http://www.nba.com/pistons/news/ripatflip_061006.html

Big Ben's bashing suggests parting was best
A Rip at Flip
By Keith Langlois


Flip Saunders was talking about something else entirely as he tried to
explain last season’s Pistons playoff funk in May, as a fog quite literally
enveloped them in Cleveland, and said that “sometimes your greatest strength
becomes your greatest weakness.”
But he might as well have been talking about Ben Wallace.

Because Big Ben’s greatest strength – an inexhaustible supply of pride –
became his greatest weakness.

Pride took him from an undrafted free agent from Virginia Union – a kid the
Boston Celtics took a look at and decided to recast as a small forward
before waiving him off their summer roster – and turned him into a four-time
NBA Defensive Player of the Year, an All-Star, the greatest rebounder of his
generation, a world champion and the face of his franchise.

None of it would have happened without that boundless wellspring of pride
gurgling within the block of chiseled granite who called Detroit home for
six giddy seasons.

But when he lashed out at Flip Saunders the way he did this week to an
ESPN.com writer – and cited his relationship with Rick Carlisle as fruitful
in the process (hah!) – it emphatically confirmed what many around the
Pistons had grown to suspect: It was absolutely best that these parties go
their separate ways.

“I didn’t like the way we handled things,” Wallace told ESPN. “We got away
from our bread and butter, and that’s on the defensive end. I hear him
saying now that I’m gone he can open up the playbook. I laugh at it.
Everyone’s looking for something, and for him to say that, he’s fishing for
getting a reaction out of me. It’s funny to me, real comical. I never
thought you could win when you’ve got five guys on the floor looking for the
ball and no one out there doing the little things. So that’s on him. If he
feels like that, go ahead.”

Whoo! Where do you begin?

With this line: “I never thought you could win when you’ve got five guys on
the floor looking for the ball and no one out there doing the little
things.” Wait a minute? Wasn’t that the problem? Ben Wallace “wanting the
ball” is what made it five guys looking for the ball. No one doing the
little things? Isn’t that what made him rich, a Detroit icon and the most
coveted free agent in the class of ’06?

Saunders took the high road – mostly – Friday when prodded for a reaction to
Big Ben’s rant. But this whole issue clearly chafes him, and for good
reason.

The Pistons brought him here not only because a championship-ready team
needed a coach with credentials and he was the best one out there at the
time of the messy Brown divorce, but also because Joe Dumars understood the
changing NBA would require more offense of the Pistons – Saunders’ forte.

“Ben gave a lot to this organization,” Saunders said, but when asked for
comment on Wallace’s contention that when they talked at the start of last
year and nothing changed, Wallace cut off communication, he added, “We had
three or four talks. The first time was after the Utah game and the first
thing we talked about was him getting the ball more. That’s where it usually
initiated.”

Another major burr in Big Ben’s behind: In desperate straits in the fourth
quarter of Game 6 at Miami, trailing 3-2 in the series, Saunders sat Wallace
for the duration, partly because of Wallace’s 27 percent playoff foul
shooting and the certainty that Miami would deliberately foul him, partly
because the Pistons just plain needed points.

“Let’s just put it this way,” Saunders said. “That’s the only quarter we
outscored Miami. … Hey, it was tough for me to watch, too. As a competitor,
you always want to be out there. I don’t fault him.”

There were moments under Larry Brown, when Ben got the ball and moved it
somewhere else quickly, when the offense was a model of clockwork
efficiency.

But let’s be honest: Most of the time when Big Ben got the ball, it was a
Keystone Kops adventure. His jump shot was thoroughly unreliable. He was
about a 70 percent dunker because of disproportionately small hands. And
when he’d try to make like Dr. J, taking the ball from the wing to the rim
in a series of swoops and pirouettes, it never quite ended the way that
other famous ’fro’s forays would.

And then there was his free-throw shooting.

On top of a league determined to alter the balance between offense and
defense to the former.

So Flip Saunders would have been madly irresponsible to put his efforts into
appeasing Big Ben’s enormous pride – his strength, his weakness – at the
expense of what was best for his team. And Big Ben’s teammates, as much as
they admired him and genuinely liked him, knew where the line between right
and wrong was on this, too.

“The game is changing,” Chauncey Billups said Friday. “After we won the
championship and San Antonio won it back to back, two great defensive teams,
they changed the rules. They wanted to make the game a lot more exciting.
Because of that you’ve got teams playing small ball. For somebody like Ben,
who is the best rebounder and defender in the league, it’s starting to make
it difficult.

“Ben’s the best defensive player in the world. And you like to have it where
the things you do best, the coach believes in the most. When Flip came here
he was in a tough position. He came to jump-start our offense a little bit.
Our defense had been so dominant. I guess Ben didn’t like that. At times, it
made us better, I thought, but at the end of the season it didn’t work out.”

It’s now becoming increasingly clear that high on the list of reasons that
it didn’t work out – somewhere between Rasheed Wallace’s tweaked ankle and
the physical and emotional fatigue of a season that began as a sprint – was
Ben Wallace’s discontent.

Because he had been such a good soldier for his first five-plus seasons,
everyone rightfully gave him the benefit of the doubt when Ben refused to
re-enter that late-season game in Orlando. Turns out it was much more
telling than anyone wanted to believe.

The fact that he cited Carlisle along with Larry Brown, Jim Lynam and Doc
Rivers as his favorite coaches is a window into how suicidal it would have
been for the Pistons to bring him back – never mind the paralyzing effect it
would have had on their salary structure and their future roster
maneuverability.

Ben wouldn’t even talk to Carlisle after Carlisle’s first season, when he
caused Wallace great affront during his exit interview. Wallace told
Carlisle he thought he could improve as an offensive player, Carlisle told
him to never mind and just concentrate on defense and rebounding, and that
was it.

Carlisle handled it poorly, of course – what harm would it have done to
encourage Wallace to hone his jump shot, ballhandling and foul shooting? But
that misses the larger point: If Ben Wallace now ranks Flip Saunders
somewhere beneath Rick Carlisle on his list of favorite coaches, it was time
to cut bait.

Not that it really would have mattered who was coaching the Pistons this
season. Big Ben wanted the ball in his hands more than a player of painfully
limited offensive ability should have it. He wanted to win games 68-66 in a
league that has done everything in its power to legislate against that model
for winning. Most of all, he wanted to be at the center of success for the
franchise that he led back to glory.

Ben Wallace became the Pistons’ greatest strength as they became champions.
But his anti-Flip diatribe this week confirms the suspicion that, had he
stayed, he might well have become their greatest weakness.

In article <egaspl$3srq$1@netnews.upenn.edu>, "Ben" <b@s.cx> wrote:



Logic 101: the Pistons were a more offense-oriented team from the first
day of the season, but Ben held them back from becoming a more
offense-oriented team.

Okay...

Guess it had nothing to do with a coach renowned for his playoff chokes
and who ran his starting 5 into the ground during a season when they ran
away with the first seed.

But I agree, keep it coming.