Pistons
The Sixers will look to get to .500 for the first time this season when they square off against the Detorit Pistons tonight at the Wells Fargo Center.

So, yeah, there's that storyline, but there's also this one, which leads us to ask just how many Detroit Pistons will the Sixers be playing?

Detroit News is reporting that several of the Pistons' players refused to attend Friday morning's shootaround, in an apparent protest against their head coach, John Kuester. Tracy McGrady, Tayshaun Prince, Rip Hamilton, Ben Wallace, and Chris Wilcox were among them.

You thought it was bad with Eddie Jordan? At least our players showed up to practice. More commentary on "practice" from a special guest (oh yeah, you know what's coming) and Kuester's plans for tonight after the jump.


Ahhhhh, it never gets old… anyway…

The players absent from today's shootaround may not play tonight, according to coach Kuester.

Via the Detroit Free Press:

“We’ll go with the group that was here,” said Kuester, who deflected direct questions about what was occurring. “We got a number of guys that have a bug, but these guys went through shootaround the way it was supposed to.

“We have some things, some excuses, not excuses, but absences because of headache and stuff like that.

“We’ll go with this group right here because they went through shootaround.”

 

So the Pistons sound like they are going with just six players. It also looks like coach Kuester may be on a lonely island sooner than later. How can you continue to coach a team where half of your players refuse to play for you, let alone practice?

Practice?!

It really makes you begin to appreciate where the Sixers are now. They, by the way, have a coach that the players want to play for. Doug Collins is, in my estimation, part of the conversation for NBA Coach of the Year.

Whatever the case, it shouldn't be too much of a challenge for the Sixers to beat a potentially heavily-depleted Pistons team that only has seven wins on the road all season.

.500, here they come. (They better, I'm going to the game tonight… I'll be pissed)

H/T to Spike Eskin