ATLANTA — Here's the thing: Fans of a non-elite team always want to talk about tearing it down and rebuilding it. In their opinion, this means that one can quickly achieve lottery wealth and then quickly return to fame. But sometimes reconstruction doesn't go that way. Sometimes teams don't hit a star and end up wandering the desert for years.
Of course, mismanagement and personnel errors also play a major role. But the simple reality of any rebuilding situation is this: Unless a team finds a star player, the rebuild hasn't truly begun. Even a club like Houston, which emerged from its rebuilding cocoon with the help of several free agent signings this season, couldn't make that leap without at least one homegrown success (center Alperen Şengün) playing at a very high level.
I bring this up because I watched the Detroit Pistons lose a basketball game on Monday night. As it turns out, this is not uncommon. They have lost 24 of them in a row, just two fewer than the NBA record for a single-season series and four fewer than the all-time loss standard set by the Process-era Philadelphia 76ers in two seasons. Since the 2023 All-Star break, Detroit has played 50 regular season games and posted an incredible 4-46 record. With a minus-12 scoring margin, this is one of the worst teams in basketball history.
Next up for the Pistons is a home game on Thursday against a struggling Utah Jazz team, a game that some are already wryly joking is a “must win” for Detroit considering the game that follows against Brooklyn seemingly offers limited opportunities to break the shot. The schedule immediately after is daunting; It's not inconceivable that the Pistons are on a 34-game losing streak when they host the San Antonio Spurs on January 10th.
What makes it even more painful for Detroit is that the Pistons are theoretically in the fourth year of a rebuild from the ground up, which they were forced to do with limited resources after the disastrous Blake Griffin trade fizzled out due to injury. They hadn't won a playoff game since 2008; After three long losing seasons in which they lost a combined 60-176, everyone is more than ready for a turnaround.
But it turns out that surviving a rebuild doesn't depend on how tired you are of the loss. In fact, this often gets in the way as franchises are tempted by short-term profits.
Instead, getting out of that dark hole comes down to talent. And despite four years in the lottery and three years in cap room, Detroit gained very little from it. In many ways, the Pistons are still a Year 1 team in terms of rebuilding.
The crux of the problem is that the Pistons have made eight first-round draft picks since their reset in 2019 and have yet to land on a star. Winning the lottery in 2021 netted them Cade Cunningham, a solid player who could likely thrive in a more complementary role, and a trade in the 2022 lottery secured them a promising, athletic center in Jalen Duren. The combination of the two could potentially still be something in the pick-and-roll game, but Duren has missed half the season with ankle problems after shining as the Pistons won two of their first three games by double digits. (I swear this really happened.)
At least for one night, Cunningham looked like the player Detroit envisioned. On Monday, he scored a career-high 43 points on 16 of 24 shooting for the Atlanta Hawks; Although the Hawks' defense looks like Swiss cheese, he had a few a-ha plays along the way, including a sweet split of a pick-and-roll that allowed him a casual stroll down Main Street for a dunk.
Cunningham's difficulty getting separation and turnover issues limit his ceiling and make it highly unlikely that he will never be that guy, but he should be better than he has shown in the first third of the season.
GO DEEPER
Cade Cunningham is showing real improvement during the Pistons' losing streak
Furthermore, it's not that the Pistons have recruited terrible players, but rather that the type of player that could bring them back to prominence has continually eluded them. The original sin was leaving the 2020 draft with Killian Hayes, Saddiq Bey and Isaiah Stewart. In particular, acquiring Hayes ahead of Tyrese Haliburton remains a tantalizing organizational what-if situation, although four teams that traded to Detroit did the same. Later in the draft, Stewart and Bey proved to be quite valuable for their selections (16th and 19th), but didn't score as well as Tyrese Maxey (21st) and Desmond Bane (30th).
A similar story can be told from the following drafts. Detroit took Jaden Ivey with the fifth pick in 2022, and while he has struggled with consistency from the outside and hasn't established himself as firmly as a defender as one would hope, he's not a bust. He had 15 points, eight rebounds and four assists on Monday. One of the best alternate picks at this spot, Duren, is already with the Pistons after Detroit traded future protected picks to snag him at No. 13 — arguably the best deal of the Troy Weaver era.
Instead, the biggest problem with this draft is that the Pistons had no luck going in the top four and getting someone significantly better. The same thing happened in the Victor Wembanyama lottery in 2023, where they fell to fifth place despite having the worst record in the league. Ausar Thompson and Marcus Sasser each had their moments, but at this point they aren't the guys who will end Detroit's playoff drought on their own.
Luckily, Detroit managed to win the lottery for a year in 2021 when the two best players on the board were Cunningham and Jalen Green rather than a certain All-Star. Sure, with 20-20 hindsight, they could have traded for Scottie Barnes or Franz Wagner, but no one suggested that at the time.
Clearly Detroit didn't help itself with other decisions. Turning Bey into James Wiseman was highly questionable in a vacuum and confusing on a roster that already had two young, productive centers in Duren and Stewart (who were now forced to pose as a four and struggle with it). Trading two seconds and Trey Lyles for the right to overpay Marvin Bagley was a similar headache. The Pistons let Bruce Brown walk for free and have failed to optimize a ton of cap space in recent seasons. The only real victory during this stretch was signing Jerami Grant as a free agent and trading him for a first-round pick two years later.
Of course, things don't get that bad without bad decisions being compounded by bad luck. The Pistons' brutally poor shooting would be better if Bojan Bogdanović had played more than eight games and Alec Burks hadn't turned into a pumpkin. (Side note: Both players are in their 30s and should have been traded for assets before the start of this season, but the Pistons were lured by the fantasy of finally making a jump in the standings.) Their ball-handling difficulties would be every time Cunningham checks out, large, significantly alleviated by a healthy Monté Morris. Despite their preference for center, the loss of Duren was a major setback that resulted in a lack of replacements in defense.
The upside of a terrible record is a high lottery pick, but if you're hoping for the savior to arrive in the coming fool, I have bad news for you. As I wrote recently, scouts are extremely disappointed with this season's one-and-dones and don't see stars who should be missed in the 2024 lottery.
GO DEEPER
NBA Draft Big Board: Isaiah Collier at the helm as the season of uncertainty kicks into high gear
All of this means the Pistons' drought may be far from over. They won't be so bad (um…right?) when they're healthier and have another year of experience, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where they'll be fine any time soon.
And really, this situation is not that unusual. The Sacramento Kings didn't make the playoffs for 17 years before losing in the first round a season ago. The Minnesota Timberwolves managed to stay underwater 14 times, then three times before finally resurfacing last season. The Washington Wizards, floundering at 4-22, haven't had a winning record since 2018, the Charlotte Hornets haven't made the playoffs since 2016 and the Spurs haven't made it to the playoffs in half a decade; None of these three seem closer today than they were a few years ago. Even the mighty Lakers had a streak of four straight 50-loss seasons that was only ended because an all-time great player decided to give life in LA a try
When fans have sugary ideas about what a rebuild might look like, they rarely think about their team losing by 32 points three times in eight days (something that actually happened to Detroit last week) and skip straight to that part, if the Clippers give them a superstar and five firsts or if they get Jaren Jackson Jr., Ja Morant and Bane in consecutive drafts. But these are the outliers.
If you're wondering why teams fight rebuilding scenarios with all their might, often waiting until the situation seems virtually hopeless and there's no other way out, this year's Pistons are the reason why. Especially in a league with shallower draft lottery odds, the rewards for participating in the full process are limited. Rebuilding sometimes means a few lean years and then a quick return to relevance made possible by hitting stars in the draft, but often it means something much worse. The 2023-24 Detroit Pistons are the perfect example.
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(Photo of Pistons coach Monty Williams: Jason Miller / Getty Images)