These Are the Best Detroit Pistons Since Their Shoulda-Been Dynasty Era

Let's celebrate the cool story that will play out in the Motor City these playoffs.

Sorry, I needed to post a photo of Rip Hamilton against the Lakers in his iconic mask. (LUCY NICHOLSON/AFP via Getty Images)

For whatever reason, it’s easy to become cynical about the NBA. I was realizing this in my own writing recently — aside from inducting Shareef Abdur-Rahim into the Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players, most of my recent NBA stories have been worrying about something with the state of the league: The bizarre trend of late-season coach firings, the inevitability of foul-grifting, the disasters of the Sixers (and Pelicans), the betting scandals, etc.

But not everything is that negative! We do have a pretty impressive group of favorites that will duke it out in the playoffs — and whichever team wins will tell us something about the direction of the league, whether we are due for another unique winner (OKC? Cleveland?? Minnesota??? Indy???? The Knicks??????) or if somebody like the Celtics, the Luka-Lakers, the Warriors or even the post-Malone¹ Nuggets could be the first multi-time winner in the past seven postseasons.

And as YouTuber Kofie pointed out a few days ago, the best story of the playoffs (while it lasts) might just belong to the Detroit Pistons, simply for locking in a trip one year after winning only 14 games in total and suffering a 28-game losing streak, the longest in a single season² in NBA history:

(Full disclosure: Kofie is a Pistons fan. But he’s also right.)

Now the Pistons are on track for roughly 45 victories, which would make for the seventh-biggest year-over-year increase in wins by a team since the 1976 ABA merger:

Notice that the Pistons also started off with one of the lowest win totals of any team who later improved enough to make that list; even the pre-Big Three Celtics of 2006-07 won 10 more games than Detroit did last year. We can’t overstate how much these Pistons have grown in the realm of execution and competitive play — Detroit went from the bottom 5 in efficiency on both sides of the ball last season to above-average in both this year, a massive turnaround.

A few days ago, I mapped out the very long-term trajectory of baseball’s San Francisco Giants, a team that has been up and down and everywhere in between since the mid-1990s. The Pistons are another fun candidate for that kind of exercise, because we can trace multiple distinct eras for the franchise since they rebuilt from the remnants of the Bad Boys entering the ‘90s.

The arrival of Grant Hill — who, it should be remembered, was on the shortlist of players who might succeed Michael Jordan as the face of the NBA, before he left Detroit and then got hurt — appeared to usher in a new age of contention for the franchise, but it only ever topped out as a four-time first-round playoff loser in that era. And things seemed especially bleak when Hill signed with Orlando; by 2001, Piston fans were relegated to rooting for Jerry Stackhouse to try for the scoring crown instead of actually winning ballgames.

But that was around when everything changed. With Joe Dumars directing the front office, the Pistons pulled off one of the most impressive series of team-building coups in recent memory: Adding Hall of Pretty Damn Good member (and Hall of Famer) Ben Wallace in the sign-and-trade that dropped Hill in Orlando; dealing Stackhouse to Washington for Rip Hamilton; drafting Tayshaun Prince 23rd in 2002; and signing Chauncey Billups as he was on the cusp of turning his career around. For the coup de grâce, Dumars swung a 3-team trade for Rasheed Wallace at the 2004 deadline, adding one last star piece to a team that had quickly risen among the ranks of the East contenders.

That core — the Wallace Bros. and Friends — would come to define what I like to call the “Shoulda-Been Dynasty” era of Pistons basketball.

In 2004, Detroit won the NBA championship in shocking fashion, dismantling the star-studded Kobe/Shaq Lakers in five games. And it wasn’t a one-off, either: The Pistons would make six straight Eastern Conference finals from 2003 through 2008 — an incredible stretch of consistency that had the team knocking on the door of a title practically every year. During that run, they went seven games in the 2005 Finals, missing a chance at back-to-back titles in part because Rasheed Wallace forgot to guard Robert Horry as an inbounder in overtime of Game 5. They lost the 2006 East final to a Heat team that won 12 fewer games during the regular season. And they would have gone to another Finals in 2007, if it weren’t for LeBron James scoring 25 consecutive points in Cleveland’s Game 5 OT victory.

Any one of those six seasons could have yielded another banner — and if that had happened, the Wallace-era Pistons might be remembered as one of the last great pre-Superteam dynasties. Instead, they’ve become a kind of forgotten powerhouse, remembered more as an underdog winner in ‘04 than the dominant Eastern Conference force they were throughout most of the 2000s.

Then came the dark times, after Dumars tried to keep the window open too long and instead plunged the Pistons into a 15-year malaise. Somewhat to their credit, they attempted to remain competitive without fully bottoming out, cycling through coaches and trying to aim for the playoffs when possible. But that just meant they never really had very valuable draft picks, and they were swept in each of their three playoff appearances from 2009 through 2019.

More recently, they were actually bad enough to secure the No. 1 pick in the draft, taking Cade Cunningham in 2021, and their top pick has been no lower than seventh in each of the past five drafts. While some teams can actually pull off the build-from-the-middle tactic, the Pistons probably needed this period of fully rebuilding, which now looks like it was all part of the plan to bring the franchise back to relevance.

Of course, that would have been a much harder case to make last year, when the vibes were low and the losses were relentless. But these Pistons are not those Pistons: Cunningham has taken another leap, Ausar Thompson is one of the best young two-way players in the league, Tobias Harris remains functional,³ Jalen Duren continues to be a rebounding machine and Malik Beasley is instant offense. Detroit plays hard, defends well and, as Kofie pointed out in his video, has also rapidly become one of the league’s most fun teams to watch — a far cry from the hopeless version that took the court a year ago.

No, they probably won’t last very long in the postseason. The Neil’s Substack 🏀 2024-25 NBA forecast 📈 only gives Detroit a 33 percent to make it out of Round 1 against, most likely, the New York Knicks. But that’s almost beside the point. For the first time in what feels like forever, the Pistons have a team that is at least closer to the Wallace Era in quality than not. It’s mid-April, and they will be playing meaningful basketball soon. In a league so often driven by cynicism and negativity, that is a pretty positive story to grab ahold of.

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Filed under: NBA

1. Pun intended, but I hate it.

2. The Sixers lost 28 in a row at the height of The Process, but that streak spanned across the 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons.

3. Much to Sixer fans’ chagrin.