Who is most to blame for the Detroit Pistons disaster of a season?
Troy Weaver
Where do I even start? It may be that we gave Troy Weaver too much credit in the beginning for doing the things any GM could have done.
It's easy to purge a roster of players, especially when you have an owner who is willing to eat money like some sort of capitalist hungry hungry Hippo.
It's easy to find talent in the top five of the draft, especially when you have the #1 pick. The beginning of this rebuild was the easy part, as anyone can bulldoze a crumbling house.
Weaver's wins have been few and far between and even in year four he still hasn't assembled a roster that makes any sense.
After suffering through the second-worst season in team history, Weaver did nothing in the offseason to improve the team. Instead, he doubled down on a bad, mismatched roster.
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He paid $25 million to two backup centers, one of whom can't play defense and the other who can't do anything.
He neglected to address the wing or power forward position even though they were clear areas of need, instead, he traded up to take another undersized guard in the draft after making a nice (and obvious) pick of Ausar Thompson with his first pick.
He held onto veterans for too long, eventually giving them away for far less than he could have gotten if he had just traded them last season.
The Pistons are the worst team in the NBA and have been (or close) for the last four seasons and yet they somehow still OWE a first-round draft pick to the Knicks, which almost seems impossible when you look at the war chest of picks other rebuilding teams have accumulated.
He's made some good moves on the fringes (getting Simone Fontecchio was a win if they can keep him) and he's found some talent in the draft, but we still have no idea if his "Core" can even play together long-term, as they currently have the worst net rating of any five-man lineup that has played meaningful minutes together this season.
He can pay lip service to financial flexibility, being nimble (like a sprite in a forest) but he has created a bad roster that no sane free agent would want to join, so who cares if they have cap space?
The Detroit Pistons are still a hot mess, even worse than last season. There are no quick fixes and the worst part is that there doesn't seem to be a plan.