It's hard to say the 2023-24 season has been anything but a disaster for the Detroit Pistons.
Fans had moderate expectations coming into the season, as few thought the Pistons would contend for anything more than the back end of the play-in tournament, but even that meager goal is laughable at this point.
We are over 60 games into the season and the Pistons still don't have double-digit wins and it will take a hot finish for them to not end up with the worst record in team history.
This would be expected if the Pistons were in the first year of their rebuild, but this is year four and other teams on the same timeline have made the progress that Detroit has not.
So who is most to blame for this mess of a season? There is plenty to go around.
Playing the blame game with the Detroit Pistons
The players
No one likes to blame the players. When they mess up, it is somehow always the coach's fault, but we rarely admit that it is the players, not the coaching staff, that ultimately decides games.
The team still makes all of the same bad mistakes they've been making for the last four seasons. The Pistons commit the second-most turnovers in the NBA, and if you watch the games, you'll see that many of them are of the unforced variety. This isn't just coaching, it's carelessness.
The Pistons lead the league in fouls per game, again, somewhat a product of their inexperience, but at some point players have to take accountability for constantly biting on pump fakes, closing out recklessly and not doing the simple things like moving their feet. The Pistons have several lazy fouls per game where they reach in instead of moving their feet, often 50 feet away from the basket.
Detroit's defense has gotten worse this season and there's not much evidence of individual improvement from their core outside of Ausar Thompson, who was already a good defender before he got to the Motor City. Defense is about will and effort and the Pistons often show neither.
Yes, some of this can be attributed to youth and a bad roster, but these aren't children. The Pistons are the 8th-youngest team in the NBA and all seven of the younger teams are ahead of them in the standings.
We can't blame youth and inexperience forever, at some point the Detroit Pistons have to show some pride in their individual defense and stop making the same lazy mistakes we've been seeing throughout this entire rebuild.