fiercely loyal admirers and bitter enemies.

And now that he’s on top, he’s not sharing just how he plans to keep the Pistons there. They spent much of the first half of the season struggling to find their collective rhythm. Rick Mahorn was gone, Mark Aguirre was here, John Salley had to start. The bench suffered. Coach Chuck Daly has called the first three months of the season “a big fishing expedition.”

Now they’ve ridden a recent 13-game winning streak to the top of the Central Division and are playing better than ever.

And Isiah Lord Thomas III is the leader of this bunch, the unquestioned soul of what may no longer be the Bad Boys, but simply the best basketball team in the league. Do the Pistons intimidate as they did last season? Probably not. Can you beat them four times over seven games? Same answer.

“He’s so competitive by nature,” Daly said, “that I don’t think he could change if he wanted to. But I think there is something that happens--it’s very subtle--when you win it. There isn’t that hard edge and there’s a certain amount of confidence that I know I feel.

“I don’t worry about what people think as much--writers, media, owners, big decisions--you make better decisions. And I think you have more confidence in your players, and vice versa.”

“I think it’s made him more mature,” said Aguirre, Thomas’s long-time friend. “He really talks to me all the time about figuring out which direction, what emotion to do it again. He is in more of a philosopher-type situation, figuring out how to do it again. He’s really into it, really into it.”

Thomas was thumbing through his mail in the spacious Pistons’ locker room an hour before Detroit played Washington recently. On the surface, there was little to squeeze from the game that followed--the Pistons led by 20 at the half and won by 30.

But this is all about motivations, how to stay focused, how to keep sharp when you could mail it in against a bad team. That’s the beauty of the defense, the psychology of being top dog. How do you do it?

“Right now, it’s still a learning process,” Thomas said. “You have to learn from everything during the course of a basketball season. It’s just like going to school. You have to progress before they let you go to the next level. The teacher tells you something new, and you can’t go on until you more or less master that skill.”

His numbers are rock-solid (18.5 points per game, 9.5 assists, team-high 952 steals), unusually low in one important area--field-goal percentage. A career 47 percent shooter, he is hitting just .440 this season, which if carried out would be his lowest percentage from the floor since his rookie season.

Part of the pressure of being the lead guard on the defending world champions?

“There’s always pressure on me,” he said. “That’s always the way it’s been. That’s just part of the responsibility of being a team leader. That’s just the way it goes . . . two and two is four.”

When Detroit fell behind a fast-breaking Chicago team at the start of the season, some people wondered out loud if the Pistons could sustain the effort to win back-to-back titles. The obvious thing was to point to the loss of Mahorn and the subsequent vacuum it created at power forward.

That was a problem, but what may have dulled the Pistons’ edge was the weariness of the chase. They had engaged themselves in a title chase in earnest for the better part of 36 months, and when that goal was achieved they almost had to take a step back.

You’re not as naive,” Thomas said. “You’re not the little kid on the block. You’re more or less looked at as the team everyone else reassesses itself against, instead of the the Lakers and Celtics. The experiences are totally different.

“When you win, you’re supposed to win, you’re supposed to play good. When you lose, it’s horrible. You’re not patted on the back, and you’re encouraged to improve as a basketball team.”

But the Pistons have found their feet. They held opponents to less than 50% shooting in only seven of their first 31 games, then did it eight times the next 13. Everyone points to the Lakers game Jan. 21 as a turning point. Los Angeles pushed Detroit around on the Pistons’ home floor and Thomas, obviously frustrated, was ejected in the last two minutes after hitting Mychal Thompson on the head.

After that game, the Pistons moved Aguirre to the bench, where he could concentrate more on scoring in a sixth-man role. Dennis Rodman started, getting the kind of minutes he probably deserves. He would rather remain a reserve, but the numbers don’t lie.