Pistons going in right direction in championship metric

There has been ample debate about whether the Detroit Pistons’ offense is good enough to be considered a true title contender, but the numbers show they are headed in the right direction. 

They don’t have a consistent second star. The Pistons only have one real 3-point shooting threat. Those things are true, yet the Pistons currently have the 9th-best offensive rating in the NBA (up one spot recently), which history tells us is good enough to win an NBA title, but it is right on the margins. 

The Detroit Pistons are teetering on the brink of a championship offense 

The Pistons are 9th in offense and 2nd in defense, which would be in line with recent NBA champions.

Only one of the last five NBA champions has finished with an offense rating outside of the top 10 and that was surprisingly the Golden State Warriors, who were 16th in offensive rating in 2021-22 but rode an elite defense to a title. 

Those Warriors had an offensive rating of 112, while the Pistons are currently just over 116, but have a nearly identical defensive rating as Golden State did the last time they won a championship.

The only other champion to fall outside of the top 10 in either offensive or defensive rating was the Denver Nuggets, who had the 5th-best offense and 15th-rated defense in their 2022-23 championship season. 

You can talk about second stars and shooting but the numbers are what they are and show that the Pistons are scoring points at a top 10 rate, mostly by dominating the paint, getting out in transition and snagging large numbers of offensive rebounds. 

There are obviously big questions about whether this model can work in the playoffs, but the Pistons are well within the margins of where championship teams have landed on both sides of the court. 

The Pistons clearly have a championship-level defense, but there will be questions about the offense until they prove it in the playoffs. Lack of offensive creativity and adjustments have been the two biggest criticisms against JB Bickerstaff, and he’ll certainly get a chance to put those to rest. 

But he’s going to have to find ways to squeeze offense out of somewhere other than Cade Cunningham, and the Pistons may need to rely on an X-Factor (Caris LeVert, Daniss Jenkins, Ron Holland) to provide some surprising offense in the playoffs in order to make a deep run. 

The Pistons’ offense has been the focus this season, and there are reasons to be skeptical, but some of this concern is overblown, as the Pistons do have a top 10 offense regardless of how they get it.