Pistons’ Monty Williams, players voice frustration amid historic losing streak

DETROIT — When it comes to discussing high school, college, or professional sports teams, an old saying has been uttered many times: “you are what your record says you are.” In keeping with that mindset, the Detroit Pistons are, without a doubt, a struggling basketball team.

This isn’t an opinion; it’s a fact.

As they sit at 2–15 after a defeat to the Washington Wizards on Monday night, a team also in search of its third win of the season, the Pistons now hold the NBA’s worst record. To compound matters, they are on a collision course with uncharted franchise history.

With their losing streak now at 14 games, the Pistons will host the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday night, endeavoring to avoid a 15th straight loss, which would be the longest single-season losing streak in franchise history. The most perplexing aspect of the Pistons’ current losing streak is that each game is quite similar: an aggressive start on both sides of the ball, taking the lead, and then demonstrating an inability to protect it.

Monday night against the Wizards was more of the same, but the difference was that they appeared to play flat and uninspired basketball in the second half. Pistons head coach Monty Williams, visibly frustrated, pointed this out after the game.

“It’s just a level of growing up on this team. Understanding what game plan discipline is. All the stuff is what we talk about all the time,” Williams told reporters. “Enough talking. That wasn’t fight on the floor. That wasn’t Pistons basketball by any stretch of the imagination. We have to have people that honor the organization and the jersey by competing.”

Williams’ concerns aren’t his alone. After last Friday’s 23-point loss to the Indiana Pacers, the Pistons players held a team meeting to address some of the same issues that reared their heads on Monday night against the Wizards. Pistons forward Isaiah Livers confirmed the existence of the meeting, stating it was fourth-year player Isaiah Stewart who organized it.

“Being the leader that he is, he brought everybody together, and we just gotta play our roles,” Livers said. “Every team has roles, and right now we all feel like we’re not playing our role to the best of our ability. So I mean, that’s the focus right now.”

“We just voiced out what we were feeling, what we were seeing, and it wasn’t pointing fingers or anything, just a collective team meeting,” Stewart said. “And we always just voicing out what we’re seeing out there on the floor and what we think we could do better and stuff like that.”

Stewart alluded to the vibe right now in the locker room not being the best following Monday’s life but was quick to add that above all, they’re still a connected unit and it’s still a family atmosphere.

“We’re still together,” Stewart said. “We know we’re going through a test right now. Me personally, I believe it’s a test. I know we will get over this hump, and right now, it looks bad from the record. It looks bad. It’s just stuff that we could fix ourselves.”

Pistons guard Cade Cunningham echoed similar sentiments as Williams and Livers when asked what it will take for his team to maintain a consistent effort of aggression on both sides of the court for a full game. In his view, staying connected, knowing and sticking to what’s working, and not getting bored with what actually is working will be key for the team to snap out of its current funk.

“Like, there’s certain plays that we run that we might get something out of. We’ve got to stick to those,” Cunningham said. “The way that we’re guarding teams, we’ve got to know what’s working, and we’ve got to stick to those game plans. And then we just have to, I mean, stick to our game plan throughout the whole 48 minutes. We can’t have lapses where we lose guys on the scouting report or have those types of mental mess-ups. We just have to stay solid.”

According to Cunningham, everyone in the locker room is trying their hardest, and the desire to win is intense. He acknowledged that because of that desire, players may sometimes overcompensate and do more than needed to try to be effective for the team, leading to many of their mess-ups.

In this area, one thing Detroit consistently struggles with is turnovers, ranking second to last in the NBA with nearly 18 turnovers per game.

“We all want to win really bad, so everybody’s doing it out of the spirit of wanting to win, wanting to do what’s best for the team,” Cunningham said. “I think we need more aggressive mess-ups. I think where we’re struggling right now is slip-ups where we’re just not physical enough or not aggressive enough.

“So I think that’s more so where we need to lean towards instead of trying not to press. Obviously, we need to trust each other with the ball offensively, make the ball pop around, but we need to do everything hard.”