Pistons rebuild gone wrong? 14th straight loss ties franchise record

DETROIT — When losing enters your building, it’s hard to get out.

Eighty-two games. That’s how many games the Detroit Pistons have won since ... the 2019-20 season. A season’s worth. That’s over four seasons and counting.

Rebuilds are both exciting and filled with hope until, well, they’re not. Right now, in Detroit, neither is true. It’s miserable and only getting worse. A team that had hopes of playing meaningful basketball until the end of the regular season just lost its 14th straight game, tying a franchise record, after a 19-point loss on its home floor to the Washington Wizards — another 2-14 team.

Losing to Washington isn’t the issue here. Both teams are bad. Someone had to win. Getting run off the floor by the Wizards when you’ve lost 13 straight is the problem. That signals something deeper rooted.

Is it that the taste of losing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over becomes the only thing you know? It feels like it. It’s almost as if Detroit is waiting for every loss to happen. It’s as if the Pistons know the outcome before they play the game. Actually, based on Monday night’s result, it’s as if Detroit has lost all hope.

That last part is how a rebuild goes wrong.

“It’s just a level of growing up on this team, maturity, understanding what game-plan discipline is ... all the stuff we talk about all the team,” Pistons head coach Monty Williams said after Monday’s loss. “Enough talking. That wasn’t a fight on the floor. That wasn’t Pistons basketball by any stretch of the imagination. ...We have to have people who honor the organization and the jersey by competing at a high level each and every night. I’m not talking about execution. I’m just talking about competing. That wasn’t it, and that’s on me.”

When losing is all that you know, it’s understandable why winning is so hard. The habits it takes to pull out victories routinely aren’t ingrained. It’s more that you just stumble into them because it’s a long season. There’s no scientific equation to learning how to win, but anyone who has watched sports long enough, especially in this city, knows that it’s a real thing. There’s no textbook on how to build a winner.

That’s why rebuilds can be so dangerous. More often than not, relying on that much youth can backfire. None of these players come into the NBA knowing what it takes to win. Things like both physical and mental conditioning. Being OK with singles instead of trying for a home run. Understanding that the possession in the middle of the second quarter is as precious as the one during crunch time. Competing each and every night.

When you’ve never done those things over an extended period, it’s almost impossible to get unstuck. And that’s how Detroit has ended up where it is today.

“It’s possible for (bad) habits (to come from losing so much),” Cade Cunningham said last week in Toronto after the Pistons lost by 29 to the Raptors . “You can’t allow yourself to play the victim. That’s the main thing. You can’t go out there and see what teams are going to do to us. We have to bring our own fight to the game.”

Ausar is Ausaring...

— Detroit Pistons November 28, 2023

Four. That’s the number of victories the Pistons have since the trade deadline last year. Yes, the Pistons’ organizational goal at the end of last season, once Cunningham went down for the year due to injury, was to try and evaluate their young prospects while also putting the team in the best position to land the No. 1 pick this summer. The latter didn’t happen and, instead, Detroit got a good rookie at No. 5 in Ausar Thompson , but he was drafted by a team with a losing culture.

Detroit’s roster consists of nine players who are 24-and-under, and aside from James Wiseman ’s stint with the Warriors , every player has spent their professional career losing in abundance. They’re not OK with it. They are competitors after all. But it wasn’t until just recently — more specifically the game in Toronto — that the narrative internally shifted from “We’re right there” to “We’re bad.” Hope, seemingly, zapped.

Detroit does have veterans, but they’ve all been hurt for the entire season or a good portion of it. That’s certainly played a part in this string of defeats. The youth, the ones who got themselves put into this rut, have been asked to get themselves out. That’s almost an unfair ask, given, again, they never learned how to win in the first place.

It’s hard to see how the Pistons can justifiably go on like this. This losing skid isn’t in February or March and the finish line is in sight. It’s the end of November. Some casual fans don’t even tune into the NBA until Christmas. There are still four months of regular-season basketball left.

A shakeup of sorts seems like the only logical conclusion. This team needs new life. It needs more players who have been there before, who know what it takes, and who can grab the young guys’ hands and show them what winning looks like. When you rely too much on youth, it can look ugly, depressing and uninspiring.

Rebuilds are imperfect. Complete teardowns are even more flimsy. Detroit had no choice but to completely strip this team to its bare bones in 2020 because nothing else for the previous decade-plus was working. But that’s the gamble, right? Because nothing seems to be working now.

There has been little progress and the collective faith is dwindling.

These are the signs of a rebuild gone wrong.

(Photo of Cade Cunningham and Corey Kispert : David Reginek / USA Today)