Sports

Yashinsky: It's Lottery Night - Can The Pistons Finally Catch A Break?

May 19, 2015, 12:04 PM by  Joey Yashinsky

The NBA Draft lottery will take place tonight, and the Detroit Pistons sure could use a break.

After completing their sixth consecutive year of playoff-less basketball, the Pistons head to tonight’s lottery with a shot at getting lucky and moving up to one of the coveted top three slots.

Their odds are relatively slim, around three or four percent, but strange things tend to happen on lottery night, and it’s about time things swung in the direction of the Motor City.

The draft lottery has been around since 1985 and not once have the Pistons been fortunate enough to vault to the top spot.  Of course, some of that has to do with the Pistons being an elite team for good portions of said time frame, but there have obviously been some clunkers in there, too. 

In fact, the last time this franchise held the first overall pick was back in 1970, which they wisely used to select Bob Lanier out of St. Bonaventure.  The Dobber would eventually make the Hall of Fame. 

The common rhetoric over the last handful of years is that the Pistons kept finding “steals” towards the 8-10 range in the first round.  They “lucked” into guys like Brandon Knight, Greg Monroe, Andre Drummond. 

But as we’ve seen firsthand, these were moderate splashes, not franchise-changers. 

Knight has already been jettisoned to Milwaukee, where he was summarily dealt again to Phoenix. 

Monroe has one foot out the door as a free agent this summer, and nobody’s really sure how sad to be about that. 

Drummond has become a rebounding machine, but with his offensive game stalled and his free throw shooting remaining severely broken, you’re looking at a player counted upon to be a team leader that is a liability 50% of the time the ball is in play.

It’s all well and good to think this franchise can keep picking in the bottom half of the lottery and improve enough to become a contender again, but recent history tells us that this is a strong unlikelihood.  Nobody from that aforementioned trio has dramatically altered the course of the franchise, and nowadays, with so many early entrants and unknown foreign youngsters in the first round mix, there are maybe 2-3 sure things in each draft.

The Pistons need to catch lightning in the bottle one time and shoot to the top of the draft board.  The problem is that this team has been remarkably consistent over this last half-decade or so, wallowing in sub-mediocrity, but never dropping so far as to be considered awful. 

Consider this: Over the last six seasons, the Pistons have never won less than 25 games, but also have never rose above 32.  It’s almost the worst place to be in the NBA.  You’re never good enough to grab a playoff spot and stir up some excitement, but also never bad enough to earn a juicy lottery pick and swing things back in the other direction.

You sort of just float from one year to the next, trying to convince yourself that Drummond will one day learn the footwork of Hakeem Olajuwon and that Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is more than just a re-heated version of Rodney Stuckey. 

Stan Van Gundy and the entire organization could use a serious jolt, and the best place for that to happen is tonight in New York.  The lottery will go off at 8:30 on ESPN, with the Pistons being represented by Jeff Bower, the team’s anonymous general manager. 

There are four teams left in the NBA Playoffs, all hoping to cradle the Larry O’Brien trophy a month from now.  The Pistons?  They just want to sniff .500-ball again.

The first step in that transformation could come tonight.  Cross your fingers.



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