Content retrieved from the archive link
The worst team in town is the biggest story in town, at least behind the Detroit Lions, though the attention the Detroit Pistons are drawing for setting the wrong kind of history won’t last. Apathy will replace anger — it may be already — and the losing will fade into oblivion.
For now, though, Pistons fans are mad, perhaps a little stunned, and obviously confused that the rebuild already seems to be finished. Which means it’s time to start rebuilding the rebuild.
Crazy? A little, sure. But hardly unprecedented. Still, other cities’ misery isn’t the fix anyone is looking for at the moment. Just a single win. Along with a plan. And a sign the franchise building block can be more than a secondary playmaker who struggles to finish at the rim.
At his best, Cade Cunningham can take over a game and bend the court. And if he were surrounded by more consistent teammates — and quality 3-point shooters! — perhaps we’d see him do this more frequently.
Yet at some point, the lead dog has to bring the others to the bowl, and Cunningham has yet to show he can do that consistently.
This, more than anything else regarding the Pistons’ future, is the question: Does this franchise have a franchise guy?
That it's hard to answer contributes to the growing lack of hope. So, let’s talk about hope, and the lack of it, and what that feels like when the search for light gets harder by the day.
The Pistons are bereft of hope. No place in professional sports is worse.
The players are disconnected from the coach. The coach is disconnected from the front office. The front office is disconnected from a future. The owner is disconnected from the fans.
This is how it seems, anyway, right? That there are chasms between the moving parts of this flailing NBA franchise?
How else to explain the lack of consistent fight? The constant fourth-quarter collapses? The endless turnovers, the fouling?
How else to explain sitting last year’s No. 5 pick, Jaden Ivey, for the entire first quarter Wednesday in loss No. 18 of a losing streak that hit 19 on Friday? How else to explain hockey-style subbing in reserves that can’t produce? Or not making sure one of the two best players is always on the floor?
Everyone appears defeated. One loss feels like the bottom ... until the next loss feels worse, like the loss to Memphis felt Wednesday night.
The Grizzlies were without Ja Morant and three of their top six rotational players. Somehow, the Pistons led after three quarters.
Yet Desmond Bane, Jaren Jackson Jr. and a handful of role players ran the Pistons off the court in the fourth quarter, delivering a deluge of easy layups and open jumpers. Bane dropped a career-high 49 points.
Surprising?
Sadly, yes, but then that’s where we are with the worst team in basketball — maybe the worst team in all professional sports. Certainly, they're the worst team in Pistons’ history, surprised they’d managed a two-point lead after three quarters against a bottom-five team.
This team is headed toward history — ignoble history — unless something miraculously changes, like if ownership, the front office and the entire roster were to swap out with, say, San Antonio. Oh, wait, the Spurs have lost 16 straight, were nearly as bad last season, and have played sub-.500 basketball the last four years.
Yes, they have 2023 No. 1 overall pick Victor Wembanyama. That’s a different kind of future. A hopeful kind of future. They also have ownership that has overseen titles, one of the best front offices in the NBA and an all-time coach.
And if they’re struggling, what does this mean for the Pistons?
More existential questions, like: Who are they? And: Is there a single future All-Star on the team?
A 19-game losing streak will do this. Losing 43 of 47 will do this, too. Take a look at the schedule and it’s not hard to see a similarly dismal stretch ahead.
Where can the Pistons get a win? Against the Utah Jazz (7-15) six games from now? That’s what we thought two weeks ago, looking ahead to a visit from Memphis.
So, yes, hope. Its absence is the cruelest in sports. But it doesn’t stay cruel for long. At some point the pain turns to apathy, and that’s even worse. The Pistons are not there yet, though, because history is out there, ignominious it may be.
Folks will tune in like rubberneckers on a freeway. Once they’ve seen it, once the Pistons set the NBA record for consecutive losses in a season (the record is 26), well, they’ll start looking straight ahead.
Then what?
More nights like Wednesday, I suppose, when barely 5,000 fans showed up and the lower bowl at Little Caesars Arena looked like a mausoleum. Surely, that got owner Tom Gores' attention: It’s one thing to lose, it’s another to have no chance against a wounded, beleaguered, fellow cellar-dweller with endless rows of empty seats.
Gores has tried to make the moves to turn his franchise around. He seems to care. He just doesn’t know how to fix this.
The players want to fix this, too, but can’t. There is pride here. And also shame; no athlete wants to become a story for the wrong reasons
It’s not that they aren’t trying, it’s that they are no longer fighting. And those are their words.
“It seems to me that we are playing harder against each other in practice,” Bojan Bogdanovic told reporters after the dispiriting loss to the Grizzlies on Wednesday. “But at this point it doesn’t matter how we practice. People are coming to watch us at Little Caesars Arena, not in the (practice facility). We have to get here and be better and show them the fight and discipline and anger we have to play with.”
Good words. True words. Damning words.
The fact that the team plays harder in practice is troubling, and falls on the coach. Monty Williams obviously hasn’t been able to connect with this team and get it to compete. He admitted this, and that’s admirable — self-awareness is the first step toward change — but at some point, he has to figure it out … or what’s the point?
As for the front office? That’ll have to change at season’s end, short of a spirited turnaround.
It just hasn’t worked, not all of it general manager Troy Weaver’s fault. Some years teams get luckier in the draft than others, and no front offices wins big without good fortune. Remember the Spurs? Tim Duncan changed everything. He came to them at No. 1, after they swiped the top pick from the Boston Celtics in the lottery. It’s not like San Antonio uncovered him.
Just as the Orlando Magic — which embarrassed the Pistons, 123-91, on Friday night — didn’t uncover Paolo Banchero. He went No. 1 in a mild surprise last year, when the Pistons fell form first to fifth in the lottery and took Ivey.
If the Magic had won the lottery the year before, they’d have chosen between Cunningham, Evan Mobley and Jalen Green, not the Pistons. And this conversation might sound different.
True, the Magic found Michigan's Franz Wagner at No. 8 overall, but if they knew he would be as good as he has been, they wouldn’t have passed on him with the fifth pick in the same draft, when they took Jalen Suggs. In other words, Orlando got a bit lucky.
Have the Pistons made things worse with moves made — or not made — in the offseason? Sure, they have, especially now that we have the benefit of hindsight.
Hindsight may be 20-20, but foresight is what’s needed, and it’s not easy to even know where to look. This kind of losing clouds the view.
For now, short of brooming everyone — which isn’t likely — the goal is to win a game.
A. Single. Game.
It won’t be easy. No team is going to want to be the one to end the Pistons’ streak.
Get that game and the conversation turns away from history, at least for a bit. Sometimes all a team can do is find a sliver of light.