Morbid Motown: Why the Detroit Pistons have been so historically bad

“Job’s not finished.“

Though Kobe Bryant’s memorable quote from the 2009 NBA Finals doesn’t fall under the same circumstance, much like those Lakers, the Detroit Pistons can already smell history. Does it come with banners hanging in the rafters? Rings? A parade? No, but standing alone atop the summit (or on the floor of the Marianas Trench) is always something to behold. 

Championship teams aren’t built in a day, it takes years of crafty roster building, asset management and the right luck and timing to etch names into history books. And though the goal differs drastically, earning that record-breaking 29th consecutive loss is the result of the same sort of process, however, in the opposite direction. 

En route, the Pistons passed the single-season losing record of 26 set by the 2010-11 Cleveland Cavaliers, a team lost at sea after LeBron James made the decision to take his talents to South Beach.

Tied with them at 28 straight losses (over two seasons) are the 2014-15/2015-16 Philadelphia 76ers, a team that defined tanking to the point that it was turned into a nickname for the player acquired to help reverse their fortunes: Joel “The Process” Embiid.

Although tanking is still very much alive, it takes more than skill (or lack thereof) to be as bad as the Pistons have been in search of a better position in the draft. 

As the Detroit Pistons suit up for their game against the also-questionable (and potentially shorthanded, after the big trade) Toronto Raptors on Saturday and what could be an all-time defeat, it’s important to take a look at how they got here in the first place. Here are three (of the many) reasons the Pistons are face-to-face with unrivalled infamy.  

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Lineup and rotation mismanagement

Unlike the 76ers from the mid-2010s, the Detroit Pistons perhaps saw themselves as a team that had somewhat of a chance to take a leap this season. With former first-overall pick Cade Cunningham leading the way and plenty of lottery players in tow, the front office decided to go all-in on what it saw as a coach to steer the ship, offering former coach of the year Monty Williams a six-year, $78-million contract.

It’s been an abject disaster so far, with Williams leading the team straight into an iceberg through mismanagement of his roster that has been harped upon since their losing streak started. 

Among the 38 five-man lineups that have played at least 100 minutes, the Pistons’ most-used five of Killian Hayes, Isaiah Stewart, Cunningham, Jalen Duren and Ausar Thompson ranks 35th in net rating (-10.1), 37th in offensive rating (101.8) and 36th in true shooting percentage (55.1). Moreover, when eliminating teams that have two lineups to have played at least 100 minutes, Detroit’s five is the worst in the league in all three categories. 

That’s all despite Cunningham having a breakout year leading the team, averaging 23.3 points and 7.1 assists. Of the six most productive units by offensive rating, the third-year guard is on the floor for five of them. 

Of those five, the only one that has a net rating below plus-23 is the one that sees Killian Hayes and Cunningham share the floor, a problem that should be obvious considering Hayes’ inability to create anything offensively, particularly off the ball. 

The fact that the Pistons don’t have a single five-man unit that has played more than 100 minutes together 21 games into the season is already concerning. But even through all this experimentation, Williams hasn’t found a lineup that he’s willing to use to maximize Cunningham’s obvious talents. 

Promising rookie Ausar Thompson has seen his minutes go from 30.9 a game in his first 14 games to 21.5 in the last 17, but his use of Jaden Ivey has been the most confounding. His deployment of the former fifth-overall pick in 2022 has come under a ton of criticism after being unwilling to start him at the outset of the season for no apparent reason and giving extended minutes to Hayes instead. Ivey has started their last five games and has averaged 18.6 points, 6.4 rebounds and 5.2 assists on .478/.400/.700 shooting splits, while the team has lost in double digits only once during that run as compared to the five double-digit blowouts in the six games prior. 

A lack of spacing

As far as setting Cunningham up for success, the plan of attack should be clear: Get shooters around him and give him space to operate. 

Instead, Cunningham has shared the floor with non-shooters such as Ausar Thompson (15.8 per cent from three) for 618 minutes, Killian Hayes (30.5 per cent) for 451 minutes and Marvin Bagley III (16.7 per cent) for 312 minutes. 

The Pistons are second-last in the league in three-point percentage, at 33.4 per cent. They also take the second least threes in the league at 29.9 a game, and since Dec. 1, they have the least three-pointers made with only 111 in their last 12 games.

Though the Pistons may not have the most gifted spacers on their roster, it’s their underutilization and implementation that has been their undoing. 

Cunningham has shared the floor most with forward Isaiah Stewart, which is the right call as the stretch four knocks down deep shots at a solid clip. However, he’s been given only 3.5 of those looks per game, down from his 4.1 last season, despite jumping up to 39.8 per cent from 32.7 per cent. 

Bojan Bogdanovic, meanwhile, has been back with the team for the last 12 games after missing the start of the season with a calf injury. The Bosnian wing has shot 37.1 per cent from deep, down from his 41.1 per cent last season. However, his return has only made it clearer that the Pistons have absolutely no volume shooters past him.

He’s the only player on the team who takes more than five threes a game, while knocking down at least 35 per cent of them. For comparison, the Orlando Magic are the only other team in that boat, but at least they’re good at defence. Even the Toronto Raptors, despite their well-documented shooting struggles, have two players shooting over that mark in Gary Trent Jr. and Scottie Barnes. 

Taking flyers on rehabilitation projects and positional overlap

Tanking teams have followed a couple of models in the past. There’s Philadelphia’s way of doing things, where they got two core players in Embiid and first-overall pick Ben Simmons then built around them. Oklahoma City collected as many draft picks as possible and prioritized guys who fit their system rather than going with the best player available. 

Detroit is another story altogether. Not only are the Pistons not building around their core piece to best suit his talents, but they also keep drafting players who fundamentally take away from Cunningham while taking flyers on projects that need time, pushing the rebuild even further down the road. 

In recent years, they’ve also chosen to trade away more known assets at the wing, such as Saddiq Bey (who shot 36.1 per cent from deep last year) and Trey Lyles (36.3 per cent) for high-lottery picks who have proven nothing so far in their careers in James Wiseman and Marvin Bagley III. 

The Wiseman trade was especially confusing, as it only added to the positional overlap already plaguing the roster by bringing in another big man who can’t space the floor and taking touches away from promising rookie Jalen Duren. 

Positional overlap has been eating away at them, with a crowded centre and backcourt rotation comprising players with skillsets that are far too similar to be used on the floor at the same time. Ivey and Cunningham were already a questionable fit, as neither has shown off-ball prowess, but taking both those players while already having used a sixth-overall selection on Killian Hayes in 2020 and then using their fifth-overall pick on Thompson in 2023 is a waste. 

With most of their roster spots invested in the guard and centre positions, they’ve had a back-breaking lack of depth at the wing, with Bogdanovic being the only (playable) prototypical floor-spacing wing on the roster. Behind him is a mess of Isaiah Livers, Alec Burks and Kevin Knox II, none of whom would have a rotation spot on the majority of other NBA rosters. 

Rather than follow any team’s pattern of success for navigating out of a tank, they’ve chosen to do it their way, only prolonging what’s been a disastrous few years. And though there’s only one game standing in the way of them and some distasteful history, this one game is a microcosm, highlighting their patterns of incompetency and mismanagement in search of who knows what.

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