Why aren’t the Pistons’ attendance numbers improving?

The Detroit Pistons have played some great basketball this season and taken down top-level teams, so why aren’t the fans showing up?

It’s been a rough run for the Detroit Pistons in recent weeks, but for the most part, the start to this season has been a positive one.

They kicked off the season by banking a bunch of wins, which will come in handy at the business end, and many of these wins came against great teams like the Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics.

In fact, the Pistons’ start to the season is nothing short of impressive considering where this team was last season and the fact that they have had the second toughest schedule in the NBA so far.

On top of that Tobias Harris has continued to prove to fans that he’s a great player, Andre Drummond is now able to breathe freely again and is back to being a beast with a vastly improved passing and free throw game, while Reggie Jackson is also moving unrestricted once again.

There is so much to be excited about with the Pistons this season, yet people aren’t showing up to the newly built Little Caesars Arena.

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For many years fans had complained that The Palace of Auburn Hills was in an inconvenient location and it was the biggest driving factor in keeping them from attending games.

It was a regular occurrence to see people pining for the Detroit Pistons actually playing in Detroit.

Those fans got their wish with a state-of-the-art arena being built downtown, yet attendance has barely moved.

Last season the Pistons had an average attendance of 15,979 per game, placing them 25th in the league.

When you look at how much of the arena they were able to fill things get even worse.

The Pistons on average only filled up 72.4 percent of The Palace, by far the worst in the league.

However, last season was a bit of an all-around disaster for the Pistons, so it’s not the biggest surprise to see their attendance figures be very poor.

With a brand-new arena, perfect location and an extremely fun team you’d think they would see a significant boost in attendance.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

The move and the return to being a good team have seen the average attendance per game jump to just 17,338.

An increase of only 1,359 fans per game is nowhere near good enough.

Similarly, they’re filling 82.6 percent of Little Caesars Arena’s 19,515 capacity, which is third-worst in the league.

So why aren’t fans turning up?

Well, when the topic is broached fans have myriad reasons.

A common reason is that it’s just too expensive.

According to SeatGeek, the Pistons are the third-least expensive NBA team to go see this season though.

With tickets as cheap as they are it’s hard to believe that money is the biggest factor keeping people at home.

Another common excuse for why attendance is so low is that fans aren’t happy with the players or the coach.

It’s often said that many people are turned off by Reggie Jackson and Andre Drummond in particular.

More casual fans being turned off by Jackson is understandable as his play can be very polarizing at times, but possessing a player who so often takes over the fourth quarter like he does seems like it would be more of a positive than a negative for fans.

To think Drummond would be turning away fans is absurd considering he’s easily in All-Star form right now and one of the best big men in the league.

Some people have gone as far as saying Stan Van Gundy’s willingness to be outspoken on social issues and not hold back on his criticism of Donald Trump has affected attendance.

This is, quite frankly, laughable.

To think Van Gundy’s comments on any of these issues have affected attendance is ludicrous, considering there are a wealth of examples n the NBA alone of coaches being outspoken and not harming attendance or support of the team one bit.

If anything, having Van Gundy as the coach should have sparked more interest in the team, considering he’s the only credible coach the Pistons have had in the past 10 years.

None of these reasons hold much credibility.

A more believable explanation of the Pistons’ attendance woes comes down to a few of things.

The first is that the Pistons’ horrendous run since the 2007-08 season may have turned many off the team.

This could make sense as wandering for ten years in the NBA wilderness is not healthy for any franchise.

Some of these years were truly woeful too, with not even a single glimmer of hope in making it to the playoffs.

You could understand why an average or casual fan would stop turning up with the team seemingly being stuck in NBA purgatory for so long, and it’s probably going to take more than one good start to a season to win these people over again.

This, however, begs the question of why fans are so ready to abandon the Pistons but will ride with the Detroit Lions to death?

Even with the Pistons’ lean recent run, they have still been a thousand times more successful and competent than their NFL counterpart in the past 20 years.

It has been 26 years since the Lions have won a playoff game, yet this season they were setting attendance records.

If the Pistons having a few poor seasons in a row was enough to turn fans away then surely the Lions’ 0-16 season would be catastrophic for attendance?

Instead, the Lions saw a slight dip in attendance the following year and have only gone from strength to strength in the seasons after, despite experiencing no success.

Perhaps this can be put down to the Lions possessing two bonafide superstars on their roster during this time, which brings us to another potentially viable reason for why attendance isn’t budging.

Calvin Johnson has gone down as one of the greatest receivers in history and was at his most dominant during this period, while Matt Stafford is one of the most entertaining quarterbacks in the NFL.

The last time the Pistons had a genuine star on the roster was way back during Chauncey Billups‘ first stint.

For better or worse the NBA is all about superstars and while teams like the Atlanta Hawks and Memphis Grizzlies have proven you can compete without superstars, having at least one helps immensely both on and off the court.

It’s also interesting to note that during Memphis and Atlanta’s recent run of playoff success they both regularly ranked in the bottom half of the league for attendance.

Perhaps the cause of the Pistons’ poor attendance is the most simple.

Maybe Detroit as a city simply doesn’t care about the NBA that much?

Sure, the city loved it when the Bad Boys were bullying teams and while the Goin’ To Work crew was on a historic run, but interest seems to die away pretty quickly.

It only took a season or two of the Pistons being less than great in the mid-2000s for attendance to take a dramatic dive from top five in the league to 20th.

After the Bad Boys’ great run finished attendance fell to 17,819, less than what the team is currently getting.

Attendance briefly saw a resurgence in 1997 and 1998, coinciding with Grant Hill‘s meteoric rise.

However, once Hill parted ways with the Pistons’ the numbers plummeted again, reaching a disturbing 14,813 in 2000.

I think we just have to admit at this point that NBA basketball is not that popular in Detroit when compared to MLB, NHL and NFL.

These other Detroit teams have had similar periods of success and failure, yet are supported no matter what.

Like any city in the world, fans will turn out when you possess a team that is winning championships and is dominating the league, however, the Pistons haven’t been able to convert many of these into lifelong fans who support the team through thick and thin.

Next: There is light at the end of the tunnel for the Detroit Pistons

It’s a shame that it’s like this because the Pistons are currently the best professional team in the city by a country mile.