Detroit's bit players upstage Wolves

Having three Pistons All-Stars enjoy a night off turned out to be no break for the Wolves, who saw a backup guard lead Detroit to victory with a career game.

By JERRY ZGODA, Star Tribune

Last update: April 2, 2008 - 12:27 AM

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DETROIT 94, WOLVES 90 Up next: 8 tonight at Utah • TV: Ch. 45 (106.1-FM)

Target Center patrons who paid to watch Detroit Pistons star forward Rasheed Wallace sweat and yelp and flail at the air with a clenched fist in Minnesota for the only time this season needed to arrive early on Tuesday night.

Say, by suppertime.

Wallace, Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton all sat out a 94-90 victory over the Timberwolves in which Pistons coach Flip Saunders rested his three Eastern Conference All-Stars with 15 game still left in the regular season. His team won anyway, ending the Wolves' home winning streak at four games.

The Pistons trailed by 21 points in the second quarter and by seven at the fourth quarter's start and rallied against the Wolves regulars with a makeshift lineup that turned rookie guard Rodney Stuckey from unsung reserve to the night's star.

"This is the NBA, everybody is talented," forward Craig Smith said in a Wolves locker room that emptied in an instant afterward as everybody else apparently rushed for window seats and peanuts on a chartered flight to Utah.

The Wolves once led 43-22 on the scoreboard and 24-10 in the rebounding statistics and were outscored 72-47 and outrebounded 35-20 the rest of the way on a night when perhaps Saunders offered a little gesture to the franchise leaders who fired him three years ago after nine-plus seasons of service.

The Pistons scored 14 unanswered points in the first half's final 4 1/2 minutes, a turning point Wolves coach Randy Wittman attributed to players who suddenly stopped passing the ball as they had and dribbled too much.

Stuckey scored a career-high 27 points in 32 minutes. The Pistons' modified bench mauled the Wolves' regular reserves in scoring 40-19.

"Their bench kicked our rear ends," Wittman said.

Saunders said he sat down three starters as both a rest and a reward for players who never received their All-Star break and for a team, now 53-21, that's all but assured itself of the Eastern Conference's second playoff seed. Wallace and Billups built up a sweat in a pregame workout, then retired for the night.

Before the game, Saunders walked by Wittman and told him that Pistons' starting lineup wasn't an April Fool's joke. "We wanted to win the game," he said afterward.

He started Stuckey, Jarvis Hayes and Theo Ratliff and put Walter Herrmann, Amir Johnson, Juan Dixon and Arron Afflalo in prominent bench roles.

Stuckey, who started at point guard for Billups, forced Wolves point guard Randy Foye into four fourth-quarter fouls and grasped the game in the final 2:33, when he scored seven of Detroit's eight points in a closing 8-2 burst.

• Saunders returned to Target Center for the third time since he was fired with a 25-26 record midway through the 2004-05 season, and was reminded of former Wolf Malik Sealy, who was killed by a drunken driver in 2000. That same driver, Souksangouane Phengsene, was arrested early Sunday morning for drunken driving, his second such arrest since he was convicted of killing Sealy.

"That's the one thing I notice whenever I come in this building," Saunders said, gesturing to Sealy's retired jersey in the Target Center rafters. "That's, what, the second time or whatever for that guy. That's sad."

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