The Detroit Pistons hope the 28 games remaining after the All-Star break offer them a fresh start and a chance to wring something positive out of this season.
What began as a campaign that promised to be competitive, quickly turned into a disaster culminating in a historic losing streak. The dreams of competing for the play-in quickly disappeared as we wondered if the Pistons were looking at another lengthy rebuild.
Tom Gores and Troy Weaver did make good on the team's promise that "change was coming" but we don't know yet if an overturned roster can provide some spark or if they just re-arranged the deckchairs on a sinking ship.
I'm trying to stay optimistic for the rest of the season and hope newcomers Simone Fontecchio and Quentin Grimes can start helping to patch the team's many holes, but there has been plenty of disappointment to go around up until this point.
4 Biggest disappointments for the Detroit Pistons up until this point
#1: Monty Williams
When the Pistons announced that their long coaching search had concluded with the hiring of Monty Williams, most fans were happy.
After all, this is a former Coach of the Year, a guy who has led a team to the NBA Finals, a coach who has a track record of turning around bad teams and making them contenders, which is exactly what we hoped he would do in Detroit.
But it's hard to call this season anything but a disaster for Williams, who seemed ill-prepared to guide this young team and unsure of how to use the talent at his disposal.
He benched one of their best players before the season even started. He has yanked guys in and out of the rotation all season. He's used rotations that look like they were created by blindly throwing darts at a wall.
He's thrown his team under the bus at times and has looked checked out at others. He'll say one thing in a press conference, then do the exact opposite.
This is the first time in my career covering the Pistons that I have gone in on a coach like this, as I usually think they shoulder an undo amount of the blame, but in William's case, it is deserved.
I hope he turns it around, I really do. But from stopping the team from trading Killian Hayes, to repeatedly playing Hayes over Ivey, to squashing Ausar Thompson to consistently using a 12-man rotation deep into the season, this has been a poor performance from Monty.
We came into the season hoping he would do what he did in his first year in Phoenix, which was turn around the league's worst team and maybe even sniff the play-in tournament.
Instead, the Detroit Pistons are coming out of the All-Star break with eight wins. Monty has been disappointing however you cut it, and Troy Weaver may end up saying a fat "I told you so" after his choice, Kevin Ollie was recently promoted in Brooklyn.