By now, you’ve probably seen that clip of Cade saying Detroit is bad or that image of the Pistons having the worst win/loss record of any team since 2019/20. That belies the franchise’s lack of success in the past decade or so. They haven’t won a playoff series since 2009, they haven’t made the playoff since 2019 - only the second time they’ve made it since 2008/09 - and if they were by some miracle to make it this year and lose their first game, they would set a record for the most consecutive playoff loses. That is a record they previously set with 14 straight playoff losses.

But let’s limit it to just 2019 and beyond to keep things simple. Since then, what would one say is the biggest contributing factor to the: Bad luck, age or mismanagement?

Just to go over some examples of each factor:

• Bad Luck
  • Injuries, and plenty of them:
    • Cade Cunningham started his rookie season recovering from injury and missed most of his sophomore season due to a fracture on his left shin
    • After being traded to the Pistons in the 2018 offseason, Blake Griffin’s entire tenure with Detroit was plagued by injuries, most notably in 2020 where
    • Currently, the Pistons are missing the interior presence of Jalen Duren who is out with an injury, as is one of their few spacers in Bojan Bogdanovic
  • Falling in the lottery multiple times
    • While they won the lottery in the deep 2021 draft, they’ve fallen quite a few times in the draft, notably dropping to the 5th pick despite holding the worst record in the league (Yes Ausur looks like a stud but that’s a pretty significant drop given those circumstances)
    • The Pistons have drafted 7th, 1st, 5th and 5th the past 4 drafts; with the exception of 2021, they have fallen in 3 of those 4 drafts

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• Age
  • The Pistons are tied with the Jazz for the 6th youngest team in the NBA, with an average age of 25.1 years old
  • Young teams tend to be pretty poor at defense and the Pistons have been consistently near the bottom of the league in defensive rating for the
  • Jalen Duren, who seems to be their center of the future, only recently turned 20 years old

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• Mismanagement
  • Trading Saddiq Bey as part of a 3 teamer to land James Wiseman who is a) a player they’ve coveted for a while despite having drafted Duren in the prior year’s draft and b) is the 2nd reclamation big man project they’ve taken on after Marvin Bagley and thus created a massive logjam at the center position
    • The Pistons have won a total of 4 games since this trade while Bey has quietly become one of the best low-volume shooters on the Hawks, something the Pistons desperately need
    • Meanwhile, Wiseman has received a number of DNPs despite their FO being high on him
  • Playing Killian Hayes at SG. I do not feel the need to elaborate on this.
    • You could also argue drafting Hayes was a mistake but bear in mind this was the 2020 draft aka. the one where March Madness was cancelled due to a literal pandemic and several teams passed up on future All-Star/franchise PG Tyrese Haliburton, Tyrese Maxey or roleplayers in Desmond Bane, Devin Vassell, Precious Achiuwa, Josh Green and Cole Anthony
    • They did snag Saddiq Bey in this draft 19th overall…but we now what they did with him