Dumars going with Double Secret Probation?
Joe Dumars plays the role of Dean Vernon Wormer
The reference is here. Chad Ford sat down with Joe Dumars to talk about the Eastern Conference Finals series against Cleveland and what the team needs to do to get reclaim the top spot in the conference.
Ford throws out a bad 80’s reference and Joe D does him one better with a 90s Gulf War reference. [Transcript from Philip Zaroo’s Full Court Press blog]
Ford: The Pistons’ effort was up and down depending on the scenario. How do you address that…get back that “eye of the tiger”?
Dumars: The only way I know you do it is by drawing a line [in the sand?]…Either the guys that stay here keep that edge or the ones who don’t, we’re going to move on…just show up and play or else.
Needless to say [but I’ll say it anyway], this approach is problematic. For one, the Bad Boys teams (which never allowed Michael Jordan to go off like LeBron James did in Game 5) had very strong leadership in Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer. So you didn’t need to have Jack McCloskey make ultimatums. Do the Pistons really have the type leadership on the team that can reign in the one player we all know Dumars is talking about? Clearly they don’t. So this approach isn’t bound to work.
The second problem is that when something happens that forces Joe Dumars’ hand it is going to completely destroy his negotiating leverage. How are the Indiana Pacers doing in the wake of Ron Artest going mental? Why was it that the Pistons were able to get Rasheed in a very uneven trade? If Sheed goes off the deep end - and given how much trouble he had controlling himself when the team was amongst the best in the league - how will he behave if the team starts to struggle?
Trading Rasheed Wallace now, when he is still widely acknowledged as being one of the best low post defenders and is still a very capable offensive player is the only way you are going to get anything approaching real value. All of the best players in the game rank in the top 10 in technical fouls [Sheed, Kobe, KG, AI, and…um…former Piston Mikki Moore]. So Sheed’s tech problem shouldn’t be a huge issue. The way he melted down at the end of Game 6 and would have been suspended for Game 7 if the game was necessary was the big problem. That’s what limits his value. But it hasn’t completely destroyed his value. A team like Phoenix will never win a championship unless they trade for a player like Rasheed Wallace.
If Dumars waits until Wallace starts to become ineffective - or worse - making a trade at that point will set the franchise back even further.
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