The Pistons deal for Tobias Harris won near-unanimous acclaim from fans and analysts for the addition of a uniquely talented player who fit into the sweet spot of the team’s talented young core as a 23-year-old.

But it came with a caveat: A team already struggling to keep up from the 3-point line had just dealt its most consistent 3-point threat, Ersan Ilyasova, and replaced him with a less accomplished shooter.

Even if the Pistons won the trade on talent, the fit would have to be figured out. And there really wasn’t time to figure much out in an Eastern Conference playoff race where nobody’s waiting around. The Pistons might have won the future, but the present grew a little murkier.

So, go figure. In Harris’ four-plus games as a starter – he got a battlefield promotion a game ahead of anticipated when Anthony Tolliver went out early in last week’s loss to New Orleans – the Pistons have had their most prolific five-game stretch of the season from the 3-point arc. To make the story a little stranger, Tolliver – second to Reggie Jackson in 3-point percentage among rotation regulars – has played a total of eight minutes in those five games due to his knee injury.

They’ve made 55 triples over that span, an average of 11 a game, two more – six points more – than their season average. They’re shooting about 1.2 more 3-pointers each game. They’ve shot it at .396 and have pulled their season average up over those five games from .337 to .342. That still ranks 23rd in the league, but it’s creeping closer to the league average of .352.

So … why? How?

“The last five games, the ball moved,” Stan Van Gundy said. “We’ve been much better sharing the ball. They know – they’ve talked about it more than I have – when the ball is moving, you create good feelings and energy and guys want to play. When it’s stagnant and you’re standing around, watching guys go one on one, it’s no fun. It’s frustrating and you don’t really have the desire to compete the way you do when the ball is moving and everybody’s involved in the game.”

It perhaps isn’t a universal formula for success. Teams that feature dominant one-on-one scorers might have less ball movement and more isolations. But is it critical for the way the Pistons are built?

“Most definitely,” Harris said. “Just distribute the ball and see who’s got it going and go off the guy and let him make the plays for other guys is key for us. It just goes to show our chemistry and how well we’ve been playing together these last couple of games.”

All five starters took between nine and 12 shots in Sunday’s win over Toronto, when the Pistons tied their season high with 28 assists. All five starters have been in double figures in all four of Harris’ starts. The Pistons average 18.7 assists a game, 27th in the NBA, but they’re at 21.8 over their last five games and at 24.7 over the last three.

“It’s been great ball movement,” said Marcus Morris, himself a big part of that with 4.2 assists a game over the last five, including a career-best eight against Philadelphia. “Reggie’s doing a great job getting guys their touches and we’re just sharing the ball.”

Jackson and Morris both say the addition of Harris has allowed the Pistons to play at a higher tempo more in tune with the group’s strengths. Harris’ ability to attack off the dribble has perhaps taken some of the pressure off Jackson to be solely responsible for creating offense, allowing him to pick his spots to attack more forcefully when he does.

Van Gundy has been vexed by Pistons 3-point shooting this season. He’s known since taking over that with Drummond to build around it was imperative to add shooting and he’s attempted to balance that with the glaring need to upgrade talent in any way necessary. But if you’d have told him before the season began that the Pistons would languish in the lower third of teams in 3-point shooting for much of the season, it would have unpleasantly surprised him by more than a little.

“It would have. Yeah, it would,” he said. “We just have not shot it well. Reggie has shot it well. Steve (Blake) has shot it pretty well. But other than that …”

The analytics folks should love the raw numbers the Pistons have produced. They’ve taken about 200 more 3-point shots than the average team and allowed opponents to take about 200 less than the norm. If they’d managed to stay in the middle of the pack in accuracy, they’d probably be on their way to home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs instead of on the bubble for a postseason berth of any sort.

But to the extent a five-game sample size can be trusted, they appear to have unlocked the key to 3-point success: ball movement.

“I’ve been encouraged by our (recent) ball movement,” Van Gundy said before the Pistons knocked down 11 first-half triples, a season high, in 19 attempts at Milwaukee in Saturday’s win. “I think ball movement has a lot to do with how well you shoot the ball because you get easier shots, so hopefully that will continue to improve.”

With a little more than a quarter of the season left and every win more precious than the last, it’s not a stretch to suggest that sustaining their recent pattern of improved ball movement – hand in hand with the stingier defense they’ve also played over those games – will determine the Pistons’ playoff fate.