Vince Ellis

Detroit Free Press

During a key stretch of Sunday's 96-94 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Detroit Pistons went more than five minutes without scoring a point.

And the Pistons only managed seven points in their last 22 possessions in Saturday's 108-101 overtime loss to the dreadful Philadelphia 76ers. They scored only a single free throw in overtime.

It's quite apparent that the team's 12-game losing streak is in players' heads and that they are tensing up in tight games. Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy admitted as much before the Thunder loss.

"Other guys are noticing it within guys," he said. "I don't think there's really any dispute. It's a thing with players where nobody's going to admit that they're playing tight, but yet they see it in everybody else.

"It's certainly there and it's sort of inexplicable to me. You go into a game, you're 3-16 (before Saturday's loss), what's the pressure coming down the stretch? I don't really get it. But we have a history of it, so now we're going to have to overcome it. I don't really know the answer to that."

After a Greg Monroe free throw tied the Thunder game at 75-75 with 27.2 seconds left in the third quarter, the Pistons went scoreless until a D.J. Augustin triple with 7:26 remaining. A tied game became a nine-point deficit.

The Pistons missed seven shots during the stretch, including an Andre Drummond alley-oop and a Josh Smith lay-up. Players have been rushing and aiming shots when another loss becomes a stark probability.

"We played carefree, for the most part -- maybe a five-minute stretch where we were letting things kind of get to us," Smith said after the Thunder loss. "Other than that, we were carefree.

"We gotta do that. We gotta play no-agenda basketball and play like we got nothing to lose."

Contact Vince Ellis at vellis@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @vincent_ellis56.