It’s been nearly 2 full calendar months since the Detroit Pistons last won a game, as the club dropped their latest contest 118-112 to the Brooklyn Nets. With the loss, Detroit has set a new NBA record for most consecutive losses in a single season.
Despite getting off a hot start, the Pistons cooled down the stretch, ultimately allowing Brooklyn to shoot 50% from the field, and 40.9% from beyond the arc.
“Again, when you look at records, you think of coaches, but I’m sure the players don’t want that attached to the name on the jersey,” Williams said. “Was it heavy? It’s been heavy for a while. That’s just the nature of this kind of losing streak and it’s not gonna change because we’re grading the level of it, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to change it.”
With the loss, the club moves to 2-28 on the season, and could set another bit of history over the next week as well. The NBA’s all-time losing streak is 28 straight games, set by the Philadelphia 76ers. However that skid spanned portions or the 2014-15 and 2015-16 campaigns. Unfortunately for Detroit, things don’t get any easier, with a date with the NBA leading Boston Celtics on the 28th.
“You can’t get away from it. It weighs on us every day, I mean everywhere. It weighs on us,” said Pistons guard Cade Cunningham following the loss. With chants of “sell the team” echoing throughout Little Caesars Arena, Jaden Ivey was left wondering who was still supporting the team at this franchise low point.
“We have the right people in this locker room and most importantly, I just heard the fans talking about sell the team and just in my mind it’s like what we talked about, who is with us? Whose really with us?” Ivey told reporters. A sentiment that appears to be held by several Pistons’ staffers as they struggle to come up with answers.
“We wanted to be competing every day, a chance for the play-in, playoffs. We wanted our players to grow. That would have been success for us,” Pistons owner Tom Gores told the media last week. “That’s what we discussed. We knew that we had a lot of growing to do. Those were the expectations: to compete, grow, and be near the playoffs. That’s how you grow the most. Make no mistake about it, that was the expectations.”
With the playoffs not even on the table at this point, Detroit will be left taking a long hard look at every aspect of their franchise as the February 8th trade deadline approaches. No one, from the coaching staff, to the front office, rookie or veteran player can feel particularly safe at this point.
After picking 5th, 5th, 1st, and 7th overall at the draft the last 4 years, it hasn’t been for a lack of draft capital or opportunity that Detroit finds itself with a broken roster. But no matter how you slice it, something will have to give over the next month and a half, and wholesale changes can’t be ruled out at this point, painful as it may be to admit for long suffering Pistons fans.
-Kyle Skinner
Twitter: @JKyleSkinner
Photo: Pafisher188. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.