Why the Detroit Pistons Tanked in the 2020-21 NBA Season

After 72 outings against different teams from around the NBA, The Detroit Pistons won just 20 games during the 2020-2021 basketball season. This abhorrent record put them at a win percentage of just 27%, relegating them to the last place in the Eastern Conference and second to last in the entire league.

However, for Detroit Pistons’ fans, those 52 losses represented something that they’d been begging for since 2016: an actual tanking effort. 

It’s a pretty straightforward concept: the teams that win the fewest amount of games receive the highest odds for a top pick in the NBA draft. If you’re a bad team, you may get to pick the first player during the league’s yearly selection of new talent.

Because of this, teams who fail to compete against the league’s best sometimes decide to start over-they build and play with a team of young guys, lose a lot of games with those young guys, and eventually turn them into superstars because of how much they’ve been playing them in comparison to how other teams are playing their rookies. When the older superstars begin to retire, the teams with the most experienced players take their spot as the league’s kings.

When the Detroit Pistons realized that their previous attempts at succeeding in the league were failing, they decided to start fresh. Throughout this season, the Detroit Pistons focused on developing their young talent and throwing them into games against some of the league’s best. 

Even looking at their roster, you’ll notice a pretty clear trend. Nearly every single player is exceptionally young. In fact, a pretty substantial amount of them are rookies.

Even though the team was losing (naturally, young players can’t initially compete with the likes of Stephen Curry and LeBron James), those same guys proved to be fast learners. By the end of their season, they’d produced two members of the NBA’s all-rookie teams. 

Now, they’ve got some solid prospects going into the future. Saddiq Bey, Isaiah Stweart, Killian Hayes, Josh Jackson, Jerami Grant, and Hamidou Diallo are all looking like future studs.

Along with the fact that their team, losing as they may, is developing into a particular group of players, the Detroit Pistons were yet again rewarded for their willingness to lose for the sake of a long-term plan. In the recent draft lottery, the Detroit Pistons drew the #1 pick. 

The obvious choice for the Detroit Pistons is Cade Cunningham, a well-rounded guard out of Oklahoma State. Cade averaged over 20 ppg in his recent NCAA year and showed prowess in nearly every aspect of the offensive game.

In the upcoming years, things are starting to look pretty ok for the Detroit Pistons. With a strong core of young players, an incoming potential superstar, and a management team that’s focused on developing their talent, we could soon see Detroit making a deep run into the league playoffs.