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Tim Bontemps, ESPN
BOSTON — TD Garden’s visiting locker room was silent.
It was about a half-hour after the Detroit Pistons lost their 28th consecutive game — a 128-122 overtime defeat to the league-leading Boston Celtics. For much of the contest, it seemed like this might — finally — be the moment Detroit would snap its losing streak of two months.
Instead, it became the latest painful outcome in a season full of them.
The weight of the streak, and how close Detroit came to escaping it, hung heavily in the air.
“I think it shows like we’re on the same level as all these teams we’re playing against,” Pistons star Cade Cunningham said. “There’s no team that I’ve ever come across in the NBA where I felt like I was going into a slaughterhouse.”
Moral victories, though, don’t end losing streaks. And, with Thursday’s loss, Detroit tied the Philadelphia 76ers — who dropped the final 10 games of the 2014-15 season and the first 18 of the 2015-16 campaign — for the most consecutive losses by an NBA franchise.
But while those “Trust The Process” 76ers were designed to lose games while rebuilding through the NBA draft lottery, these Pistons were not.
“We wanted to be competing every day, [to have] a chance for the play-in, playoffs,” Pistons owner Tom Gores told reporters last week. “We wanted our players to grow. That would have been a success for us. … Those were the expectations: to compete, grow and be near the playoffs. That’s how you grow the most.
“Make no mistake about it, that was the expectation.”
A team doesn’t expect to be sitting at the bottom of the standings when it drops $78.5 million to hire a new coach, landing Monty Williams in May after he’d been fired by the Phoenix Suns two years removed from coaching them to the NBA Finals.
But here is where the Pistons sit: with a 2-29 record, no clear vision for the franchise’s future and no guarantee its run of futility will end anytime soon.
“At this point, this is all we have right now,” Pistons forward Bojan Bogdanovic told ESPN before Thursday’s game. “So you gotta get one W and keep growing, even if it’s hard right now to find anything positive.”
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Monty Williams: Pistons’ effort in record 28th straight loss was ‘admirable’
Monty Williams reflects on the Pistons’ NBA record-equaling 28th consecutive loss to the Celtics in overtime.
The roots of Detroit’s fall stretch to the 2008-09 season. The year before, Detroit was in the Eastern Conference finals for the sixth straight season, losing to the eventual champion Celtics in six games. Game 4 of that series is the last time Detroit won a playoff game.
Nine players from that season remain active, and the arena where the game was played, The Palace at Auburn Hills, closed six years ago and was imploded in 2020.
Over the past 15 years, Detroit is the only NBA team without a playoff win. It has the fewest regular-season wins (454) and lowest winning percentage (.372) over that span, with only the Sacramento Kings and Minnesota Timberwolves joining them under .400.
Those teams, though, sit among the top four in the Western Conference and boast multiple All-NBA selections on their rosters: De’Aaron Fox and Domantas Sabonis in Sacramento and Karl-Anthony Towns and Rudy Gobert in Minnesota.
At the moment, Detroit has nothing close to that.
Cunningham has shown flashes of being a foundational piece for the Pistons, particularly lately, with multiple 40-point games and a 31-point performance in Detroit’s narrow defeat Thursday.
But while Cunningham’s recent play has been a bright spot, there have been precious few others.
League sources view the Pistons as a team with several stakeholders articulating different visions for the team — from Gores to Williams to general manager Troy Weaver to Arn Tellem, the longtime superagent who is the team’s vice chairman. Since their last postseason appearance, the Pistons have been caught between competing for one of the bottom playoff spots and rebuilding, which has left the franchise without extra draft capital or young talent.
Detroit can create as much as $60 million in salary cap space in the offseason, per ESPN NBA front office insider Bobby Marks — although the Pistons won’t be viewed as a free agent destination this summer.
On the court, Detroit has an ill-fitting roster: A flurry of guards and centers but not much in between. That has led to awkward lineups, such as playing two of Jalen Duren, Isaiah Stewart, Marvin Bagley III and James Wiseman together for large stretches of most games, when each are best suited at center.
Detroit is tied for 29th in 3-point makes (10.0) and attempts (29.9) per game and is 29th in 3-point percentage (33.4). Boston, for example, leads the league with 16.1 made 3-pointers per game.
The Pistons have also been plagued by a lack of continuity. Bogdanovic, the team’s best veteran, missed the season’s first 19 games with a calf injury. Duren, its best young big and arguably its second-best player behind Cunningham, missed five games last month and another eight in December before returning to the lineup Tuesday.
But injuries are only part of the story. Detroit had the No. 5 pick in each of the past two drafts, taking Jaden Ivey in 2022 and Ausar Thompson this year. Both players have shuttled in and out of the starting lineup, contributing to season-long volatility in the Pistons’ rotations. Thompson played a season-low eight minutes in Thursday’s overtime loss.
Detroit hasn’t had a single five-man lineup play more than 100 minutes this season, and there isn’t one that has played together in more than nine games.
“It’s hard,” Williams said of trying to balance changing rotations with finding consistent roles for his players, “but it’s my job. For me, there are times where the first unit is going pretty well and I feel like a ding-dong taking one of those guys out when it’s going well. But I have to also think, ‘I need one or two of those guys with the second unit.’
“So, sometimes it’s an in-game rhythm choice.”
But arguably the biggest issue the Pistons have is, after nearly 15 years, they are no closer to becoming a consistent playoff team.
Across the league, there are myriad examples of teams — the Celtics, 76ers, Memphis Grizzlies and Oklahoma City Thunder among them — that have gone through a full rebuild, but the Pistons have almost exclusively remained near the bottom. Others, such as the Orlando Magic, Houston Rockets and Indiana Pacers, appear to be emerging from recent rebuilds with playoff-caliber clubs this season.
Detroit, on the other hand, has matched the league’s record for futility and could have it to itself with a loss Saturday at home to the Toronto Raptors. After that game, the Pistons begin 2024 with a Western Conference road trip to Houston, Utah, Golden State and Denver.
“We’re all human beings. We all know what’s going on and around the league, and what’s going on around our team,” Bogdanovic said.
“Still, at the end of the day, if we don’t figure this out, who knows how many games we could lose in a row? So it’s on all of us to take ownership of what’s happening right now.”
