You probably do this, too: When an interesting basketball game is getting down to the end, you look at the scoreboard, you see which team is leading, and you try to figure what score that team can get to that the other cannot. I usually do it right around the five-minute mark of the fourth quarter. Watching Wednesday night's Game 5, between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Detroit Pistons, I hit upon my number with 3:57 to go. The Pistons were sitting on 100 points following a Dannis Jenkins and-one layup. Donovan Mitchell was ice-cold; James Harden absolutely could not create space for comfortable shots; Evan Mobley was sort of valiantly hurling himself into turnovers and wild off-balance floaters. The Cavaliers, sloppy and fading, were at 91. It's my own little Elam Ending: What is the score that only the Pistons can get to?
Could the Cavaliers make it to 106 points? It had taken them 2,643 seconds to score 91 points. Could they realistically score 15 points in the remaining 237 seconds? No, probably not, not without a miracle. Could the Pistons, meanwhile, pull six measly points out of somewhere between five and 12 possessions? Consider the likelihood of free throws. Consider the likelihood of intentional fouls. Consider that no one on the Cavs had figured out a reliable way of stopping Cade Cunningham from getting wherever he needed to go. My number, with 237 seconds left on the clock in Game 5, and with the home Pistons leading 100–91, was 106. This was not bold, nor is it high-level basketball analysis. It's not meant to be either: It's just a fun way to watch the end of a basketball game, and without pressure to be bold, you can have the satisfaction of never really being wrong.
The Cavaliers charged pretty good in the closing minutes of regulation, but not before first seeming to boot the game away. Max Strus buried a clutch three, but then the Pistons got an offensive rebound and a pitch out to Tobias Harris in the corner for a comfortable three-pointer, which he buried. The lead was back to nine points, but, more relevant to my formula, the Pistons now had 103 points, with three full minutes to produce just three more points. They can't lose!
They did lose, 117–111, in overtime. I so badly want this to be a moral failure, because one of my true weaknesses is a nagging subconscious urge to find and describe what actions a person could've taken to avoid their terrible fate. I've watched the tape and I'm sorry to say that the answer, in this case, is: Make more shots.
The Pistons were not always clean Wednesday night. In many cases they resorted to habits of the modern game better suited to a dreary January snoozer and the game-theorized best practices of an 82-game regular season. I grumbled once or twice through the game's first three quarters about over-dribbling, about pointless screens, about times when Cunningham would slow down the attack to engineer a switch, get the switch, and then dither with the ball long enough for the Cavs to re-switch, thus making a perfect waste of the first 16 seconds of a possession. There were also times when various Pistons guys would get the ball into the paint with a little space for a shot, but then freeze up and pivot around in a panic. I do wonder about rhythm, and whether offensive rhythm would be more prized in the optimized modern game if it were a thing that could be quantified. The Pistons, playing without Duncan Robinson and thus pinched more than is normal for offensive spacing, passed up decent shots as if expecting there to be a high-value shooter left open in the defensive scramble, but too many times this meant kick-outs to well-meaning interior guys, left open by design, or to not-very-open ho-hum options like Harris or Jenkins or Caris LeVert.
To the extent that this pivotal game boiled down to the Pistons blowing a nine-point lead late in the fourth quarter, none of this stuff satisfyingly explains the outcome. The Pistons benefited by what seemed like 1,000 live-ball Cleveland turnovers in the first half, and posted a stunning 20–2 advantage in first-half points off of turnovers. It eventually became easier to nitpick Detroit's offense, because beyond a certain point any fully coherent Cleveland possession seemed like a moral victory. Perhaps Detroit's lead would've been a bigger one if, say, the home team hadn't taken a couple of second-half shot-clock violations due to over-dribbling, or turned down perfectly respectable shots in or around the paint. In the second half the Pistons really did start to overthink things: Harris, who'd had success early getting to his antiquated midrange stuff, over-penetrated along the baseline and wound up forcing a shot amid Cleveland's rim-protectors that was not so unlike a turnover. Paul Reed at one point pumped his man into the air on the perimeter and then drove into space, but then weirdly rifled a dump-off pass to Cunningham from like two feet away, leading to a loose ball and then finally a desperate air-balled 35-footer.
The second half featured a lot of this sort of thing, from both teams, but Cleveland converting enough of this frenzied stuff into by-God shot attempts instead of turnovers meant that Detroit couldn't benefit from run-outs, and thus failed to maintain a lead that at one point of the first half was all the way out to 15 points. The only consistent thing either team had working was Cunningham's ability to get to spots, but this was such an obvious advantage for Detroit that when Cade knocked down a tie-breaking three-pointer with 6:41 to go, it felt like a back-breaker, like Detroit could almost play the clock the rest of the way. When the Cavs followed with a couple of awful possessions and Detroit turned a transition chance into a corner three to double the lead, the crowd exploded, the Cavs called a timeout, and the end seemed very close. The Cavs wasted another possession immediately following the stoppage, the Pistons had another runout, and Ausar Thompson made a couple of free throws to push the lead to eight points.
I want to be able to say that it all changed down the stretch, but it did not. Mitchell salvaged a busted sequence with a driving layup to cut the lead to seven, but the Pistons got not one but two respectable playoff-type looks on their subsequent possession, both missed. Mitchell had the ball stripped on a rim attack and had to fling a wild bounce-pass to nowhere to avoid a turnover, but Mobley, the trailer, was there to make the mess into a dunk. A nice Cunningham pass to Reed on the short-roll gave the big man a runway to the cup, but he hesitated into a gather dribble and then jumped into Mobley's chest, which allowed Mobley to get his fingertips onto the layup attempt. Reed got the rebound but was trapped, leading to a shot-clock violation. Kevin Harlan was on the money: "That hurt the Cavs," he exclaimed, noting that Reed's desperate pass had been intercepted by a sprinting Jarrett Allen just as the buzzer sounded, negating what would've been a pick-six. My formula was holding: Three points and 94 seconds away from victory, a shot-clock violation was a long way from the worst outcome of a Pistons possession.
The Cavs finally ran a coherent set and got a great shot, a Mobley three-pointer from dead-on that he buried to make it a two-point game. Detroit also ran a coherent set, waiting until the final 10 seconds of their next possession to trigger, then escaping a would-be trap with a quick pass to the free-throw line. Cleveland rotated and Jenkins tracked it, and he whipped the ball to Harris on the right wing, perfectly open for a good look at a three-pointer. Harris—and I know there are Pistons fans who would like to see this man locked into a diving bell and sunk to the deepest part of the ocean, not for this miss or anything he's done in this playoff run but for being the sort of guy who just broadly cannot be depended upon, really ever—simply missed it.
The subsequent Cavs possession was hilarious. Harden front-rimmed a not-graceful floater but was able to tap the rebound out to Mitchell. Mitchell, who before this moment has never in his life turned down a shot, record-scratched mid-air on a three-pointer, and had to sort of fling the ball back along the arc, where it was collected by Strus. Strus, who is also a great and ultra-willing shooter, similarly glitched and then grenade'd Mobley, who had to try to force a drive into traffic from the left wing. It sucks that it worked out this way, for being a totally anticlimactic way for an otherwise narratively interesting sequence to resolve, but Mobley was tugged lightly from behind by Harris, the referee spotted it, and a whistle moved the action to the stripe, where Mobley, a 61-percent free-throw shooter this season, tied the game.
The Pistons got a clean inbounds after a timeout, and a relatively comfortable midranger from Cunningham. That it missed was no terrible shock, but Harris grabbed the rebound and the Pistons should've gotten another good look. Instead they got a bizarre running drifting mess of an airball from LeVert, another man that certain long-suffering Detroiters would like to see strapped inside a pressurized vessel and launched either down a bottomless well or into the cosmos.
We cannot know for sure whether reaching 106 points would've won the game in regulation for Detroit. But we can know that the Pistons did not score a point in the final three minutes of the fourth quarter, not because Cleveland's defense noticeably stiffened, and also not because they themselves suddenly started flapping their elbows and clucking like chickens. Nothing is more annoying than "it's a make-or-miss game" as postgame analysis. The Pistons, poor sonofaguns, missed shots. They weren't always great shots, but they were shots. They went 0-for-6 with a pair of shot-clock violations. You could imagine Gregg Easterbrook smirking and writing "GAME OVER" into his notebook after this last one; whether the Pistons ever cheated the basketball gods, it certainly seemed like somewhere in there they psyched themselves to hell.
You can't do the little fake Elam Ending at the start of overtime. Overtime is a crapshoot. Cleveland scored first, Cunningham's layup in response rolled and bounced around the rim before tipping out, Mitchell answered with a bucket, and from that point on the Pistons were on the back foot. The Cavs posted an improbable 14 points in the five-minute frame, took the first road win of the series, and will have a crack in Cleveland at closing out the East's top seed.
This is a fun series: There are no superhuman marvels or cynically optimized basketball machines to break any parts of the game, just two teams who know each other very well and thus have to do a lot of making the most of what is available. The Pistons were tantalizingly, agonizingly close to holding serve Wednesday night. Unfortunately, the game's about a bucket.
