CLEVELAND — Last season, JB Bickerstaff began his new tenure at the helm of the Detroit Pistons after his firing by the Cavaliers . While doing so, he watched as Kenny Atkinson and the Cavs raced to a 15-0 start and a 64-win season, along with the No. 1 seed in the East.
This year, the Cavs and the rest of the Eastern Conference are looking up at Bickerstaff and the Pistons.
Entering Jan. 7, the Pistons were 27-9 and holding the top spot in the East. In Bickerstaff's second year in Detroit, only the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder had a better record at 30-7.
Bickerstaff's Pistons came away with a 114-110 win over Kenny Atkinson's Cavaliers on Jan. 4, when second-quarter woes again led to the Cavs' downfall .
The Pistons' quick rise from a rebuilding team into a serious playoff contender mirrors Bickerstaff's time with the Cavs, when a team that won 22 games in his first full season then beat expectations by winning 44 and 51 games in next two years, respectively. Bickerstaff played a major role in that accelerated turnaround for the franchise, though in the end he wasn't able to find the same success in the playoffs.
That led to the Cavs firing him and hiring Atkinson in an effort to find a coach essentially tailored to the roster, and with the direct goal of reaching a level of playoff success that hasn't been achieved in Cleveland by a LeBron James-less roster since the 1990s.
Bickerstaff took over a Pistons team that had won 14 games the year before and turned it into a 44-win squad last season. The Pistons are rolling now and look to be in a similar position as when he was with the Cavs and they were trying to prove they were legit contenders in the East.
Speaking in Cleveland recently, Bickerstaff noted how the ever-changing landscape of the NBA has, in a way, made some aspects of coaching in the league simpler. It seems as though at least with turning around a rebuilding franchise, Bickerstaff has some things figured out.
"I mean, it's made it easier, to be honest with you. I feel like we're in a place where you don't need to overcomplicate it anymore," Bickerstaff said before the Cavs-Pistons game at Rocket Arena. "It's important and it's easy to try to master the simple things because there is such a variance in style of play that you see night-by-night, coach-by-coach, but it still comes back to the fundamentals of the game and the simple things, and being able to execute those simple things and the willingness of your guys to do those simple things over and over and over again.
"It's hilarious to me when you watch the game, how just throwing the ball to the open man isn't the easiest thing that's done every night. But when you look at the best offenses in the league, that's all they do is throw the ball to the open man. And it's just not as common as you would like, but it's those small, simple things that if you can master and your guys are willing to master, they can help you have success."
And if there's one thing Bickerstaff learned in his time with Cleveland that he was able to carry over to Detroit, it was being able to trust in what they're building long-term. In a word, it's the "process."
"I think that's the thing that helped me the most, especially that last year here in Cleveland, is not being results-driven, but being process-driven," Bickerstaff said. "And I think that's what's helped me and kind of transformed my career, to be honest with you, is to be able to have that mindset that you can't get caught up in the results. Your focus has to be on doing the right things every single day. And if you do the right things and you have the right people with you, the results will be what you want them to be."
Ryan Lewis covers the Cleveland Guardians and Cavaliers for the Akron Beacon Journal. He can be reached at rlewis1@gannett.com
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Ex-Cavs coach JB Bickerstaff fueling a turnaround with Detroit Pistons
