The Detroit Pistons lost their 19th straight game last night and it was never in doubt.
The team barely put up any resistance as the Magic ran layup lines and easily shut down anything Detroit tried to do at the other end.
It was tough to watch and what made it worse is that there is no easy fix.
They are somehow worse than the team that won 17 games last season even though they got Cade Cunningham back, signed a big-name coach and spent over $30 million in cap space in the offseason.
The roster is clearly broken, and as I wrote earlier, does not look like a modern NBA team with their lack of two-way forwards and skilled bigs.
In fact, it doesn't look like a team at all, at least not one that likes each other or cares much about the outcome of the game. The body language was horrible again last night, players were loafing up and down the floor, and they all looked as if they were just going through the motions until they could go home again, like office drones who go and stare at a screen for eight hours before being mercifully released, like prisoners putting in mindless labor that they know will yield no reward.
This team is far away from being good, hell they are far away from even being competitive against the other young teams.
And this front office, coach and roster may not contain an answer.
As painful as it is to say, the Pistons may need another teardown. Let's start at the top.
Tearing down the Detroit Pistons
Tom Gores
We can't fire the owner, so unfortunately, we are stuck with Tom Gores, whose team has been the worst in the NBA since he bought them. Gores is now 358-606 since taking over in 2011.
In that time, the Pistons have had exactly one winning season and have won zero playoff games. To put it in perspective, Gores' .371 winning percentage as an owner is identical to that of Donald Sterling, former owner of the Clippers, who is widely recognized as the worst owner in the history of professional sports for various reasons.
To Gores' credit, he does spend money, unlike Sterling, who was as miserly as he was racist, but Gores' money is like a reverse-midas, as everything it touches turns to ash instead of gold. But don't worry about Tom, as he is personally richer than ever.
Even though Gores is not the most engaged owner, I do think he wants to win but has consistently hired the wrong people to get him there. He's either had too much patience or not enough, has routinely tried to build his team around expensive coaches and has been completely absent as this year's team sinks into a death spiral from which they may never return. Accountability starts here, but there is nothing we can do about the owner except hope his girlfriend, like Sterling's, is wearing a wire (I kid...sort of).
Tearing down the Detroit Pistons
Troy Weaver
Troy Weaver was supposed to be the guru who would gather the elite talent the Pistons needed to rebuild the franchise. So far, his roster has one player ranked in the top-100, a bunch of kids who don't know how to play or win and veterans who are not long for the league.
For the last three offseasons, he has sat on his cap space or spent it on salary dumps while the rest of the league is trying to build coherent rosters.
The worst part is that the NBA is wide open. There aren't any super teams right now, the Timberwolves and Thunder are atop the Western Conference and the Magic are top-3 in the East. You don't have to have four superstars to be competitive in the NBA and there are probably 7-8 teams with a realistic shot at the title.
The Pistons have enjoyed none of this parity, and Weaver hasn't even tried. When he first took over he talked about "empty clips" and people were calling him Trader Troy. What happened to that guy? He has been terrified to take any sort of risk and it shows in this roster, that doesn't have a single free agent on it from the last three offseasons.
Worse yet, this team is completely mismatched, isn't built to complement its best player and doesn't have the personnel to match up against a modern NBA team. There's been no discernible plan from the beginning, no team building and absolutely no logic to how this team has been constructed.
You can blame Monty Williams (I will in a second) but this is Weaver's team and he has to be held responsible for his failure to improve it. The silence from the front office during all of this has been deafening, as all we've heard is how we need to see if the team "gels" or if getting Bojan Bogdanovic back will help them "win a few games." They haven't and it hasn't.
Given his lack of activity and the lack of progress, I don't see how Troy Weaver can be allowed to rebuild this team again this summer, as they will have as many as eight open roster spots.
Tearing down the Detroit Pistons
Monty Williams
What do you do with a coach in the first year of a seven-year guaranteed deal who has already lost the team? We may be there with Williams, who has been a disaster so far.
It's not just the losing. This team doesn't compete, looks completely defeated and doesn't seem to care. They went through the motions last night and it never once looked like they thought they had a chance to win.
You can criticize Dwane Casey all you want, but the team never looked this pathetic and lifeless under him. The Pistons have exciting players like Jaden Ivey and Ausar Thompson who look like shells of the guys they were coming into the season and you can't blame them.
They've had inconsistent minutes, ill-defined roles and never seem to know what is being asked of them. Williams has jerked around the lineups so much (partly because of injuries) that none of these guys know if they will be playing, or with who, from one night to the next. He's used more five-man combinations than any coach in the league, routinely goes away from things that are working and holds players to different levels of accountability.
Ausar Thompson went from a rookie with swagger who was tearing up the boards and drawing comparisons to the best defenders in the league to a guy who has no role. Jaden Ivey has never been put in a position to succeed, and even when he does, he could get benched. Killian Hayes had a great stretch in the first half only to barely play in the second last night.
Williams refuses to even try Isaiah Stewart as a small-ball center even though his starting center is out and the other two bigs are virtually unplayable (more of Weaver's handiwork there). I don't think I've ever seen a team with worse body language than the one I saw last night, a night when Williams was supposed to shorten his rotation, but ended up playing 13 guys.
Players look like they have never met, they throw the ball away because they don't know where to be, the offense and defense have gotten worse, and there isn't a single player with a defined role, not even Cade Cunningham, who goes from playing off the ball to being the only guy who touches it.
Monty has taken a young roster that had some confidence coming into the season and completely sucked the life out of it. But don't worry, we only have six more years of this unless Williams decides to quit or Tom Gores doesn't mind paying him nearly $100 million to not work.
This team has no identity and no hope and a big part of that is the coach that zapped their confidence, doesn't have a clear plan and hasn't established roles for any of his key guys.
Tearing down the Detroit Pistons
Cade Cunningham
For the first time last night, I saw Cade Cunningham look like he didn't want to be there. He was dead behind the eyes, had no juice and his body language was awful. His shoulders slumped with every turnover and missed shot.
Don't get it twisted, some of this is on him. He's been a turnover machine and hasn't made the leap in efficiency we were hoping for. Gee, I wonder why? Has any team done a worse job of building around their key player than the Detroit Pistons?
We are in year three of Cade and still the team has no shooting, no two-way wings, no skilled bigs, no secondary scorer or any of the types of players who would best complement Cade.
We have no idea if Cade can be "Him" because the team around him is so bad and poorly constructed that it is making him worse. People have compared Cade to Luka and talked about how Luka's early teams were never this bad. No s***! Go look at the rosters! Even the worst teams Luka was on always had a few veterans who could actually contribute. He never played with a team full of guys who were his age or younger, as Dallas was trying to win games, not tank like the Pistons.
The losing culture is affecting Cade Cunningham, and if you think trading him is going to help, think again. The Pistons would get 50 cents on the dollar at best and then we'd have to watch Cade go be a superstar on another team.
If he is the guy, the Pistons have to start acting like it, which means replacing most of this roster with players whose primary attribute is "They help Cade." That means getting some shooters, forgetting about the "Bad Boys" and acting like the only way Detroit can win is by playing defense. Yes, defense matters, but look around the league, all of the top teams are the ones who can score and have dynamic offensive players.
I feel bad for Cade, as I know he wants to win and bring success to Detroit, but he's not been given the tools to do it and it is sucking the life out of him night after night as he kicks out to teammates who can't make open shots, as he perfectly sets up a big only to watch him fumble the pass out of bounds.
Tearing down the Detroit Pistons
The rest of the roster
To me, everyone else on the roster is on the table. I would probably keep Ausar Thompson and Jalen Duren, but nearly everyone else has to go.
Marvin Bagley III and James Wiseman have to go. Alec Burks, Joe Harris and Monte Morris have to go. Bojan Bogdanovic has to go and he can take Isaiah Livers and Kevin Knox with him. This team has to be completely revamped around the "Core 4" even if that means trading one or two of them and building around Cade, Ausar and Duren.
They have to fill their expiring roster spots with veterans who can play. They have to package Ivey with their pick and get a real forward. They need to pack this team with shooters as the Pacers have done around Tyrese Haliburton.
In short, the Pistons need to start over.
The good news is that they will have a better starting point than last time, as they do have some talented young players, but the bad news is that they can't fire the owner, the coach holds all the cards and there is apparently no low the team can sink to before Troy Weaver's seat gets hot.
So the problem will probably continue, just with a different cast of players, but something has to change. I've been watching this team for a LONG time and they've never been down this bad. I've never seen the fanbase this checked out, this angry, this hopeless and it shows in the empty stands.
The Pistons have been building for four years, now it's time to tear it down again.