As a diehard Pistons fan, I wanted to add to the discussion on the current state of the franchise. I’ve seen a lot of passionate, emotionally driven ‘everything is bad’ posts. While I don’t necessarily disagree, I will try to lean towards impartial judgement of what’s going on.
We suck, clearly - but are we really a 10-72 level team (assuming we keep loosing at our present rate)?
I personally don’t thing so. Up until the last 3-5 games, I would argue that we actually had been quite competitive - and had found ourselves in positions in which we could (if not should) have been able to win. Even against the Pacers, we were in that game for 90% of it, despite ending up losing by 20. That said, the 4th quarter execution has been terrible. Really amateurish mistakes - some of which you could chalk up to youth and lack of experience, but also there appears to be a huge lack of composure in crunch time. This is where we are missing our injured vets the most IMO. Confidence is obviously also severely lacking when you are on a 15 game slide and I think this is a big factor in what’s happened in the past few games (the uncompetitive blowouts).
Don’t let games where they show a little competitiveness fool you. Even the worse teams in the record holder (76’ers) and the Bobcats still were competitive in games.
This team is really that bad. There is no fight, no heart, nothing. I think most of them would probably do better elsewhere, but them as a team does not gel.
I really think this is the year the Pistons take the reins of the worst record of all time and our FO will stay quiet mostly. Troy will release a statement in a few weeks saying, “It’s hard, rebuilds take time, we are frustrated too” and so on. He will make a meaningless trade before the deadline, then the lottery drawing is here where we get shafted again, free agency rolls around, and we do nothing again. This upper management from the ownership to the GM really think they have the future of the NBA on on the roster and they will not budge from that. I think we are sadly stuck with a bad owner who just does not care and wants the team to resemble what he thinks a good team is, just like WCF did with the Lions for decades. We are screwed for a long time and sadly that is a reality we are going to have to accept.