If you asked most fans of the Detroit Pistons how they feel about JB Bickerstaff right now, the responses would be overwhelmingly positive and they should be.
Bickerstaff has gotten his young team to buy-in on the defensive end and they are playing far better basketball than they ever did last season.
But let’s face it, the bar to clear was in the mud after Monty Williams, whose incompetence for the Pistons is all that more obvious when juxtaposed against a coach who has shown up and has a plan.
The Pistons are one of the surprise teams of the early 2024-25 season, mostly because they are merely bad and not terrible in an Eastern Conference that has exactly two teams with winning records.
The other surprise in the East (aside from Milwaukee and Philly stinking it up) is that JB Bickerstaff’s former team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, have yet to lose a game and have looked like a juggernaut in most of them.
Kenny Atkinson is getting a lot of the credit, as he’s added a high-powered offense to the defensive foundation that Bickerstaff laid before he was fired after winning 48 games last season.
The Pistons aren’t in a position to worry about how a coach does in the playoffs or whether he can get them in the top half of the league in both offense and defense, but as Detroit inches closer to relevancy, it’s going to become an issue.
JB Bickerstaff can coach defense, but what about offense?
In his last three seasons as head coach of the Cavaliers, coach Bickerstaff had his team near or at the top in defensive efficiency, finishing 6th, 1st and 6th in his final three years in Cleveland, seasons in which they won 44, 51 and 48 games, respectively.
Bickerstaff was fired because he couldn’t get the offense to that level, as they were in the top half of the league only once in four seasons and finished 20th, 20th and 28th in offensive efficiency in the others.
The Pistons currently have the 13th-ranked defense in the league to go along with 8th in opponent’s points allowed, so they have made a huge leap defensively this season.
But the offense has not kept pace, as they are just 25th in offensive efficiency and scoring fewer points per game than they did last season when they won 14 games.
The Pistons are just trying to get to respectability at this point, so this is hardly a criticism of Bickerstaff, who has mostly pushed all the right buttons this season and has his team competing every night.
The offensive woes are something to watch though, as it was what eventually got Bickerstaff fired in Cleveland. Coach Atkinson has the Cavaliers as the #1 offense in the NBA right now with mostly the same personnel.
Coach Bickerstaff can clearly coach defense, but we’ll have to see if he eventually brings in an offensive-minded associate head coach to handle that side of the ball.