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.
#2: Inconsistent minutes for Ausar Thompson and Jaden Ivey
This goes along with number one, as you can put this squarely on the shoulders of Monty Williams.
Ausar Thompson is up to 24 minutes per game for the season after finally getting starter's minutes over the last handful of games. But this kid was looking like a monster to start the season. He averaged 11.4 points, 9.5 rebounds and 3.1 assists in his first 17 games while playing over 30 minutes per night.
Then Williams inexplicably pulled him from the starting lineup, then put him back in, then pulled him again, with minutes ranging from 30 one night to eight the next. Thompson has struggled shooting the ball, but Williams has done little to help him by getting him different looks in different sets, instead, parking his best athlete in the corner where he is essentially useless.
Thompson didn't even make the Rising Stars Challenge, which Monty has been complaining about, but he has no one but himself to blame, as he is the one who stopped playing Ausar even though he is the team's best defender and athlete.
Same with Jaden Ivey, who only started six times in the first 22 games after being benched for Killian Hayes, a player the Pistons cut just to remove him as an option.
Ivey has started the last 28 games and averaged 18.3 points, 4.5 rebounds and 4.4 assists, looking very much like a star at times.
It was like Monty Williams had never seen any of these guys play before and did no research on the team he inherited.
They are getting more consistent minutes now, but he spent a good chunk of the season trying to make a pointless point to two of his best players, stunting their growth and wasting more than a quarter of their seasons, which was hugely disappointing.
#3: The Detroit Pistons' defense still stinks
If talking about the importance of having a good defense actually translated into having one, then the Detroit Pistons would be shutting down the league because they did plenty of talking in the offseason.
Monty went on and on about the importance of defense, even using it as his excuse for benching Ivey, but we never saw any evidence of it on the court.
The Pistons have gotten way worse on defense this season, as they are 27th in opponent points per game, allowing a staggering 122, which is four points worse than last season.
They are 28th in defensive efficiency, which is also worse than last season, and their +9.1 opponent's margin is 29th in the league, nearly a point worse than last year.
Part of this is that the Pistons aren't blessed with elite defenders, especially before the trades that sent Bojan Bogdanovic, Alec Burks, Isaiah Livers and Marvin Bagley III packing.
But part of it is also scheme, as the Pistons inexplicably switch on everything, often putting up no fight against the screener and switching well before they have to.
Unlike the first two disappointments, I can't put this all on Monty, as individual players have to get better and give more effort.
Hopefully, this will start to change after the additions of Fontecchio and Grimes, who are huge steps up defensively from their counterparts.
Defense is practically disappearing in the NBA, but the best teams still play it at a high level and Detroit isn't even close. They've gotten worse, which is hugely disappointing.
#4: Stunted growth of the Core Four
Once it became clear that the Pistons weren't going to be competing for anything but lottery position again, the focus should have immediately turned to their alleged "Core Four."
But for a "Core," they don't see the floor together much, as they have only played 159 total minutes as a group, just 5th-most among four-player combinations.
Consider that a four-man group featuring both Killian Hayes and Ausar Thompson (two players who can't shoot) has played nearly 100 more minutes than the "Core Four."
If you are building your team around these four guys, shouldn't they play together as much as possible? There are questions about whether this group can work together and the Pistons aren't any closer to answering them, as they have played together sporadically for an average of just over eight minutes in their 18 appearances together.
When your team is bad, the future is all you have to look forward to, and the Pistons have managed to take that away by jerking their young players around and not focusing on their development individually or as a group.
They've taken a step back defensively and have a coach who still doesn't have a preferred rotation with just 28 games remaining in the season.
That all adds up to the most disappointing year in my memory, a lost season in which the team didn't get better, nor develop their young talent.
Let's hope they can start to turn things around in the home stretch.