The Detroit Pistons getting buried by ridiculous schedule

The Detroit Pistons didn’t need any help to be bad this year, as they have that covered on their own.

The Pistons are once again the worst shooting team in the NBA and currently have the worst defense, so they are equally bad on both sides of the ball.

There hasn’t been much to get excited about outside of the play of the rookies, and if something doesn’t change soon, the Detroit Pistons are en route to a historically bad season.

You can blame their age, inexperience and injuries for the 3-10 start, or you can just say that this team is still far from good and needs more talent.

I think it’s a little of all of those things, but one other culprit is the schedule, which has been absolutely ridiculous so far this season, almost as if the league were trying to bury the Pistons before they even got a chance to get started.

Detroit Pistons schedule: The early back-to-backs

The Detroit Pistons will take on the Boston Celtics tonight at home after playing last night in New York against the Knicks.

This will be their FOURTH back-to-back already this season out of 14 games, which seems absurd, especially if the league had any plans on keeping fans interested.

Detroit has already had a road/road back-to-back against the Knicks and Pacers, road/home against the Wizards and Hawks, home/away vs. the Warriors and Bucks and will now have another away/home against the Knicks and Celtics.

The Pistons have arguably played the toughest schedule in the league so far, and that’s before they hit the road soon for a six-game West Coast road trip, so things are likely to get ugly before they get better, as the Pistons have yet to win on the road.

Eventually this all balances out, and I said before the season that the NBA loves to front load the schedules of the bad teams so that they will all be playing each other late in the season with lottery position on the line.

I get it in theory, but it leaves teams like Detroit buried early in the season with little chance to climb out of the hole. If the league is interested in keeping the fans of young teams invested for the entire season, maybe don’t give them four back-to-backs in the first 14 games?

The schedule is obviously not the only reason the Detroit Pistons are bad, but the league sure didn’t do them any favors by giving them all of these back-to-backs so early in the season.