The holy trinity of draft misses for the Detroit Pistons

Myriad problems and mistakes have led the Detroit Pistons to their spot at the bottom of the NBA.

This year injuries have derailed any chance the Pistons had to compete, though you can also point to mismanaged cap space and an unbalanced roster as contributors to their league-worst record.

This season aside, the Pistons have been bad for a long time, so it’s not like this is new. They currently have the longest playoff win drought in the NBA, and the longest active losing streak in the playoffs in all of professional sports. Their 415-703 record over the last 15 years (the last time they won a playoff game) is the worst in the NBA by 11 games.

So this isn’t all on the current regime, as it takes a village of failure to be this bad.

But if there is one thing you can point to as the problem over this time, it’s been the Pistons inexplicable ability to miss in the draft, something that appears to have changed in recent years. Cade Cunningham, Jaden Ivey, Jalen Duren and Ausar Thompson all appear to be some of the top young players in the game, but there are three draft misses in particular that are still killing the Detroit Pistons years later.

All teams miss in the draft, but Detroit is really in a league of their own.

2015 NBA Draft: The Pistons take Stanley Johnson over Devin Booker

There is rarely a situation where there is a perfect draft pick for a team, but that was the case with Devin Booker back in 2015. Booker is from Grand Rapids and grew up as a huge fan of all things Detroit, including the Pistons, something you can still see as he sits on the bench in a Tigers hat even though he plays for the Suns. Like another guy in this trinity, Booker worked out for the Pistons, wanted to go to Detroit and thought they were going to take him.

But “need” reared its ugly head and the Pistons went with Stanley Johnson, as they already had a two-guard named Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. KCP is a great role player who has now won multiple rings (with other teams of course) but he’s not a reason to pass on a generational scorer who is from your backyard and actually wanted to be a Piston. It’s hard to imagine what things might look like right now if the Pistons had been building around Booker since 2015, but we know Stanley Johnson isn’t even in the league while Booker is making All-NBA teams and hunting titles with Phoenix.

Booker isn’t hiding his love for Detroit, so can we just bring him home already?

2017 NBA Draft: The Detroit Pistons chose Luke Kennard over Donovan Mitchell

This one still hurts because it didn’t make any sense at the time and is a prime reason why you don’t let your coach do your drafting. The Pistons were fresh off a 38-win season and Stan Van Gundy was trying to get them to the next level of mediocrity, so took Luke Kennard, a safe, “need” pick to help the Pistons’ shooting instead of going for the higher upside player in Donovan Mitchell, who went just one pick later.

Kennard fulfilled his destiny as a decent role player (albeit for a team other than the Pistons), while Mitchell went on to be a 4-time All-Star (and counting) who has made the playoffs every season of his career. It’s easy to draft in hindsight, but this one was obvious at the time. Kennard never had a chance to be much more than he currently is, but SVG went with the guy he thought would help him in the short term, rather than the guy who would satisfy more of the franchise’s long-term needs. When your team’s best players are Andre Drummond and Reggie Jackson, you need a star, but the Pistons elected to go with a safe pick instead and are still paying for it as they have to watch Mitchell scoring 29 points per game for a division rival.

Like Booker, Mitchell wanted to come to Detroit, worked out for the team and thought they were going to draft him. Two colossal misses and why you never draft for need over talent.

2020 NBA Draft: The Pistons take Killian Hayes over Tyrese Haliburton

Sigh.

The Detroit Pistons entered the 2020 draft in the first year of their rebuild and needed a point guard. They had reportedly narrowed it down to two guys: Killian Hayes and Tyrese Haliburton. Both players were big guards, but Haliburton was certainly the more polished prospect, while the Pistons viewed Hayes as the guy with more upside.

Oops.

Hayes has somewhat rebounded from a horrible start to his career this season and is starting to look like the guy that they though they were drafting. But Haliburton has already been an All-Star, has his team in the 3rd seed in the Eastern Conference and is doing stuff like this on a nightly basis:

Haliburton is not just better than Hayes by a mile, but he’s also been better than the guy the Pistons are currently building their team around, Cade Cunningham. Haliburton is deadly efficient, leading the entire NBA in assists and his team is in the hunt for the playoffs.

The Pacers never tanked, which shows that building a team is more about making the right choices than it is about lottery balls, something the Pistons are learning the hard way right now, as it could be them with the young star leading a team whose present and future look very exciting.

The Pistons may have finally gotten their guy in Cade Cunningham, but it took a ton of losing to get to that point and you can easily argue that they would have been better off building their ream around any of the three players named above.

Draft misses happen, but there were circumstances that made these misses even worse, as they were so close to drafting all three of these guys but just made the wrong choice.