Detroit Free Press

So now the Pistons must win five games to take the crown. They already have won two, gotten credit for one, and ...

Five years ago, I did a breakfast interview with Joe Dumars. It was his final season as a Detroit Piston, and he ...

LOS ANGELES -- They were three seconds from the top of the castle. Three seconds from a hammerlock on this series. And then Kobe Bryant lifted as high as a man can go without a trampoline, and Richard Hamilton got a hand up but not enough body, and the ball flew toward the hoop with every ounce of Lakers legend spinning a cloud of pixie dust around it. You knew it was going in. You could have closed your eyes and seen it.

LOS ANGELES -- This was Sunday night, just minutes after the Pistons had stunned the Lakers in Game 1 at the ...

LOS ANGLES -- They arrived like the plumbers called to fix the movie stars' sink. Barely noticed, anonymous but ...

First, they pulled him off the bus. Literally. Suspended him from the job he loved, accused him of stealing money, said his team of high school girls, looking anxiously out the bus windows, would have to play its championship game without him.Then, over the next 18 months, like crows plucking at a carcass, certain forces in the Southfield school system slowly took away everything else Ben Kelso had worked for.

Bill Plaschke writes for the Los Angeles Times.Their leading scorer goes to work in the ideal accessory of all unfortunates who wear the name "Pistons" on their shirt.A mask.Their leading rebounder's unkempt hair has not been cut since the last time his team made a scoreboard sweat.About five years, he says.The only bit of greatness in their locker room is the engraving upon the one and only championship ring there.Lakers, it reads.

Things we forget about Tayshaun Prince: 1) He is only 24. 2) He barely played last season. 3) He is a college graduate. 4) He already has, in his young adult life, moved from the West to the Southeast to the Midwest. 5) While he looks like a cartoonishly skinny, open-mouthed kid, he grew up in Compton, Calif., the hard side of L.A., which means 6) he really wanted to be drafted by the Lakers and 7) he is about to go home and play them.