‘We built that:’ Behind the Pistons’ drastic turnaround that has been years in the making

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The boos were audible. The patience from a necessary rebuild had dissipated, replaced by frustration and a feeling of: Not again.

It was only the Pistons’ first preseason game of the season and the Milwaukee Bucks had gotten off to a quick 12-0 start, prompting a timeout from new coach J.B. Bickerstaff and those boos from a fan base that had grown tired of being the NBA’s underbelly. It was like the home team was a bad act at the Apollo.

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New coach, new front office — same nonsense, or so the fans thought.

They had no idea the Pistons were about to embark on one of the most drastic turnarounds in NBA history. No idea they’d go on an eight-game winning streak in February, including a beatdown of the champion Boston Celtics. No idea they’d win a playoff game for the first time in 17 years, setting the stage for what will certainly be a raucous atmosphere at Little Caesars Arena on Thursday night for Game 3 of the Pistons’ first-round series against the New York Knicks.

There was no reason to believe something special was brewing. The franchise hadn’t won a playoff game since the 2008 Eastern Conference finals, and so many years had been lost in between.

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It has been an unexpected development. But the roots of the revival were beginning to blossom even during the franchise depression.

“Nobody celebrates when you build a big, beautiful building, when you pour in the concrete,” former Pistons head coach Dwane Casey, who’s now in the front office, told Yahoo Sports. “Nobody’s out there with pom-poms and confetti. That’s boring.”

What might feel like a one-year breakthrough is anything but. In a way, the Pistons, save for a disastrous one-year detour that had the franchise dancing with ignominy, are right on schedule.

The offseason additions of Tobias Harris, Tim Hardaway Jr., Malik Beasley and, later, Dennis Schröder have yielded positive results, the necessary veteran presence to aid a young team in desperate need of it.

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But the true reason for this reversal starts with the draft decisions made during the ugly rebuild.

Cade Cunningham, Isaiah Stewart, Jalen Duren and Jaden Ivey are the cornerstones of this turnaround. The Pistons’ draft picks from 2020 to 2022 were all around when the team bottomed out last season, winning only 14 games, and losing 28 straight. If the years of losing had broken them, the franchise wouldn’t be here with as much optimism and real hope as there’s been in 20 years, when Detroit began its dominant run as an Eastern Conference power.

Their basketball character led the Pistons out of the darkness and to the doorstep of prosperity — or if nothing else, respectability.

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The Pistons went 60-176 from the 2020-21 season to ‘22-23. Casey wore the losses when the necessary decision was made to pivot away from the Blake Griffin-Andre Drummond core. Griffin had dragged around his left leg during the end of the 2019 season and into the playoffs, and the Pistons were swept by the Bucks in Round 1 — not far from the best-case scenario at that time.

Troy Weaver was brought in as the team’s general manager during the pandemic to lead the rebuild. He’d long been acknowledged as one of the league’s best talent evaluators from his days in Oklahoma City alongside Sam Presti, and he began the deconstruction of the roster.

Two of his first three acquisitions on draft night were Stewart and Saddiq Bey via trade — and Killian Hayes with the seventh pick. Hayes was a disaster, but Stewart and Bey were tough ones. They battled Griffin and the other vets in practice daily. For all the protocols that were restrictive on the outside, the inside was all about ball.

“We used to battle about, you know, who can get to the gym first? That’s how competitive it was,” Stewart said.

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If you got there at 8 a.m., you were probably late.

“You ain’t showing up and you saw another person’s car there before you,” Stewart said. “It all boils down to that. And obviously, that rubs off on any young player that’s around, because you don’t want to get looked at as like the oddball who was not working.”

It’s the circle of NBA life. Before proving yourself on the outside, the inside is where battles are won, real estate gained. The wins weren’t coming, because they weren’t supposed to. Veteran guard Derrick Rose was traded to the Knicks at the deadline and not long after, Griffin was waived and bought out.

The Pistons were going lottery hunting and, for the first time, luck smiled on them. In 2021, they wound up with the first pick. They needed a star, and got one: Cade Cunningham.

Upon Cunningham’s arrival in Detroit, Stewart immediately saw something special about him — a magnetism, a charisma that was easy to follow. And more importantly, a maturity that belied his age, along with a want-to, a desire to do it in Detroit even as a Dallas native.

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“Cade … he has a voice, and that voice takes the locker room when he speaks, and he’s been doing that since a rookie,” Stewart said. “I mean you coming in and you’re able to even voice stuff out to vets. I’m like, yeah, he’s special.”

“I’ve never tried to impose myself on anybody, like ‘I’m your leader.’ I’m not trying to force it,” Cunningham told Yahoo Sports earlier this season. “I’m gonna be myself. I want the best for everybody in here, the best for my teammates. I think guys respect that.”

But you can’t add water and produce a contender. Cunningham had a solid rookie year, but surgery on his left shin ended Year 2 after just 12 games, putting a rookie Ivey in a position to play more point guard than he was ready for. Stewart, playing alongside Duren, tried to become a stretch 4 (and to be fair, shot 38 percent on nearly four 3-point attempts a game a year later in ‘23-24). Duren showed promise as a powerful finisher at the rim, but battled ankle injuries.

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“As a young player in this league, it was kind of like, when (are) the wins gonna come? You know, everybody was talking about, ‘Just be patient, man. You guys working hard,’” Stewart said. “You know wins are gonna come, but we didn’t know when it was gonna come, and we didn’t know how we were supposed to feel.”

Casey said he had “contentious” moments while coaching the Pistons’ youth, but insisted it was never personal. He still loved on them, just like his teams in Toronto that he took to the doorstep of glory before being fired for Nick Nurse in 2018.

“I’m sure I had moments with Cade. I was sure I had moments with Ivey, Stew and all these guys,” Casey said.

But it’s impossible to know what culture is being built, if a culture is being built.

The turnaround was predicted to happen last year. Pistons owner Tom Gores pressed the fast forward button to hire Monty Williams after he was fired from the Phoenix Suns. It came with a record price tag, $78.5 million over six years, almost a stimulus package for all coaches who’ve benefitted since, and Gores viewed it as a coup considering Williams had taken the Suns to the NBA Finals in 2021.

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But what ensued was a disaster. The roster was ill-fitting. Weaver filled the open spots with wild cards like James Wiseman and Marvin Bagley — former No. 2 picks hoping to recapture pedigree. He kept Hayes around. He didn’t see much in free agency, so he traded for veteran shooter Joe Harris, with Bojan Bogdanovic and Alec Burks set to be the leading vets.

Snake eyes was rolled on every single move.

Williams believed Hayes could be redeemed, and it came at Ivey’s expense. Ivey was energetic, but still in need of seasoning as a playmaker. He fell into Williams’ doghouse and never got out.

The 28-game losing streak wore on everyone — Williams didn’t seem long for the job, and he wasn’t given a roster that fit his strengths. He tried things, like hockey shift changes — all five players being substituted at once — and nothing worked.

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Still, perhaps shockingly, the confidence of the team’s young core wasn’t shaken. Cunningham and Stewart had optimistic yet tough conversations that seem clairvoyant now but appeared downright delusional in real time.

“I remember me and him, just talking in that moment and we’re just saying, ‘Tables are going to turn,’” Stewart said. “You know, that’s what me and him always said to each other, ‘Stay with it.’”

To have a steeled approach when getting your head beat in every night says a lot about that group’s togetherness amidst chaos.

Duren could see something forming, too. He called the culture “something you can believe in, a symbol of togetherness. And we built that.”

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“We were gym rats,” Duren said. “We had the same mentality of wanting to get better individually, that to me was something. I haven’t been here long, but you’ve seen guys go through the motions of the NBA. But our young core was always working, bumping with each other, playing with each other.”

Still, the 2023-24 season raised questions about the core four Weaver had drafted. Could Cunningham really be the guy? Could Stewart and Duren work together in a league that calls for small? Was Ivey broken, a tweener without a real position?

When last season mercifully ended, it was clear change was needed. Weaver was fired, and Williams was bought out — meaning Gores had to cut some big checks. And he had to make sure there weren’t as many conflicting voices inside the front office — something that led to tacit finger-pointing, blame and not a lot of responsibility being owned.

“I think we needed to get better, be more organized,” Gores told Yahoo Sports in October. “We’ve done the things necessary. Everybody’s clear on their jobs. It’s part of being a good team. I do feel like we’ve tightened things up.”

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In stepped Trajan Langdon as president of basketball operations and then Bickerstaff as head coach.

Cunningham was a no-brainer to stick around, fortified by a max contract the franchise didn’t hesitate to give him. But the other young players, Langdon had no ties to them — he could very well have taken the wrecking ball from Day 1.

“To be honest, I didn’t know much about the team itself the previous year because they were not a very good team and I didn’t see them as much,” Langdon said. “But you start prepping for the job and you’re like, tweak this, tweak that in terms of roster, trying to put Cade in a better position.”

He identified turnovers, defense and shooting as the biggest issues, thinking he could make moves around the fringes and was open to seeing how things could develop.

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“We had a preseason camp out West and the vets come in and the players are working out together and they’re talking playoffs — back in September,” Pistons president of basketball operations Trajan Langdon told Yahoo Sports. “Who am I to say (they’re wrong)? So do it.

“It’s been fun to watch this group come together. They knew they had to be competitive. I think the one thing that they figured out pretty early on is we got to take our compete level and our care factor up to another level, because it wasn’t good enough last year.”

The Pistons finished 11th in defense this season, and became a middle-of-the-pack 3-point shooting team with the new additions.

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Cunningham has become an All-NBA player. Stewart has evolved into one of the league’s best interior defenders, as well as the anchor of their competitive, take-no-prisoners culture reminiscent of the franchise’s championship past. Ausar Thompson, the team’s 2024 lottery pick, has developed into a do-it-all wing who’s on track to be one of the best defenders in the NBA — and many around the league believe he’s the player who should be untradeable outside of Cunningham.

Summer looms, when Duren is up for an extension, and so is Ivey, who’s been out since Jan. 1 with a broken fibula and just began basketball activities. Their improved play will make for some hard decisions financially. But make no mistake, the future is bright.

“There were a lot of people who talked about the character of the players, great young men and they care,” Langdon said. “Until you meet them and get to know them, you see them around their teammates, and they do care.

“There wasn’t a sense of defeat.”

Their character has continued to show throughout this season — even after their heart-breaking Game 1 loss against the Knicks. They wouldn’t be broken, because they weren’t broken through the toughest times they’d ever experience. It’s only up from here.

This news was originally published on this post .

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