By most measures, the Detroit Pistons are better than last season.
At 9-15, they are still far from good, but considering they didn’t get their 9th win of the season until late February last year, there is at least improvement. Baby steps away from being the worst team in the league.
But there are key areas in which the Pistons are even worse than last season, familiar problems that have been plaguing them for years and have to be addressed.
Turnovers
We’ve talked endlessly about this, with Cade Cunningham taking the brunt of the criticism, as he’s leading the NBA in turnovers per game.
But Cade doesn’t even have the highest turnover rate on his own team, as Jaden Ivey, Jalen Duren and Isaiah Stewart are all turning it over at a higher rate. It’s been a team effort to lead the Pistons to 25th in the NBA in turnovers per game.
They are turning it over 16.6 times per contest, more than a turnover worse than last year’s mark of 15.2 turnovers per game which was 28th in the league.
It’s not just the turnovers, it’s that they often come at key times in the game and usually in bunches, as the Pistons have a stretch in every game where they lose focus and turn it over on consecutive possessions.
A team living on the margins can’t have these kinds of breakdowns and until this problem is fixed, the Pistons are going to struggle, as turnovers lead to easy buckets, especially transition 3-pointers, which brings me to the next problem.
Defending the 3-point line
The Pistons are allowing opponents to shoot 37.7 percent from long range, which is 26th in the NBA.
It’s been on full display over the last three games, all blowout losses, in which the other team took uncontested 3-point shots all night. It turns out that NBA teams are surprisingly good at making open shots. Who knew?
The Pistons don’t close out aggressively, and when they do, they usually foul, as we saw against Giannis the other night when Isaiah Stewart inexplicably fouled him on a 3-point attempt.
Detroit doesn’t fight over screens, electing instead to switch everything without much resistance, creating mismatches that the other teams are exploiting for wide-open shots.
The Pistons have done a decent job defending the paint, as they are 8th in the league in points in the paint allowed per game, but they are still giving up a ton of 3-point shots.
Detroit was better against the 3-point shot last season, when they allowed opponents to shoot 37 percent and were giving up two fewer 3-point makes per game.
We can talk about defensive improvement, and there certainly has been some, but the Pistons are worse at defending the 3-point line and that’s a problem.
Points
While the Pistons have had some modest improvements on defense, they are still not good enough on the other side of the ball to hang with the elite teams.
The Pistons are scoring 110 points per game, which is 21st in the league and exactly the number they scored last season when they won 14 games.
The best offenses are scoring between 10-12 more points per contest than the Pistons, which is a gap they can’t make up with a defense that is decent but far from elite.
The Pistons have shown flashes, and at times look like a good team, but until they take care of the ball, stop big runs at the 3-point line and score more points, they aren’t going to get out of the mediocre gray area between the play-in tournament and the worst teams in the Eastern Conference.