Tom Gores must resolve Detroit Pistons future: When is this historic losing enough?
MILWAUKEE — It defies belief how bad the Detroit Pistons are.
Friday night’s game against the 76ers in Philadelphia, with history on the line, might’ve been the most unwatchable game in a season full of them.
Twenty-one turnovers — their second-highest total this season — most resulting from sloppy passing and ball-handling.
Four-for-21 (19%) shooting from 3-point range, their worst percentage of the season.
Disengaged effort. Bad body language. Visible frustration.
And, perhaps most worrying, an inability to identify why these problems persist. Saturday's 146-114 road loss to the Milwaukee Bucks quite possibly could have been worse than Friday's; the Bucks made 19 3-points while Detroit missed 22. The Pistons are 2-24 and, given the expectations going into the season and the length of their rebuild, arguably have become the most disappointing team in the four U.S. professional sports leagues.
There are multiple points of failure in this 4-year rebuild, which started from the studs. How else do you explain losing a franchise-record 23 games in a row? Four years of patient maneuvering and drafting has somehow produced a team on pace to be the worst in NBA history.
The front office, which expected this team to be competitive every single night, is forced to reevaluate its entire approach.
The players, who spent most of the offseason together building familiarity with one another in spirited scrimmages at the practice facility, are clearly feeling the weight of being outmatched by nearly every team they’ve played.
Even the recently assembled coaching staff, led by 2022 Coach of the Year Monty Williams, is out of answers. Williams probably feels like Bill Murray during his postgame news conferences. It has been the same mistakes, same questions and same answers for six weeks. It’s Groundhogs Day, if every day were Devil’s Night.
A question after Friday’s 32-point beatdown, which set the franchise record for consecutive games lost, started by apologizing that the question might sound repetitive. Williams empathized.
“Nah, it is what it is,” he said. “It’s a lot of repetitive games.”
What else is there to say? This season, still short of the one-third mark, has already gone up in flames. The pressure is on — and has been on for a while — for owner Tom Gores and his Platinum Equity partners to draw a line, whatever that may entail. When will enough be enough?
Bad evaluations set path for bad season
Say what you want about Gores, but the Pistons’ owner has put his money where his mouth is. He has brought in reputable decision-makers — most recently, Stan Van Gundy and Troy Weaver — to guide the team forward. His past two coaching hires were former Coach of the Year winners, and he paid Williams a historic amount of money to lure him to Detroit.
Gores most recently has embraced a patient approach, a change from his previous priority to build a contender as quickly as possible. He has embraced building “the right way,” if you will.
Cleaning up the cap sheet after being in cap hell. Eight first-round picks in four years. Prioritizing development, rather than bringing in expensive veterans who would raise the floor, but lower the long-term ceiling.
But the team has nothing to show for that patience, and for the losing that a fanbase accustomed to success has had to endure for more than a decade. There has been no payoff. Gores has invested a lot, moving the team back to Detroit from Auburn Hills, and this year announcing a joint project with Michigan State and Henry Ford Health that calls for $3 billion in local development.
Yet the one thing that has eluded him is the single most important factor in his legacy — winning. He has now tried multiple approaches and nothing has clicked.
This latest challenge is his greatest. The entire organization was in lockstep in their expectation that the team would take a step forward. For things to collapse this quickly — this dramatically — has left them shell-shocked. There needs to be accountability for this horrific start, but who do you point the finger at?
The easy answer is Weaver, who Gores pried away from an Oklahoma City Thunder organization that has perhaps set the blueprint for building the right way as a small market. Weaver has built through the draft with the belief that having the right veterans in the locker room would insulate his young team from the drama that often goes with losing games. And he has gone against groupthink in his talent evaluations, taking risks by trading and investing in disappointing former No. 2 overall picks Marvin Bagley III and James Wiseman, believing a new environment could help them live up to their former hype.
This roster, it turns out, still lacks the critical infrastructure necessary to win. The Pistons can’t shoot, and can’t defend. Despite building the team around big men, none of them have moved the needle defensively, or appear to even fit together well. Isaiah Stewart is the lone member of the group who can shoot. There’s a lot of role overlap with Bagley, Wiseman and Jalen Duren.
There are too many guards who are best with the ball, and not enough floor-spacing wings who can make plays without it. Williams has struggled to find viable lineups, in part due to cramped spacing. Cade Cunningham, after returning from shin surgery, hasn’t been the franchise savior the team desperately needs.
These compounding issues don’t quite explain the 23-game losing streak, to be clear. On paper, this team is too talented to be this bad. But it highlights the importance of fit, and being able to space the floor in today’s NBA.
Those decisions weren’t made in a vacuum. Weaver has had Gores’ full backing through all of this, and ownership and vice chairman Arn Tellem have had a hand in these decisions as well. Even the most pessimistic projections for this season were rosier than the current reality. It’s a collective failure in evaluation and expectation-setting.
The team has dealt with injuries all season, as most teams do, which is no doubt a factor. But it’s also clear the roster lacks the franchise-changing talent necessary to win. After four years of promising to "restore" the franchise back to its former glory, that’s incredibly tough to accept.
Based on the team's priority to preserve cap space this past summer rather than significantly upgrade the talent floor, it's clear that the front office believed the young players would be more ready than they are.
But Weaver isn’t going anywhere, for now. Neither is Williams, who has been transparent about the fact he has failed to connect with and organize this roster. They will have a chance to clean up a mess no one predicted, and will need to do so urgently.
Perhaps it reflects decision paralysis on ownership's part. But there’s no easy way out of this — no clear solution. Perhaps a roster-balancing trade can put the team on the right path. Things haven't gone according to plan, but Weaver will have a chance to show he can get this back on track.
What is clear is something needs to be done. And soon. As bad as things are, they can still get worse.
SHAWN WINDSOR: The Pistons are bereft of hope. No place in professional sports is worse.
On the clock
On Friday night, I asked Williams a question that, in hindsight, might’ve been a set-up. But it felt fair: Are the Pistons demoralized right now?
He took a few moments to gather his thoughts. Williams’ calm demeanor has been off-putting for some fans who want to see more anger, more urgency. But he sees the big picture, and put it into perspective.
“I wouldn’t argue that at all, we’ve lost a lot of games in a row,” Williams said. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t want to be happy in a situation like this. I shoot from the hip, it’s not a big deal to me to call it what it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t recover. It’s not like going off to war, or getting a bad phone call about a disease. It’s sports. And sports is a lot easier to bounce back from than real life. We can do that, and that’s what we will do."
The Pistons will have to lean on that perspective to endure this season. It’s sports. Teams win and lose. Morale ebbs and flows. Expectations are met, exceeded, and fallen short of. Losing can be a motivator, or it can break your spirit, if you let it.
This team isn’t what it was thought to be.
In 51 games since the February trade deadline, the Pistons are 4-47. They lost 23 of their final 25 games last season with intention, set up by multiple contributors sitting out. They’ve lost 24 of their first 26 this season without intention. A once-proud franchise has allowed losing to infect it like a virus. It’s a tough spell to break.
But here we are. The Pistons have yet to show they have what it takes internally to turn things around.
Some sort of button needs to be pushed. That decision ultimately lies with Gores, who is willing to be patient just a tad longer to be shown this rebuild isn't a sunk cost.
When will enough be enough?
Contact Omari Sankofa II at osankofa@freepress.com. Follow him @omarisankofa.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tom Gores must decide Detroit Pistons fate: When is the losing enough?
