Early in the basketball offseason I’d made the decision that I wanted to take more of an interest in the NBA (I’m not much of a college sports watcher), and it seemed that the Pistons were in a pretty optimal spot for a novice basketball viewer like myself. Many of the faces that a casual viewer recognized from the last decade of Detroit basketball were gone. There was no more Chauncey Billups (I will devote a bit of time to that later), Rasheed Wallace had moved on to the Boston Celtics, and Ben Wallace had only just returned after 4 years of cashing checks from someone else. The claims that many in the media were making was that this Detroit team was going to be more up-tempo, and was going to be very offensive (possibly at the cost of making stops at the other end). John Kuester was lured away from an assistant’s gig with Cleveland t0 be the head man in Detroit. The way the roster was constructed, it seemed that the Pistons would actually be able to run.
Long story short, they were not, and were a massive disappointment.
Better than the Pistons starting five? Probably.
This was supposed to be a team that was going to be able to run, and be a team that would light up the scoreboards with lots of offense. If basketball-reference’s Pace Factor statistic is to be believed (Pace Factor is the estimate of how many possessions a team will have per 48 minutes), the Pistons were 2nd to last in the entire NBA in Pace. Not only did the Pistons play a painfully slow brand of basketball, but they also ranked 21st in the NBA in Offensive Rating and 26th in Defensive Rating. A feather in the cap for these statistics is that the top 16 teams in the NBA for Defensive Rating all made the playoffs (the Celtics finished 5th, the Lakers finished 4th overall as well). The Offensive category is a little more sketchy, but 13 out of 16 isn’t bad either, so I believe that these stats may be on to something. At the very least, they help us paint a little bit better picture of the team (and give me a nice talking point).
Someone could easily point to the injuries that the Pistons sustained as being the thing that killed the season, but I don’t know if I buy that. It definitely doesn’t help having Tayshaun Prince out for the first couple months of the season, Richard Hamilton being injured on and off for the first 2 months of the season, and Ben Gordon being bitten by the injury bug for the first time in his career, that much is certain. But the team just looked lost more often than not. The lineups were very inconsistent, and the personnel didn’t fit with what the were supposedly trying to accomplish as well. Ben Gordon, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, and Charlie Villanueva all had some of the worst seasons of their careers.
The best player on the team last season, by Basketball-Reference’s Win Shares measure (a combination of both offensive and defensive contribution added together and made into a simple number) was actually Ben Wallace with 4.7. I’m bold-facing that because 4.7 is good for 102nd best in the entire NBA. That, that is the best player on the 2009/2010 Detroit Pistons. That’s worse than luminaries like Nick Collison, Kendrick Perkins, Beno Udrih, and Quentin Richardson. When a 35 year old defensive specialist is ranked 3rd on your team in Offensive Win Shares, something is seriously wrong (to be fair to Ben, it was probably his best season in 7 years offensively though). Jonas Jerebko was as good as advertised through this measure (with 4.4), and was arguably a top 5 rookie in the NBA (more towards the lower of the 5, though). He was probably one of the lone bright spots for the Pistons last year.
The “big” free agent acquisitions from the offseason were not very bright. As stated earlier, Ben Gordon fell to injury and put up the worst season of his career (easily the worst). Almost all of his major stats (FG%, FT%, 3PT%) were all career lows or the lowest since his rookie campaign. He was relegated to the bench when Richard Hamilton returned from his injury (though there were some instances where he was utilized in 3 guard sets), earning that 10 million. The other big free agent signing, Charlie Villanueva, did his best to try to outdo Gordon in the disappointment department. After having what seemed to be a breakout season in 2008/2009 with the Milwaukee Bucks, he reverted to what he had been previously last season. The only thing that remained was that he shot around 36% from 3 point range (which isn’t terrible for a PF). The thought was that he put up pretty good numbers in a bench role with his other teams, so giving him starter’s minutes with Detroit would transfer perfectly. It didn’t, and he was back to coming from the bench by mid-season.
That’s 18 million tied up in (currently) two bench players, for the next 5 years.
One thing that’s been missing from the info so far has been Rodney Stuckey. Rodney was drafted in 2007 to be the successor to Chauncey Billups at the PG spot. Stuckey got his chance to be the man in Detroit after Chauncey was traded prior to 2008, and he hit a huge speed bump in 09/10 after a decent 08/o9. All of his major stats were down (aside from points per game, of course), and he really didn’t look like much of a point guard throughout much of the season. His Assist% was only 24 (guys like Steve Nash, Deron Williams, and Chris Paul are around 50%), and even if you think that PGs can do it other ways than guiding the offense, he didn’t do it scoring efficiently either. His 3 point percentage was .228 (that is not a typo), and his FG% was barely over 40%. The only guards in the entire NBA who had over 1800 minutes and were worse than him in 3PT% were Dahntay Jones, Andre Miller, Russell Westbrook, and Rajon Rondo. Usually PGs breakout in or before their 3rd season in the NBA, but Stuckey hasn’t done it yet (not even close). It would be fair to say that Billups didn’t do it until he was 25 (he also wasn’t a big assist guy for a PG), but he had a phenomenal free throw shot and perimeter offense to fall back on. Rodney has none of those advantages, and may have a guy on the roster who is his clone (with lesser minutes) in Will Bynum.
This was a lot of words to essentially say that the 09/10 Pistons were an unmitigated disaster, but that is the short of it. They are a team in disarray, and with the head scratching late season winning streak they took themselves out of the running for the 1st pick in the draft (everyone says it, but my god would John Wall have been nice on this team) and find themselves picking 7th overall. With Joe Dumars’ drafting history, that doesn’t instill a ton of confidence.
I’ll address Joe D with my next post.
-Kevin
This read more like an autopsy report than a season recap. Nice work in putting the Pistons’ issues in such stark display.
Basketball is one of those sports were injuries really can be an excuse most of the time. With 12 players, and only 8-10 getting regular playing time, two or more going down can turn a good team really bad really quickly. However, as I think you’ve argued quite well, the Pistons’ players were so inept as a team when healthy, it’s hard to imagine that their ceiling was very high in the first place.
I don’t think I want to know what that picture was.