3 things that the Detroit Pistons need to fix right now

The Detroit Pistons lost their second in a row to the Milwaukee Bucks last night to push their record to 2-7 in the young season.

Unfortunately, the Pistons reverted to some of their old bad habits last night, and that coupled with being down two big men, was enough to secure the blowout win for the Bucks.

Hopefully Detroit will get Jalen Duren and Marvin Bagley III back soon, but not all of the problems last night were due to being shorthanded.

Detroit Pistons: The turnovers

You can point to a number of things that doomed Detroit last night, but the biggest was turnovers. The Pistons committed 21 of them, their highest total of the season, which led to 28 points for the Bucks.

Detroit has seemingly improved in this area given that they are 13th in the NBA in turnovers after finishing 20th last season, but the truth is that they are averaging more this season and are trending in the wrong direction after averaging 16.3 turnovers per game in their last three.

That 16.3 would put them 25th in the league, tied with Houston, so even though Detroit got off to a good start taking care of the ball, they have regressed in this area and it killed them last night.

Second-chance points

Detroit started the season as one of the best offensive rebounding teams in the league, but have fallen back to earth since Jalen Duren got hurt. They are currently 12th in the league after dropping to just nine offensive rebounds per game over the last three games.

Last night they gave up a whopping 15 offensive boards and only grabbed two of their own. This led to 24 second-chance points for the Bucks, which was another huge factor in the loss.

This is an area where Detroit can excel when they have their full complement of players, as Duren and MBIII average over five offensive rebounds per game between them.

Points in the Paint

This has been an area where the Pistons have gotten smoked all season, only winning the battle of points in the paint once in nine games.

It happened again last night, as Detroit gave up 56 points in the paint and only scored 30 themselves. They are now 27th in the NBA, averaging 43.8 points in the paint per game, and just 28th in the league at allowing them, giving up a terrible 54.4 points in the paint per game.

Obviously, two of these stats were made worse by injuries, but the Pistons stunk in these areas when Duren was playing, and if your entire chance of winning comes down to an 18-year-old rookie being able to keep the Bucks’ huge front court off the boards, you are in big trouble.

Hopefully as the Detroit Pistons get back to full strength we will start to see these gaps narrow, but for now, they are losing games in the paint.