Where did the Pistons go wrong?

Detroit hasn't won a playoff game since 2008. The consistent retoolings and rebuilds haven't worked.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Fishermen at Sea; J.M.W. Turner; 1796

The Detroit Pistons have lost 19 straight games, and have a legitimate shot at the NBA record of 26 consecutive losses in a single season, set by 2010-11 Cavaliers and matched by the 2013-14 Sixers. The record could happen on December 26 in Little Caesars Arena in Detroit against the Brooklyn Nets. As the Romans said, “Pizza pizza.”

Where did all this go wrong?

Let’s travel back to … 2008.

A Particular Inelegant Fall From Grace

Under head coach Flip Saunders, the 2007-08 Pistons went 59-23 and made their sixth straight Eastern Conference Finals. The Boston Celtics — in their first season with Flip’s old star Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen — beat the Pistons 4-2 to make the Finals, where they beat the Lakers. The Pistons had made two Finals and won one before Saunders arrived.

Losing in the final four three straight years didn’t sit well with franchise leadership, so they fired him and hired first-time head coach Michael Curry, who had been an assistant under Saunders for a single season after a journeyman NBA career.

The Pistons then did something even worse than replace Flip Saunders with Michael Curry: they traded Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson a couple days into the regular season.

A Decade of Headsmackingly Brutal Player Transactions

AI’s career was effectively over at that point. He spent the one season in Detroit. Billups made two All-Star Games post-trade, and had a whole ‘nother era of his career as the savvy “coach on the floor” before eventually becoming a coach off the floor. The Pistons went 39-43, got swept out of the playoffs by LeBron’s Cavaliers and fired Curry. (He would later coach under Doug Collins in Philadelphia, and eventually turned to college coaching.)

At that point, Detroit just became a bad team. Without Billups and with Iverson moving on quickly, the team became rudderless. The Pistons hired John Kuester; he lasted two years. The Ben Gordon contract happened. Rip Hamilton and Ben Wallance became less effective absent an effective team around them. The team replaced Kuester with Lawrence Frank, who also lasted two years. Here are the win totals during the Kuester and Frank eras: 27, 30, 25, 29. It’s enough to make you pine for Michael Curry.

Then they hired Mo Cheeks in 2013-14. He was fired midseason because the team owner, Tom Gores, thought the team was underperforming. The Pistons were 21-29 (.420) under Cheeks and 8-24 (.250) under his interim replacement John Loyer. Looks like overperformance to me! That team’s top three in field goal attempts per game: Josh Smith, Brandon Jennings and Greg Monroe. Cheeks might have been the Coach of the Year batting .420 with that crew.

Ah, Josh Smith. The Pistons needed to clear cap space for free agency before that fateful 2013-14 season, so they traded Ben Gordon to the Hornets along with an unprotected first-round pick for Corey Maggette, who was on his way out of the league. Joe Dumars then used that cap space on Josh Smith … who the Pistons waived within 18 months, during Stan Van Gundy’s first season in Detroit. In SVG’s second season, the Pistons somehow managed to win 44 games and get swept by LeBron’s Cavaliers (a trend) with a team led by Reggie Jackson, Andre Drummond, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Marcus Morris.

The Pistons fell back to reality the next season and change.

Josh Smith, meanwhile, went on to ruin the Lob City Clippers once and for all, which eventually led to [sync up when the SVG Pistons are falling back to reality] the Pistons trading for half of Lob City, Blake Griffin, a couple months after the Clippers convinced Blake Griffin to sign a max deal to stay in Los Angeles. (The Pistons gave up Tobias Harris and the pick that became Miles Bridges in that deal.) Van Gundy, who also ran the front office, left at the end of that season.