Maybe because Aron Baynes played shoulder to shoulder with Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and pals for all of his NBA career before moving to the Pistons, he knows them as men and not as basketball gods. Baynes might have profound respect for the Spurs, but less than outright awe.

“It was a good marker for us,” Baynes said after the Pistons hung even with the Spurs for a half before losing and having their four-game winning streak snapped by a team unbeaten at home this season. “When we play the right way, we know we can play with them and that was evident in the first half. But it’s one of those things. We’ve got to play 48 minutes the right way and then we know we can compete.”

The Pistons are playing for the playoffs over these final 21 games. But they’re really playing for their future. Getting to the playoffs this season maybe nudges that future a little closer to the present. But just engaging in an honest-to-goodness playoff chase for the first time in seven seasons – since long before anyone on their roster wore their uniform, and before almost all of them wore any NBA uniform – accomplishes a lot of that, too.

There is only one way to forge the competitive mettle of a team and that’s playing meaningful basketball games when both teams have seasons on the line. How many of those games have any Pistons played?

Well, Baynes played several, though not as a mainstay with the Spurs. Reggie Jackson had a significant role with Oklahoma City, especially when injuries kept Russell Westbrook out of big playoff games. Joel Anthony played a role on Miami’s championship teams, but a very limited one with the Pistons as he nears the end of his career.

That’s about it, really. Steve Blake and Anthony Tolliver are veterans who’ve played on some pretty good teams and are staples of Stan Van Gundy’s second unit, but they don’t represent the future of the Pistons.

And that’s why this last quarter of the season is so big for them. They remain frightfully young with Marcus Morris, at 26, their oldest starter and an average age of 23.8 for the five of them. Throw sixth man Stanley Johnson, 19, in the mix and the average drops to 23.0.

That’s the core Van Gundy has built, adding Morris, Jackson, Johnson and Tobias Harris to the only two players left he inherited, Andre Drummond and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Baynes and Darrun Hilliard are two others he knows he’ll have for next season, at least.

He’d like to keep them all around for the future and add a few more pieces. But this is the first time they’ll go through the cauldron of a playoff race – and, if that goes well, the playoffs themselves – and nothing hastens a team’s growth cycle quite like those games.

The Pistons have to survive the next 12 days with five of the six games scheduled on the road, including a four-game road trip that will see them visit two of the teams they’re fighting for the remaining Eastern Conference playoff berths, Charlotte and Washington.

Then they have a nine-game home stand that will see them play Atlanta – another of those teams – twice, plus Charlotte again. They’ve got two games left with Miami, another one with Washington and a big one at Chicago on April 2 that might eventually prove a knockout game for the loser.

The Pistons get 12 of their last 21 at home. But the schedule has at least as many pitfalls as pluses for them. They still have six back-to-back sets crammed into the season’s final 39 days, including three in the final 13 days.

Fourteen of those 21 games come against teams either currently in the playoff field or on the cusp of it in the case of Chicago and Washington, both 30-30 and one-half game behind the Pistons. All of those 14 games come against teams that have been in the playoffs within the last two years.

There are 10 teams in the East .500 or better with a quarter of the season to play. There’s no sneaking in the side door to the postseason this year. If the Pistons make it, they’ll have earned every bit of it. And what a giant leap forward it would be for Van Gundy and his administration, less than two years from taking over a 29-win team without its lottery pick.

But even if they come up a game or two short, they’ll be that much farther along in their evolution for the experience of playing meaningful basketball games into April for the first time in seven years. Experiencing the playoffs is the best way to learn how to succeed in the playoffs. But experiencing a playoff chase comes with its own reward, too. And the Pistons – once again, average age of the starters, less than 24 – have guaranteed themselves that much already this season.