Last night was just a simple case of a good team toying with a bad team and eventually picking the bad team apart.  The game was so bad that even the Pistons' scrubs beat the Clippers' scrubs terribly.  and as for the fan support...don't ask.  

Heisler--with a little Simers paragraph too--goes after Sterling this morning, breaking the news that DTS still hasn't talked to Dunleavy since the December fracas.  And apparently this is the reason why the Memphis deal for Mike Miller didn't go down, although the details of that are unclear.  No mention of how the Cassell deal somehow managed to happen in the same dysfunctional climate.  One of them, Simers I think, floats the idea that it would benefit DTS to fire Dunleavy now, because he could get another coaching job, which would mitigate DTS paying him.  But why do I feel like we'd be hearing Dunleavy on ESPN or TNT for the next three years, before he goes to work for another franchise?

Of course DTS and the Clips are a big fat pinata.  We all know that.  And I'm not really going to be on the side of DTS.  If he's not talking to Dunleavy, that's ridiculous.  But there are two sides to every story.

When your team is slogging through a horrendous season, one of the things you look forward to is a high first round pick.  Call it a Saviour Syndrome.  Look at Boston last year, whose fans, led by Simmons, were dying to get Kevin Durant.  Would they have been happy to get a solid, established, second-tier player on their roster like Mike Miller before the deadline in exchange for their pick?

On top of that, you have Memphis giving the Lakers Gasol for... what was that again?  What did the Lakers give up?  So when Memphis asks for a very high pick in exchange for a player who is vastly inferior to Gasol, it's not unreasonable to pause.  If the Grizzlies had thrown Crittenden into the trade (or maybe Lowery--I don't know him very well), that would cover the bases a little better and would be hard to turn down.

But instead we get the analysis that DTS is a doofus and giving away the pick was a no-brainer.  Draft picks take time to develop--but there's no discussion of Al Thornton.  Or how, with the emergence of Thornton, the great play of Maggette, and if Mobley could get healthy it's not clear that Miller is so obviously the answer.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  But with Mobley, Livingston, and Brevin Knight on the roster they would have a little time for a really great player to develop.  And at 5-8 they might stumble onto a Brandon Roy or a Kirk Hinrich.  There are probably some other names that I'm leaving out.  But OJ Mayo looked pretty good yesterday (as did James Harden).  Would you rather have Mayo or Miller?  How would Miller have affected the salary issues? And we get to watch Bayless today (plus a couple of Bruins I won't mention).

My anti-fondest Clipper-Pistons memory was when one of my Clipper favorites, Big Z (a former Piston) was finally healthy and filling in for an injured Kaman I think.  This might have been right after Z's big 18 rebound game against the Warriors off the bench.  (Olowokancer had a 20 rebound game?!--give that guy $65 million!)  And then Sheed just mugged Z somehow, I don't remember exactly, and Z was out of commission for a while.  But it was at one of those times when Z seemed like a better starter than the slow-developing Kaman, and Piston thuggery took away his shot.

It was great to see Kaman out there.  He looked good for about 5 minutes, and then his offense fluttered away.  But it's a different team, obviously, with a man in the middle.  A whole lot of Josh Powell--I like him, but this is probably too strong a dose.  In a meaningless 5 minutes Fazekas did not look very encouraging, I must say, and Barrett doesn't seem like he's going to do anything.  But this was the Pistons, I guess.