Blessing In Disguise: Detroit Pistons Should Send Sprained Ankles a Fruit Basket

Sprained ankles are the best thing that have happened to the Detroit Pistons this season. Don't listen to anyone who tells you different.

I consider myself a realistic and patient basketball fan, but I have a hard time imagining a feasible scenario where Joe Dumars turned what we had at the beginning of this "rebuilding" phase into less.

In November 2008 the Pistons were one of the best teams in the league (second only to Boston, according to '07-'08 win-loss records) with nothing but assets: All-Star quality veterans, young talent, a very manageable payroll, no bad contracts, and Sheed's expiring deal. In short: Limitless flexibility.

What Dumars turned all that into is a jump shooting .500 team (at best) with too few minutes and shots to go around in the backcourt, no inside presence whatsoever, quite a few bad contracts, and extremely limited flexibility.

I understand that rebuilding is rarely easy, but Joe admittedly broke up the team too early in order to make the transition easier, and I can scarcely imagine a more painful pair of seasons than the past two. To say nothing of the apparently bleak future that lies ahead.

A couple of .500-ish seasons with a bright outlook would be one thing; as it is, the Pistons are one of the worst teams in the league with no apparent ways to significantly improve aside from the promising young big man we stand to draft in the lottery. There's nothing wrong with rebuilding through the draft when you start the process with a bloated payroll, bad contracts and a lack of movable assets; there was no reason for it to come to this.

I have little doubt Joe planned on trading Rip and/or Tayshaun this season or very soon for some frontcourt help, considering the major steps he took in replacing them through the draft and free agency.

It looks a lot like he was looking to upgrade up front via trade (it's obvious enough, or else Joe would have drafted Rasheed's replacement last year instead of Tayshaun's), but planning on doing so and actually being able to are two entirely different things.

Surely their injuries affected their respective trade values, but each bounced back in time to play like their old selves again.

Besides, Rip's prohibitive contract makes him all but unmovable anyways if you expect to get a fair talent exchange, and though Tayshaun's sudden injury after a career of flawless health surely affected his value, it might have been hard to get very much in exchange for him since he's about to be a free agent after next season

The 09-10 Pistons are a team that, by necessity, has to overperform to beat all but the worst teams. The worst thing that could have happened to this season was if everyone remained healthy. They probably would have had a similar record to last season's (at best) and (also at best) met a similar fate with a humiliating first-round sweep.

Only, when that happened last year, at least we had a promising future with around $20 million to spend (giving Arron Afflalo and Amir Johnson away in the process); what we're looking at now is essentially "The Pistons." If not for that juicy lottery pick, I don't know if we'd have anything to look forward to at all.

We're not looking at a situation like Atlanta or OKC faced a few years ago when they were on the brink of becoming legitimate threats. They had young rosters that were balanced and had lots of upside and promise. What those teams needed to do was learn how to win.

Our squad is completely imbalanced and already knows what it takes to win consistently, and that's to shoot over 50 percent, no easy task for any team, let alone one that relies entirely on jumpshots.

I'm not mad at Joe for breaking up the team too early or trading Chauncey (though it's obvious he didn't get enough in exchange); what's galled me is every single thing he's done since. He extended Rip and Maxiell, overpaying both.

Then he overpaid Ben Gordon (who will never get the minutes or shots to earn his contract as long as Rip and Rodney Stuckey are around) and Charlie Villanueva (who, despite being our lone legitimate scoring threat down low, can't manage to stay on the floor in a frontcourt rotation that might be the worst in the league).

And, on a side note, Joe's first mistake in all this was probably misidentifying Stuckey as Chauncey's replacement when his skill set really made him Rip's logical replacement. And then he signed Gordon, effectively replacing Rip TWICE without getting rid of him.

So we have too much depth at shooting guard to get the most out of our players, the best point guard and playmaker on the roster is a reserve whose minutes suffer the most due to the logjam at guard, and arguably the worst playmaker of the bunch is running the point for about 35 minutes a night.

Joe has been quoted as saying he doesn't plan on spending the full midlevel exception on a free agent this summer. This is disappointing, considering he didn't waste a second before spending more than that on Villanueva and twice as much on Gordon, two players who don't serve to help this team very much at all as it's currently constructed.

I was in favor of trading Sheed's and/or Iverson's contracts at last year's trade deadline to improve the team. And once that ship sailed and the team had cap space, I'm not saying Joe should have sat on it; he could have offered a contract to David Lee.

We'll never know if New York would have matched a five-year contract that started at, say, $12 million (and frankly, I think significantly overpaying Lee would have been a better move than the Gordon and Villanueva signings, as I'd much rather have one of Lee on the roster than both of them, even at the same price).

And if that failed, he could have used the cap space to pick up a big man from one of the many teams looking to clear cap space. Surely there were many bargains to go around. There's something to be said about an offseason where neither of your two major free agent acquisitions, whose contracts total a shade below $100 million, is a surefire keeper in the event of an expansion draft.

As a fan, I am not content to rebuild through the draft, least of all when there was never a need to fall so far. People seem to give Joe a lot of leeway because of his accomplishment in building the previous incarnation of the team from nothing (which was no small task), but what is that really worth if he goes full circle and turns it right back?

I'll always give Joe credit for the early moves that made a poor team into a perennial contender, but if he was the infallible genius so many people give him credit for being, we could be looking at a young core made up of Ty Lawson (available where we drafted Austin Daye), Stuckey (playing the two, like God intended), Jonas Jerebko, Josh Smith (who became the "incidental" draft pick we gave Atlanta when we acquired Sheed), Mehmet Okur (whom we cut loose in order to re-sign Ben Wallace. oops!), Arron Afflalo and Will Bynum.

Making less than $25.5 million combined this season, you can imagine the kind of talent management could afford to add. Heck, you could afford to add a max contract and still be about $10 million under the cap. All that, and I didn't even say "Darko." Admittedly, this would have taken a remarkable amount of foresight, but it's no more than many give him credit for.

If Joe can't turn this team into something to get excited about by next year's trade deadline, this rebuilding attempt can safely be called an abject failure, and we'll be looking forward to lottery picks for a long time to come.