Every team in the NBA has big misses in the NBA Draft and that definitely includes the Detroit Pistons. It’s the nature of an event where you are trying to project who teenagers are going to be when they are 25 years old, which is not an easy task in sports or the real world.
The Pistons have been particularly bad at it going all the way back to the early 2000’s, so if you want to know why Detroit has been terrible for so long, this is why.
It takes some amount of luck to hit big in the draft, but the good teams seem to do it with more regularity, so there is more to it than just blind chance.
Make no mistake about it, the Pistons are where they are because of the draft, and the last decade is a perfect example. Let’s take a look at the best and worst draft picks over the last 10 years. I’m not saying these are the best or worst players, but for various reasons, they were either great picks or terrible ones.
Sadly, the competition for worst pick was far more heated than the competition for best pick.
Worst pick #1: Stanley Johnson, 2015
Stanley Johnson is not the worst player the Pistons have drafted in the last 10 years, as there were guys like Sekou Doumbouya and Henry Ellenson who never had NBA careers. But these players were chosen outside of the lottery, where teams miss far more than they hit, which is why I have Johnson on my all-time Pistons draft bust starting five.
Johnson was the 8th pick and joined a poorly constructed but decent team that could have made some noise had they hit on this pick. How might the Pistons’ history be different if Detroit had just done the logical thing and picked hometown star Devin Booker?
But it wasn’t just Booker, all eight players taken just after Johnson have had better NBA careers, so at the very least, the Pistons could have had a good role player. At the time, fans were excited about Johnson, who had high-upside talent, but he was just never able to put it all together.