I’ve been a fan since 2003. I remember the Pistons being good and then bad. I’ve never seen them go from bad to good though. For fans that have, what finally clicked to make them good again? Is the situation we are in now comparable to another bad spell? Or are we truly seeing the worst it’s ever been?
If you’re talking bad to genuinely good, then you’ll be exclusively asking Pistons fans who were watching from the early '80s into the Bad Boys era and/or the late '90s into the Going to Work era. Nobody who began watching after 2001 has experienced that.
In terms of the sheer length of it, this team has never been anywhere near this bad for such a long period. The Pistons have gone 15 years without even so much as a single game won in the postseason and only two postseason appearances overall. Over the last two decades, only the Timberwolves, Kings, and Hornets have had comparably bad stretches.
I’d argue that the late Dumars era, in which the Pistons were not only fielding awful rosters and losing but doing so in the course of trying to actually win (and not rebuilding), was considerably worse. The Van Gundy era wasn’t a great deal better than that.