By now, you’ve probably seen that clip of Cade saying Detroit is bad or that image of the Pistons having the worst win/loss record of any team since 2019/20. That belies the franchise’s lack of success in the past decade or so. They haven’t won a playoff series since 2009, they haven’t made the playoff since 2019 - only the second time they’ve made it since 2008/09 - and if they were by some miracle to make it this year and lose their first game, they would set a record for the most consecutive playoff loses. That is a record they previously set with 14 straight playoff losses.
But let’s limit it to just 2019 and beyond to keep things simple. Since then, what would one say is the biggest contributing factor to the: Bad luck, age or mismanagement?
Just to go over some examples of each factor:
- Bad Luck
- Injuries, and plenty of them:
- Cade Cunningham started his rookie season recovering from injury and missed most of his sophomore season due to a fracture on his left shin
- After being traded to the Pistons in the 2018 offseason, Blake Griffin’s entire tenure with Detroit was plagued by injuries, most notably in 2020 where
- Currently, the Pistons are missing the interior presence of Jalen Duren who is out with an injury, as is one of their few spacers in Bojan Bogdanovic
- Falling in the lottery multiple times
- While they won the lottery in the deep 2021 draft, they’ve fallen quite a few times in the draft, notably dropping to the 5th pick despite holding the worst record in the league (Yes Ausur looks like a stud but that’s a pretty significant drop given those circumstances)
- The Pistons have drafted 7th, 1st, 5th and 5th the past 4 drafts; with the exception of 2021, they have fallen in 3 of those 4 drafts
- Injuries, and plenty of them:
- Age
- The Pistons are tied with the Jazz for the 6th youngest team in the NBA, with an average age of 25.1 years old
- Young teams tend to be pretty poor at defense and the Pistons have been consistently near the bottom of the league in defensive rating for the
- Jalen Duren, who seems to be their center of the future, only recently turned 20 years old
- Mismanagement
- Trading Saddiq Bey as part of a 3 teamer to land James Wiseman who is a) a player they’ve coveted for a while despite having drafted Duren in the prior year’s draft and b) is the 2nd reclamation big man project they’ve taken on after Marvin Bagley and thus created a massive logjam at the center position
- The Pistons have won a total of 4 games since this trade while Bey has quietly become one of the best low-volume shooters on the Hawks, something the Pistons desperately need
- Meanwhile, Wiseman has received a number of DNPs despite their FO being high on him
- Playing Killian Hayes at SG. I do not feel the need to elaborate on this.
- You could also argue drafting Hayes was a mistake but bear in mind this was the 2020 draft aka. the one where March Madness was cancelled due to a literal pandemic and several teams passed up on future All-Star/franchise PG Tyrese Haliburton, Tyrese Maxey or roleplayers in Desmond Bane, Devin Vassell, Precious Achiuwa, Josh Green and Cole Anthony
- They did snag Saddiq Bey in this draft 19th overall…but we now what they did with him
- Trading Saddiq Bey as part of a 3 teamer to land James Wiseman who is a) a player they’ve coveted for a while despite having drafted Duren in the prior year’s draft and b) is the 2nd reclamation big man project they’ve taken on after Marvin Bagley and thus created a massive logjam at the center position
If we’re going back to 08, it’s management for sure. Never seen the opinion of someone change as drastically as it did for Dumars
If you ain’t a desirable free agent destination is can be hard to get out of the dumps. Gotta hit on picks + establish a good culture.
It’s the Curse of Billups. Dumars making that deal for Iverson completely ruined them.
Great overall post. I think it’s mostly mismanagement, other teams have made more out of similar luck. Also just poor drafting it seems. They’re lucky the Hornets shipped them Duren.
Also, people are gonna get on your ass for calling Bane a role player lol
It’s management, should’ve been tanking when the Sixers were, instead we decided to start 3 bigs and try and win 40 games.
Worryingly for fans, the disgraceful start to the season might force Weaver to make a win now move that will set the franchise even further back than it already is.
All of the above has contributed. Not everything they’ve done has been a misfire, but enough of it has that it’s put them in a seemingly eternal tread of bad.
From an outsider’s perspective, I haven’t liked what Weaver’s been doing for a while now. You could sense early on he was going to hyperfocus on size, defense, and dude’s with “junkyard dog” personalities. He wanted to re-create the old Pistons as some sort of offering to the fans, and it just feels like he ignored too many other things like skill, fit, etc.
If I’m a Pistons fan, I’m not totally hopeless though. There is a good deal of young talent, and a Magic-esque progression isn’t out of the realm of possibility for them in the coming seasons. I just don’t know if Weaver’s the guy who’s gonna put them on the path to get there.
IMO they spent too long not being bad enough to get great picks, and didn’t get good value out of the draft. Here’s their main picks from 2010:
2010 #7 - Greg Monroe. Had a good career, but 2 of the next 3 picks were Hayward and PG13.
2011 #8 - Brandon Knight. Sucked. Kemba, Klay, Kawhi, Vuc all drafted shortly after.
2012 #9 - Andre Drummond. Actually a good pick. The rest of this draft was pretty bad.
2013 #8 - KCP. Good player. Multi-time champ. But missed Giannis, McCollum, Steven Adams.
2014 - got Dinwiddie in the second round, so credit for that.
2015 #8 - Stanley Johnson. This was a pretty bad draft, but they did miss on Booker and a couple other OK players.
2016 #18 - Henry Ellenson. Missed Beasley and LeVert.
2017 #12 - Luke Kennard. Right before Donovan Mitchell and Bam Adebayo.
2018 - got Bruce Brown in the second round, so again credit for that.
2019 #15 - Sekou Doumbouya. More than half of the remaining players drafted in the first round turned out better.
2020 #7 - Killian Hayes. Ouch. Over Hali and Vassell.
2021 #1 - Cade. Could turn it around, but man, that hurts for that to be your #1 pick.
2022 #5 - Ivey. Ehhh, let’s call that pick “incomplete”.
2023 #5 - Ausar. OK, this dude is ballin.That’s a #1 pick, 8 more picks in the top 10, and 3 more mid-firsts (and 2 years without a FRP due to trades.) I’d expect a team to have put together a pretty good core from that many lotto picks, but they really didn’t. Other teams with middling picks in that time period hit on Giannis, Kawhi, PG13, Bam, Haliburton all in the same part of the draft (not to mention Jokic going in the second round.) They got some good role players but didn’t find any stars. And not enough good role players, and the ones that left, they didn’t get a lot back by orchestrating trades or anything.
For a team that’s not a big FA destination and hasn’t pulled off a successful star trade (Blake couldn’t stay healthy), drafting poorly on top of it is not a recipe for success.