It was still, little movement at all. The few people walking around seemed to stare blankly. Occasionally, there would be a spasm of activity, and then nothing.
One would say that was the scene here Monday, the Memorial Day holiday, on the fringe of the city’s sleepy downtown near the hulks of the empty Indians’ baseball stadium and Cavaliers’ arena. Or it could have been the basketball court during any of the three Eastern Conference finals games between the Detroit Pistons and Cleveland Cavaliers.
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The Pistons lead 2-1 with Game 4 in Cleveland on Tuesday, and the reason this series is setting the NBA back years is because after telling people there’s more to the NBA than the last two minutes of each game, little has gone on in these three games until the last minute.
There has been high closing drama in each of these games, with LeBron James passing up a potential tying shot in the last seconds of Game 1, failing to convert on one in Game 2, and then concluding a terrific night in Game 3 with a closing 14-footer with 16.3 seconds left to effectively stay alive in the series.
Otherwise, it has been a lot of standing around and watching, the Cavs — and the rest of us — watching James, and the Pistons looking at their watches to try to figure out when this series will be over.
Been there last year, done that.
C’mon, Zydrunas Ilgauskas makes the immobile Chris Webber look like an Olympic gymnast. Drew Gooden is like the chicken who keeps quacking. He’s supposed to be a post-up force but spends much of his time fading away for 18-footers.
The news of the day is Larry Hughes is hurt and probably won’t play in Game 4. Actually, the news of the day would be if Hughes weren’t hurt.
Hughes, who isn’t really a point guard but plays one for the Cavs, will be replaced by Eric Snow, who has played 17 minutes in the series and hasn’t made a field goal, or Daniel Gibson, the X-factor of Game 3.
Gibson, a rookie second-round pick, came off the bench to score nine points and get in the way of Chauncey Billups and Tayshaun Prince, who were so anxious to see the tiny Gibson in pick-and-rolls they inexplicably brought the ball down to their ankles, where Gibson could reach up and swat it away.
Not that Gibson is bright-eyed, but he said Monday that growing up he used to pretend he was Billups while trying shots in his back yard.
“I watched him for a long time when I was in the back yard doing those back-down, fadeaway shots he does,” said Gibson, about nine years younger.
Move aside old man?
And this is all just so annoying to the Pistons, who took a 2-0 lead over the Cavs in last year’s conference semifinals, sleepwalked through three losses and then ignored the snooze and finished off the Cavs in seven.
Though less impressively this time, the Pistons won the first two games and then lost Game 3 here as Billups and Richard Hamilton were 6 of 22 for a combined 20 points against the relentless pressure and all-league defense of Sasha Pavlovic and Gibson.
The Cavs have been calling Billups, the Pistons’ only all-league player, the so-called head of the snake, which would make the rest of the Pistons some sort of slithery reptile, though no one seemed to object.
The Cavs trapped Billups often on the Pistons’ favored pick-and-roll play, and Billups, curiously, seemed to accept it and not try to slip the double-team.
“When you have two guys that average roughly 40 points a game between them, and they go into a game and they get half that, it puts your team very much at a disadvantage,” Pistons coach Flip Saunders said. “So they’ve got to bring it.”
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