The Detroit Pistons have been on a tear lately, winning 9 of their last 11 games including beating the Toronto Raptors in overtime Sunday night, the Raptors currently sitting in second place in the Eastern Conference but playing without Kawhi Leonard, and have drawn a bit of excitement in the Detroit area, with some thinking they may be able to win a playoff series. On February 3rd, the day before the Pistons hosted the Denver Nuggets, their record stood at 22-29, putting them in ninth place in the Eastern Conference, 2 games behind the Miami Heat for the 8th seed and only a half-game ahead of the Wizards and closer to the 11th place Magic than a playoff birth. In the month since then, they have passed the Heat, Hornets and Nets to move up to 6th place in the East at 31-31, and if the season ended today they would have a first round matchup against the Indiana Pacers. That may be the most likely matchup to result in an opening round upset in the Eastern Conference, but it’s unlikely the Pistons will end up playing the Pacers. The 76ers are only half a game behind the Pacers right now for the third spot, and Philly has been improving their play as their new players get more accompanied to their teammates and system as the season goes along, while the Pacers losing Victor Oladipo back on January 23rd have gone 9-8 without him after being 32-15 at the time of his injury. If the Pacers keep playing .500 basketball, they won’t hang on to the 3 seed. Even if they do, the Nets tied the Pistons for the 6th seed by beating the Mavericks Monday night, and the Pistons could easily end up in the 7th spot with the Nets taking their 6 seed. Some Pistons fans think they could beat the Raptors in a playoff series, given they’ve beat Toronto twice and head coach Dwane Casey being Toronto’s coach last year could give the Pistons some advantages. This is where we need to pump the breaks.

The Pistons don’t have the roster talent to win a playoff series

If the Pistons match up with any of the top teams in the Eastern Conference other than the Pacers, they will have the worse overall roster in the matchup. If they faced the Milwaukee Bucks, the Bucks would have the best player in Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Eric Bledsoe and 2019 All-Star Khris Middleton would give the Bucks arguably 3 of the best 4 players, with only the Pistons’ Blake Griffin ahead of them. Midseason acquisitions George Hill and Nikola Mirotic give the Bucks a better bench rotation than Detroit as well. If the Pistons went up against the Raptors, Kawhi Leonard would be the best player on the floor, Kyle Lowry gives them 2 of the best three on the two rosters, Paskal Siakam is developing into a very nice player right before our eyes, and Jeremy Lin, OG Anunoby, and whoever comes off the bench of Marc Gasol and Serge Ibaka give Toronto a better second unit than the Pistons. Arguably the most likely scenario, the Pistons taking on the 76ers would have Philadelphia with arguably the best 3 players on the floor with Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons and Jimmy Butler possibly being better than any individual on Detroit’s roster. This is the one matchup where the Pistons may have the better bench, with Luke Kennard, Ish Smith, and newcomer Thon Maker giving the Pistons maybe a better bench than the 76ers bench unit centered on TJ McConnell, Furkan Korkmaz and Mike Scott, but the major gap in starter talent would put Philly well in front of the Pistons in total talent. The Celtics would have a better individual player in Kyrie Irving, and their guard/wing rotation of Irving, Tatum, Smart, Brown, Hayward, and Rozier easily outclasses that of the Pistons which includes 2018 second round pick Bruce Brown starting games, and Brown has played the most minutes of any draft pick after Landry Shamet, the 26th pick, and the most minutes played of anyone drafted after Brown (42nd) is De’Anthony Melton (46th) who’s played over 300 fewer minutes for the Suns, who own the NBA’s worst record. Brown has held his own against NBA competition, but a field goal percentage under 40% and a 3PT% under 30 isn’t what playoff teams are looking for in a starting shooting guard.

Any importance of this run other than playoffs?

Well… Maybe. They’re not going anywhere in this year’s playoffs, but it seems incredibly likely that they will at least be in the playoffs now. There is value in going to the playoffs, but this core of players doesn’t seem like one that will ever put together a long playoff run and it does hurt your draft position to be in the playoffs instead of the lottery. So the main possibility of importance of this stretch of basketball is growth in the players as individuals. That starts with Andre Drummond. Blake Griffin isn’t getting any better, he turns 30 in just under 2 weeks. When the Pistons gave Drummond a 5 year max deal in the summer of 2016, they were relying on him to improve his offensive game and get more consistent on defense. Drummond at his best is an elite defender, proven by the fact that he edged out Rudy Gobert in defensive box plus/minus and defensive rating for the best mark in those categories in the entire NBA last year. That’s partly from his historically great rebounding, but also in part to the way he uses his long arms (7’6 wingspan in a 6’11 frame), collecting steals at an uncommon rate for a center, as Andre has averaged no less than 1.5 steals per game over the last 4 years. But he has always had periods of listlessness on the defensive end as well. With his strength and that reach, he should rack up blocks and be a constant threat to opposing guards looking for space in the lane, yet his blocks hit a career low of just 1.1 per game in the 2016-’17 season. They went back up to 1.6 last year, he’s at 1.7 this season, and over this 11-game stretch Drummond is averaging 2.1 blocks to go along with 2.2 steals, to go with a touch over 20 points and 16 rebounds per game. If over 2 steals and blocks per game seems crazy, that’s because it is. There have been 6 seasons in which a player posts at least 2 in those per-game categories, 4 of them by Hakeem Olajuwon. Also, after his historically terrible free through shooting took a big step in the right direction last year, posting a 60.5% mark, it had dipped back to to 57.3 so far this year, but this 11-game stretch saw him hit free throws at a 68.5% rate, not good but passable for an NBA center. Andre Drummond looks elite at times, as his 10 20-point, 20-rebound games is twice as many as Karl-Anthony Towns, who’s 5 20-20 games makes him the only other player with more than 3 such games this year. Since Drummond entered the league in 2012, his 30 20-20 games are double DeMarcus Cousins’ 15, second in the league in that span. Drummond turns 26 this offseason. He can still be a great old-school center. He’s also taking more 3’s than ever before, averaging more than an attempt every other game. Please stop that, you’re barely making over 10% of them.

Other players who’ve looked good are the other 2 of the Pistons best 3 players. Reggie Jackson and Blake Griffin are both putting up career highs in 3 point percentage, something players can always improve on as they age to stay valuable to their team. Griffin has also averaged nearly 6 assists on this stretch, including picking up his 10th career triple-double in a win over the Pacers on February 25th. Jackson, meanwhile, has been a net positive in his box plus/minus statistic (analytic?) after posting a -1.4 average over the past 2 seasons. Shooting guard Luke Kennard was struggling in his sophomore season, shooting 35.8% from deep after having a 41.5 3P% in his rookie season, and he had seen a similar decrease in free throw percentage, as well as posting lower assist numbers and not getting an increase in minutes that was expected for him coming into the season. But in this 11-game stretch, he’s averaged over 26 minutes a game after playing roughly 20 a night his rookie year and to that point this year, and his scoring average has jumped to 13.6 a game thanks in large part to his 48.4 3P% on this run, and his assists/game average going from 1.3 before this to 2.5 during the great stretch of basketball shows him being more involved in the offense even when he’s not scoring. Newcomer Thon Maker provides good, versatile defense when he’s on the floor as his length and relative quickness allow him to guard big men and some slower wing players, but his effective field goal percentage since joining the Pistons has been about 40%. The NBA average eFG% is 52.4 this year. To be fair, that’s the highest it’s ever been, and it was never higher than 50.2% until 2 years ago, but also league average has only been below 47% one time (’98-’99) since the NBA adopted the 3-point line. The point is Thon Maker needs to shoot better. More than half of his shots this year have been 3’s, but he’s hitting less than a third of them. If he could get back to around 38% like he was hitting in his rookie year, he’d be a lot more valuable.

The Pistons have been playing really good basketball lately. For a city who’s other sports teams are rebuilding (Red Wings and Tigers) or just the Detroit Lions who are always a mess, it’s good to have some excitement around this team that at least will give the city some playoff action to look forward to. But people thinking they can make it out of the first round just need to look at their roster and compare it to the teams at the top of the Eastern Conference. They’ll find it doesn’t stack up, and this middling team is only exciting in that they are good enough to make the playoffs in the horrid East, where all you need to do is look at the Southeast Division, currently led by the 30-35 Magic, to see how miserable it is. This is why the NBA stopped having division winners automatically get home court advantage in the first round, because the Magic don’t deserve a first round series where they have home court against the 76ers, so we’ll let them have to play the Bucks on the road instead. They probably don’t even deserve that, and after there was some public bemoaning of the playoff system and people saying the league should seed teams 1-16 regardless of conference for the playoffs. If they did that, the Kings would take the Magic’s spot and actually be 14th, ahead of the Nets and Pistons at the moment.

The Pistons have been fun to watch lately, and have some really good players, and hiring Dwane Casey to be the head coach was a really good move, as it didn’t seem like this team was connecting under Stan Van Gundy, but they needed this really good stretch just to get to .500. They’re not a great team, they’re not going to make a run in the playoffs, and they’re not going to in the near future with this same core of players. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Until next time,

CM

Stats and info courtesy of ESPN and basketball-reference.