The Pistons limped out of The Palace a week ago with their playoff hopes in tatters. They’d just lost their fifth straight game. Their trade with Houston for Donatas Motiejunas was on the verge of collapse. Anthony Davis had just put up 59 points against them. And they were jetting to Cleveland for a date with LeBron James and the No. 1 team in the Eastern Conference.

Fast forward seven days. With Sunday’s 114-101 win over Toronto in a devastatingly efficient offensive performance – their 57.7 percent shooting smashed their previous season’s best and their 28 assists tied a season high – the Pistons are on a four-game winning streak, tying their season’s longest and standing as the top current streak in the Eastern Conference.

They’ve pulled into a virtual tie with both Chicago and Charlotte for the last two playoff spots and are just one-half game out of the No. 6 spot, currently Indiana’s.

Their offense has come alive with the addition of Tobias Harris. They’re getting bench contributions from the unlikeliest of sources – including D-League call-up Justin Harper – and they’ve seen Andre Drummond return to the form of November and December that cemented his first All-Star berth.

To what do the Pistons attribute their dramatic 180?

“Young, dumb and we don’t know no better,” Reggie Jackson grinned. “That’s who we are. We just continue to fight. We continue to battle.”

Jackson brought everything back to Drummond (15 points, 18 boards in 30 minutes for his NBA season-best 13th straight double-double) and his renewed commitment to defense.

“I can’t reiterate enough how much our defense is really allowing us to be who we are offensively and how much credit needs to go to Andre Drummond,” he said.

“Andre’s back to getting huge numbers on the boards again,” Stan Van Gundy said. “He had been in a long stretch of what would be great rebounding for anyone else but was a down stretch for him. He was only getting like 12, 12½ a game, which would’ve only made him like the second- or third-best rebounder in the league. And now he’s back 15-plus every night.”

But the offense was even better than the defense this time around and Jackson has driven the improvement at that end with a nod to Harris for the way his versatility has helped complete the puzzle. All five starters took between nine and 12 shots and scored between the 14 Harris and Marcus Morris put up to the 19 – plus eight assists for the second straight night – for Jackson.

“The ball’s just been moving and everybody’s taking their shots,” Jackson said. “No one’s shying away from their shots.”

“It’s been great ball movement,” Morris said. “Reggie’s doing a great job getting guys their touches and we’re just sharing the ball.”

For as well as Pistons starters are playing – and their plus-minus numbers were startling, led by the plus-30 in 36 minutes for Kentavious Caldwell-Pope – perhaps the key stretch came when Steve Blake took over for Jackson with 3:21 left in the third quarter. The Pistons closed the quarter with a 12-6 run to go ahead by 17 and they led by 22 when Jackson returned with 7:10 to go. Blake, after a rough first half in which he committed four of the team’s seven turnovers and went scoreless, had eight points and four assists in that eight-minute span when the Pistons effectively won the game.

“He was great,” Van Gundy said. “I just said to him at halftime, real quick – you don’t need to talk to Steve a lot – I said, ‘You’ve been at this a looong time. Just have a great second half.’ And then he played really, really well in the second half. Passes, threes, teamed up with Aron (Baynes) a couple of times down there. It was just really, really good.”

It was really, really good all the way around. Offense, defense, starters, bench, ball movement, you name it. Now their reward? A trip to San Antonio, where the Spurs are a preposterous 28-0.

“That’s pretty good,” Van Gundy deadpanned. “San Antonio’s a decent home team. So that’ll be a nice challenge and then you’ve got five more road games after that in the next six. So it’s not going to get any easier and that’s OK. We just need to keep competing and moving forward as a team.”

What a difference a week makes.