Saunders Never Found True Love In Detroit

Flip Saunders never truly got entrenched in Detroit. He was the Pistons coach for three seasons, but two things about that: 1) GM Joe Dumars has a fetish for canning coaches after a couple years or so, and 2) you never got the feeling that Saunders was securing his place, about to defy the odds created by item #1 in this paragraph. He won a ton of games -- 176 of them in three years -- but couldn't push the Pistons past the NBA's Final Four. "When you get to where we were," Dumars said yesterday at the press conference announcing Saunders' ziggy, "you never feel like you're not good enough to get to the Finals. Nobody gets to the conference finals and wonders if they're good enough to move on." Dumars used those words to deflect any heat he might face from firing a coach with a winning percentage of over .700 in Detroit. What Joe D was saying was that the Pistons didn't luck themselves into these last three Final Fours. Yet they coul...