NBA Rebuilds Taking Way Too Long
There's no such thing as a standard NBA rebuild.
When teams realize a particular era is at an end, the next steps can take any number of forms. The process can start with trading away a superstar or letting free agents walk. Sometimes, the first move is firing a coach or giving minutes to younger players—for development, sure, but also for the losing that typically attends a youth movement.
Timing varies, too. We've seen relatively quick turnarounds from organizations like the Houston Rockets and Indiana Pacers, as well as a more protracted process from the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Here, we'll highlight five teams whose attempted rebuilds are either progressing too slowly or, even worse, inexplicably have yet to begin. Some have been failing to execute a proper teardown for years, while others are badly mishandling the first steps in more recently undertaken rebuilds.
No two start-overs are alike, but all successful ones require a clear plan and full commitment. The teams we'll cover are short on at least one of those necessities.
Detroit Pistons
1 of 5
The Detroit Pistons haven't had a winning season since 2007-08, when all the key pieces of the championship core, sans Ben Wallace, were still in place. Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince and Rasheed Wallace each logged over 2,000 minutes that year as Detroit racked up 59 wins.
The franchise has been unsuccessfully rebuilding for the better part of two decades since.
If we narrow the lens to focus on this most recent rebuild, things are still progressing far too slowly. Detroit has logged 20, 20, 23 and 17 victories in the four full seasons since it went 41-41 in 2018-19. With just eight wins so far this year, the Pistons aren't totally certain to avoid posting the worst record in league history.
Detroit is operating like a team trying to bottom out, which is a bad look for a squad that's already been in the cellar for years.
Much of that consistent failure owes to a series of high draft picks struggling to make an impact. Detroit waived Killian Hayes, the No. 7 pick in 2020, at the trade deadline. Cade Cunningham came off the board first in 2021, but he ranks just 12th in career Box Plus/Minus among the 19 players in his draft class who've logged at least 3,000 minutes. The Pistons also buried their No. 5 pick in 2022, Jaden Ivey, behind vets and underperformers like Hayes, particularly at the start of this season.
Ausar Thompson, picked fifth in 2023, has immense defensive potential but spent most of this year playing with lineups that lacked the spacing to offset his shaky jumper.
In sum, the Pistons don't have a surefire franchise cornerstone after picking in the top 10 nine times since 2010. They also have a top executive in Troy Weaver who hasn't brought about change in four years at the helm, a ridiculously expensive head coach in Monty Williams who leaned on players like Hayes to the point of absurdity and no reason to believe anyone in a leadership (or ownership) position has a clue about how to fix this mess.
This is a proud franchise with multiple stretches of championship play in its history. It has had chances to draft the right players and hire the right coaches over the past several years. Yet the current version of the Pistons seems further from playing respectable ball than ever.
Bleak as it sounds, this rebuild, which is now in its fifth year, has barely even begun.
Charlotte Hornets
2 of 5
It's a low bar to clear, but the Charlotte Hornets have enjoyed more success than the Pistons over the roughly similar rebuilding timeline of the past five years. Charlotte had a winning record (43-39) in 2021-22 and saw LaMelo Ball earn an All-Star nod as a 20-year-old that season, giving it two things—recent success and a cornerstone—Detroit lacks.
That said, the Hornets also seem precariously positioned as they try to take a step toward consistently competitive play.
The recent sale of the team from majority owner Michael Jordan to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall should be an upgrade by default; Jordan's 13 seasons in that role produced just two playoff appearances. At the same time, change at the top usually signals managerial restructuring, which began with general manager Mitch Kupchak moving to an advisory role, per ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski, and should continue with head coach Steve Clifford's seemingly imminent removal. The installation of new leadership could bring sweeping change to the roster and coaching staff, a reset that might set Charlotte back a year or two.
Ball seems like a legitimate building block, the type of pass-first force-multiplier who makes his teammates better. But health is a real concern for the undeniably skilled point guard. Ball played just 36 games last year and is stuck at 22 this season, which makes it hard to be sure of his ability to avoid injury going forward.
No. 2 pick Brandon Miller may not have superstar upside, but his high floor and plug-and-play skill set as a plus-shooting big wing mean he'll fit into whatever form the Hornets take over the next few years. Other than those two, though, Charlotte is short on projectable talent.
This is where one might note the franchise's many draft misses, dating back to Michael Kidd-Gilchrist at No. 2 in 2012; extending past Cody Zeller (No. 4), Noah Vonleh (No. 9) and Frank Kaminsky (No. 9) the next three years and running right up to James Bouknight (No. 11), who Charlotte waived just after this year's trade deadline. It also might have been a good idea to hold onto Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at No. 11 in 2018, rather than trading him to the Clippers for Miles Bridges and two future second-rounders.
Perhaps Ball will stay healthy going forward, and Miller will flash a little more future All-Star potential. If the restructuring under new ownership doesn't involve a start-from-scratch mandate, the Hornets can compete for a play-in spot as soon as next year. But those are all sizable "ifs", and the team's deadline dealing, while shrewd, was extremely future-focused and indicative of a construction plan in its early stages.
From a distance, Charlotte looks further along than Detroit. But it's also possible this team is as far away from reliable success as the Pistons are.
Washington Wizards
3 of 5
Disclaimer: The Washington Wizards are doing the right things lately.
They traded Bradley Beal and his albatross of a contract this past offseason, cleaned up their books, correctly drafted a risky high-upside player in Bilal Coulibaly and even made a smart asset-preservation re-signing in Kyle Kuzma, who'll likely net them a first-rounder via trade at some point over the next year or two.
All that said, the Wizards land here because the rebuilding process they've only just begun should have commenced years ago.
Washington spent far too long chasing bottom-end playoff spots, winning an average of 32 games over the past five years. The five-year max it gave Beal, along with the only no-trade clause in the league, was the apex of Washington's dogged pursuit of mediocrity. Win totals in the 30s are the last place any team should want to be—not good enough to seriously compete in the postseason and not bad enough to earn high draft picks.
As is the case in Charlotte, Washington is in the first season of what could be a new era. Last September, Michael Winger took over as president of Monumental Basketball, which runs the Wizards, and Will Dawkins replaced Tommy Sheppard as general manager. Those two have history with the Oklahoma City Thunder and LA Clippers, two teams that have built winners in very different ways. Based on their decisions to this point, optimism seems warranted.
If Coulibaly develops into a star two-way wing, the Wizards could have their foundational piece. But other than him, Washington doesn't have anyone on the current roster who projects as a high-end starter on a good team, and Jordan Poole (four years, $128 million) might be one of the worst dollar-to-production contract values in the league.
It's easier to have faith in Washington's braintrust than it is with Detroit or Charlotte, but the Wizards are right there with those sad-sack operations at the bottom of the standings, joining them in the unenviable club of teams getting outscored by more than 10.0 points per 100 possessions.
Chicago Bulls
4 of 5
Here's how you know the Chicago Bulls' rebuild is off schedule: It hasn't even started yet.
That relentless pursuit of mediocrity for which we criticized the Wizards? The Bulls are the Central Division champs of that chase, only they haven't yet realized it's time to bottom out and start over.
Chicago's inactivity at the recent trade deadline, in which the team made no trades for the third straight year, stemmed from this mindset executive vice president of basketball operations Arturas Karnisovas revealed to K.C. Johnson of NBC Sports Chicago: "The vision this year is making a push for the playoffs. ... Every season we want to be competitive, especially with the parity in the East."
As it stands, the Bulls are ninth in the conference and four-and-a-half games out of the No. 6 spot held by the Indiana Pacers. They're nearly as close to 12th seed (six games ahead of the Toronto Raptors) as the sixth, so if that counts as parity, well...perhaps things are going to Karnisovas' plan. Never mind that Chicago will be without Zach LaVine (whose massive contract made him untradable at the deadline) for the duration of this ill-fated playoff push. The best-case scenario seems to be a first-round elimination.
But hey, when the last deadline trade you made sent Wendell Carter Jr., Otto Porter Jr. and two first-round picks to the Orlando Magic for Nikola Vučević, a general hesitancy to swing deals is understandable. The Bulls were on the wrong end of one of the great fleecings of the past 10 years.
Chicago had win totals in the 20s across 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 before clawing its way to 31, 46 and 40 wins in the ensuing three years. All told, the Bulls have won one playoff game since 2015.
No meaningful postseason success for almost a decade, no clear cornerstone in place and seemingly no intention of resetting in pursuit of one—the Bulls are perhaps the league's most committed in-the-middle organization.
Put another way, they're at least a year or two from getting to where Washington is right now. And nobody would argue the Wizards are very far down the rebuild road.
San Antonio Spurs
5 of 5
All's well that ends (or starts?) well, so the San Antonio Spurs' selection of Victor Wembanyama with the first pick in the 2023 draft means their rebuild is in a better state than that of any other team we've discussed. By a lot.
The first step in the ground-up process for bad teams is securing a player good enough to build around, and Wemby's presence means the Spurs have aced that. If he's not an All-Star next season, it'll be a shock. And if Wembanyama finishes outside the top three in DPOY voting at any point over the next decade, we'll need to recalibrate our analysis of defense.
The problem for the Spurs was the intervening stretch between their perennial playoff status, which ended in 2018-19, and the complete steer-into-the-skid approach they didn't embrace until last season, when they won 22 games. In between, the Spurs loaded up on vets like LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan en route to 32, 33 and 34 wins from 2019-20 to 2021-22. That's smack in the dreaded middle, and San Antonio's presence there amounted to several wasted years.
If the Spurs hadn't timed their bottom-out season as they did, Wembanyama might not be on board. But we're talking about process here, and the Spurs' was flawed for three full seasons.
In addition to that rough stretch in the recent past, it's also fair to criticize how San Antonio is approaching its roster in the present. It was worth trying Jeremy Sochan at point guard, and the early decision to try Wembanyama at power forward had some logic to it. But the Spurs stuck with both plans for too long after it was clear they were stifling growth, and in the case of the point guard spot, they should have had a capable fallback option waiting to take over. Tre Jones is an improvement over what the Spurs were getting from Sochan, but he's a career 27.8 percent shooter from deep whose lack of size makes him an iffy defender.
That the 2024 trade deadline passed without San Antonio onboarding a floor leader who could feed Wemby easy shots and position others for success feels like a mistake.
Wembanyama matters more than anything, and if he hits his ceiling it probably won't matter what else San Antonio does. But no one who watched the Spurs from 2019 through the first part of this season should feel total confidence that the organization has its ducks in a row.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Accurate entering games played Feb. 12. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
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