Driving to the Basket: A Detroit Pistons Podcast - Episode 118: Unfortunate Pistons History: the Van Gundy Era

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

This listener-requested episode gives a history of the ill-fated Van Gundy era of the Pistons.

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Drive Into the Basket, part of the Basketball Podcast Network. I am Mike, your host, coming at you with the solo episode, and we're going to call this one Storytime. So we're only about two weeks away from the start of Pistons' preseason schedule, or rather will be two weeks away when I post this episode tomorrow on Wednesday. They'll open preseason, I believe, October the 4th against the New York Knicks. Definitely excited for that. Next two episodes will be season preview material. But for this one, I will be, wanted to answer an episode request from a long-time listener. And I guess we'll call this some unpleasant Pistons history. So we're going to be going over the Stan Van Gundy era of the Pistons.

And my goodness, do I not like saying that name? Rarely as anybody in sports made me as upset as Stan Van Gundy, just watching him mangled the Pistons. So a couple notes. Well, just one note particular. We'll go with that. I have promised not to talk about Andre Drummond in the past. and I continue, you know, I intend to keep that promise when we're talking about present-day MBA. Now, of course, for the sake of this story, I do need to talk about that guy. And I kind of cannot believe that I'm actually doing this episode because this was on the whole a really, really unpleasant era of the Pistons for me. But who knows?

Maybe this would be an exorcism of the angst I still have left over from it. So, just to give a little bit of additional backgrounds before we get to the Van Gundy era. So the Pistons, or Van Gundy took over from Joe Dumas, Joe Dumars, who had been the architect of the Pistons championship team, the 2004 roster. But at that point, had really let the Pistons stagnate up until 2008, at which point, it was clear that the going to work core, as Ben Wallace was gone by that point, he left for the Bulls in 2006, but the other four was still around, Chonte Billups, Tashon Prince, Rip Hamilton, and Rashid Wallace. But it was clear come to start of the 2008, 2009 season, that that Corps' window

had closed. It really didn't help that Dumars had done a really poor job of keeping it stuck with depth, had done a really poor job of drafting, which he would continue to do. But it was, you know, it was clear that the piston should do something if they wanted to rebuild on the fly, for example, and definitely the pistons were not going to just go and tank at that stage. So unfortunately, Dumas went about it in a horrible way. And for the next four or five seasons, between 2008, that was five seasons then. And when he was fired in 2014, he was undoubtedly, I would say almost undoubtedly,

the worst executive in the entire league. So he made the big mistake, the first big mistake he made, was trading away Chaunty. So he traded away Chauncey for Ellen Iverson. It was a cap dump. Ellen Iverson only had that year remaining on his deal. He made that deal about, I don't remember,

less than 10 games into the 2008-2009 season. And so the idea was that, sure, we send out Chauncey, who recently had signed a big contract, and we just let Iverson's contract expire and we go from there. Now, trading Chauncey was the wrong move. This was a terrible idea. Chonzie was really the leader of that team.

He still had a lot of good basketball left in him. And yeah, this is not what you do. You trade Rip Hamilton, for example. If you want to cap down somebody who do that. Instead, they trade Chanty. You lose really the leader of your team, the point guard for your team. And Chanty would go on to have some great years in Denver. Meanwhile, you also really alienate relationships.

of Hamilton who was pretty pissed off about that trade. So in any case, you bring in Iverson who was predictably a complete ass. And yeah, like a friend of mine have told him, I heard it from a friend of a friend that Iverson got banned from multiple Detroit area. You know, it was one of them for just urinating in a plant right in the middle in front of everybody. I can't confirm that, but it sounds quite like him from everything that I've heard. Nonetheless, I digress. yeah so things really obviously didn't work out for for iverson with the pistons i mean he wasn't meant

to stick with the team but it was definitely an unpleasant year all right so the pistons get to 2009 and dumars was always of this mentality like oh i have cap space i have to use that cap space so he signs charlie ville and away ben gordon to really big contracts both of them were terrible ideas just just awful and you know in addition you piss off rip hamilton even more by signing ben Gordon. Whatever. So the years go on, Dumar's drafts poorly. The Pistons are constantly stuck in the sort of mid-lottery purgatory. Dumar still isn't drafting well. His best draft of his entire career is in 2012 when he takes Chris Middleton, whom he subsequently just gave away to Milwaukee in a bad trade that I'll talk about in a minute, and Andre Drummond, who will be a key member

of this story. So I should mention an important event that happens in the middle of the wait, we'll call it Wade Stage Dumars in which he was particularly bad. I'll be honest, I have a very controversial take on this. I think that Dumars caught lightning in a bottle when he assembled going to work starting five, and that he benefited from the fact that they were far more than the sum of their parts. And I don't think he was ever particularly good GM. I think in a way that he just got very fortunate. He wasn't incompetent by any means. I mean, he did it, I think, you know, on paper he did a great job in building that team. But I think that's, that overrated his capabilities a little bit, or actually quite a bit, as we would see after, you know, from the time

of the Chauncey trade onward. But so an important event came in 2011. Now, Bill Davidson, the long time owner of the team who had been around, who had been the owner for all three championships, and had privately financed the Palace of Auburn Hills. It was the first privately financed NBA arena. So he died in 2009, and his widow, Karen Davidson, decided to sell the team. Now, there was some talk about her selling to, or selling the team to Mike Hill, which was the owner the Red Wings and the Tigers, it's unclear exactly what happened to make that fall through. There is one report that he was in the verge of buying the team for more than $400 million in 2011 and then found out that the team's valuation had been inflated and he got furious

and backed out. That has never been confirmed. Nobody really exactly knows what happens, but it knows what happened rather. But it just didn't come to fruition. So in steps, Tom Gores, who's a very, very successful venture. capitalist. And he comes in and buys the team for $325 million. There's about $428 million in today's currency. And now the team, of course, is worth well over $1 billion. Thanks in part to Steve Balmer, who's enormous offering to buy the Los Angeles clippers really inflated the value of every

NBA team. Also made, incidentally, Michael Jordan a billionaire because the value of the Charlotte Hornets went way up as a result. But, yeah, so Tom Gores comes in. And as we all know about Gores, for a long time, he was not a very good owner. He had this idea that you could just win with a winning culture, so to speak. You know, it's just like, let's focus on winning. We'll keep winning, we'll get better. The culture will get better and we'll just continue getting better. And while a winning culture is very important, you can't make that work without the talent.

So that really became an issue in terms of, I mean, he just, he was constantly meddling. That director was constantly handed down. The pistons were not allowed to really rebuild. And it was always win now, win now, win now. We'll talk about that later. So Dumars' ineptitude really reached its apogee in the 2013 offseason. Now, his employment was on the rocks at that point. I mean, obviously, Tom Gores, who really wanted the team to win, was losing patience with him.

It was clear that the Pistons had to make a substantial turnaround, or Dumars would be out of a job. So he goes on and has one of the worst off seasons, I would say probably, well, in modern Pistons history for sure, and definitely within like the last 20 years, no doubt about it, maybe the worst, almost undoubtedly the worst. The only one that could possibly compare was his own 20 in 2009 off season when he signs Ben Gordon, Charlieville, and Oweva. So what does he do? First of all, he goes out and trades the final year of Ben Gordon's contract, trades away a protected first round pick to do it. And that first round pick would convey in 2014. So then, like right after the opening of free agency, he signs Josh Smith to the largest, contract in team history. And in order to have Josh Smith play small forward, this was basically

just a case of, oh, hey, this guy's available. He's pretty talented. I'm going to sign him to a big contract, even though he doesn't fit this team at all. The pissons at that stage were going to be fielding Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond two non-shooters. Josh Smith had no business playing small forward. I mean, the best situation for that guy, like his best situation in Atlanta was just playing a power forward and don't have him shoot anything, just have him only take shots close to the which was viable for a power forward back then. Unfortunately, Dumas signs him to play small forward. So that's terrible.

I mean, and Josh Smith had been a strong defender, but he got a real case that the I don't cares when he got to Detroit. And then what does Dumars do? So he goes on and he trades Brandon Knight, who was a bad pick, and the guy just didn't have it in him to be a point guard. He didn't have the basketball IQ. He didn't have the court version, didn't have the passing acumen.

So he trades Knights. He packages him with, in a very very, unfortunate act, just a very bad decision with Chris Middleton, whom Dumars had drafted in the second round in 2012, and Middleton ended up being the best player Dumars had ever drafted. But yeah, so he ended up in that trade. And they trade him, the two of them for Brandon Jennings. Brandon Jennings, who had really peaked in like the first few months of his career and had from that point really just been a no defense chucker. It took a lot of shots, was not efficient, really bad on defense, and pretty selfish.

So Dumas Tez United, one of the worst shooting lineups ever. Like he has KCP, whom he had drafted in 2013. Yeah, 2013. So KCP is a rookie there. So you've got Brandon Jennings, who's a chucker. You've got Josh Smith, who's a horrible shooter. You've got Monroe, you've got Drummond who don't shoot. And KCP's largely an unknown.

No, he'd been a solid shooter in the NCAA, but he never got it together in the NBA. Well, never got together with the Pastins, rather. he went on to be, he's gone on to be a pretty good shooter. And he played an important role on the Lakers 2020 championship team. In any case, so this is a terrible roster. And that five-man lineup would go on to be like one of the absolute least efficient rosters in terms of shooting percentage in the last 15 years. It was just awful.

The team was a complete disaster. I haven't even talked about the rotating carousel of coaches, none of whom were good. but, you know, that was another issue, but I don't think any coach could have gotten much out of the teams that Joe Dumars was fielding. So Dumars gets fired before the 2013, 2014 season ends. And then we go into the offseason. Need a new coach. Need a new GM. So we've got Stan Van Gundy, who had been quite successful as the coach of the Magic,

and had really been one of the pioneers of the four-out offense. He had Dwight Howard, and then just four shooters around him. These are not very good rosters. Van Gundy got a lot out of them. He'd done well as the coach. for the Miami Heat as well. The Pistons had defeated at his heat in 2005. He was pushed out after that.

It was Pat Riley, who was the coach of the Heat when they won. And what I think is still, I'm not a sports conspiracy theorist, but goodness gracious, let's look at, in 2006, when Dwayne Wade, you couldn't touch the guy without getting a foul against the Mavericks. It was ridiculous. Whatever the case, he was the coach when the Miami Heat won the championship in 2006. That was Pat Riley. and Stan Van Gundy ultimately moved on to Orlando.

So you've got Stan Van Gundy. And both the Pistons and the Warriors who are seeking his services. They both want to sign him. And then Stan Van Gundy says, well, I want personnel control. And Tom Gore, and the Warriors say no. And Tom Gora says, oh, absolutely 100%, you got it. So basically, there should be a statue of Tom Gores around the Warriors Arena. I believe it's Chase Center now.

Yeah, it used to be Oracle Arena. So, yeah, there should be just like a statue. statue made all in silver of Tom Gores because he was a big part of the Warriors ending up the team that they became. Steve Kerr is a brilliant coach, especially in offense, like drastically better than Stan Van Gundy. What would you have had if you had Stan Van Gundy coaching the Warriors? The guy wouldn't have had a clue as to how to pull all that personnel together and make them their best possible selves and run an offense that absolutely maximize them. We'll probably have Steph Curry just running a zillion pick and rolls with Andrew Bogot.

So in any case, great for the Warriors, not so good for the Pistons. So Stan Van Gundy comes in, he has full personnel control. One of his very unfortunate first act is deciding not to trade Josh Smith. Now, you might say, who could possibly have wanted Josh Smith with the absolutely terrible season he had in 2013, 2014? And just the really awful contract he was on, one of the worst in the league. And if you've got to think of the teams who might be interested, you know who I'm about to say. It's the Sacramento Kings, because their owner, who is probably the worst owner in the entire league. in terms of just how he conducts the team and just badly, just awful.

He's an awful owner. He just constantly meddles in the worst way. So he wants Josh Smith. He likes Josh Smith. So the Kings offer a package of Carl Landry and Jason Thompson. And there's just a couple of power forwards. It weren't very good, but it's a drastically lesser salary load. I mean, these guys, the amount of salary that they will count for against the cap in terms of

and just total salary. It's drastically less than what Josh Smith is owed over the next three years. So Stinn has his golden opportunity to trade a locker room cancer who's on a terrible contract. And he says no, because he thinks he can make Josh Smith work. He thinks that he can make the trio, the big man trio of Josh Smith, Greg Monroe, and André Drummond work. However, he doesn't play that trio together, which was a good idea. Unfortunately, he decides to bring Munro off the bench. and Monroe, who was a restricted free agent at that time,

took the incredibly, incredibly unusual step of signing a qualifying offer rather than taking a big contract extension with the Pistons. There has been no player since who has done that. I mean, generally, if a player is in line for a big second contract with the team that drafted him, he takes it, period. Like, no frills. Hardly anybody, I don't remember the last time. It's aside from Greg Monroe, that a marquee restricted free agent

has taken the qualifying offer means that you just it's a smaller salary it's just that basically the team tenders you the qualifying offer in order to make your restricted free agent and then usually they sign you but a player can just say I'm going to take the qualifying offer and then I'll be an unrestricted free agent next summer and that's what Greg Monroe did so back to Josh Smith van Gandhi not only doesn't trade him oh basically Monroe he was probably his days were numbered anyway but you know what you sign the guy and then you trade him You don't lose him for nothing. So, you know, you trade him on down the line, you know, six months.

Or excuse me, this would have been, you know, January 15th of the next year. You can see you're able to trade the player. Trade him then. You trade them the next summer, whatever. So not only did Van Gundy not get rid of this horrible contract or this locker room cancer. And not only did he alien at Greg Monroe. He also decided that he was going to make Josh Smith, who is just a terrible offensive player, the center of the Pistons offense.

which was a comically, comically, comically bad idea. So the season starts. Smith is horrendously bad. The team is terrible. And after, like, I believe it was a 5 and 28 start, nobody wants Josh Smith, not even the Kings. Like, even the Kings do not want the guy anymore. So it's near Christmas of 2014.

And Stan Van Gundy makes the decision, okay, we're going to just wave Josh Smith. You know, we'll just wave him and stretch him. You know, stretching means that you're, basically you stretch the rest, the remainder of the salary across a number of years equal to the remaining years in the contract plus one, and you equally divide the remaining salary across those five years. So it ended up being around $5 million. And this was the biggest noncompliance buyout in the history of the league. And the Pistons, coincidentally, have the two biggest noncompliance buyouts in history of the league between Blake Griffin and Josh Smith, you know, the two biggest in his history. history, whatever, and we'll come to Blake Griffin later. So Josh Smith is gone. The Pistons

immediately go on this amazing run, where they're 12 and 3 over the next month. And Brandon Jennings really comes alive. It's a little bit, a little bit more than a month, I believe. So Brendan Jennings really comes alive and just becomes the leader the team needs. I mean, his performance tremendously improves, both as a shooter and as a passer. All the rest of the team, I mean, DJ Augustine is the backup point guard. Van Gundy signed him. That was a good signing. Van Gundy had also traded for Anthony Tolliver, traded Tony Mitchell. Yeah, that was also good. Tolliver would go on to be a good role player for the Pistons.

And everything comes together. Just everything comes together. And the Pistons just go on this magical run. And they're one of the best teams in the league. And it's super exciting. This was probably back to the Pistons. And it's just great. I mean, it's the feel-good story of feel-good stories for the Pistons.

Like after all that the fans have suffered through over the previous, you know, like six years. It's just awesome. And, you know, like the pistons are back. Awesome. It's fantastic. I just can't say enough good things about it because it was such a fun time. And then, unfortunately, Brandon Jennings, around the beginning of February of that year, he's contesting an inbound against the bucks. And you just see him fall down.

And at that moment, I was like, okay, there goes as Achilles. And that was what it was. And we all know, Brandon Jennings was never the same after that. And Achilles injury is one of the hardest to come back from, you know, you're almost certain to lose a good degree. of your agility, your explosiveness, whatever else. If you're Kevin Durant, and it happens, you know, and you're just a brilliant shooter who's not dependent at all upon being particularly agile or particularly explosive,

you're fine. It also helped that it was on his non-dominant foot. But the vast majority of players, it's really going to put, really going to harm your career in the NBA. So that really obviously put an end to that run. And it was clear that the Piston season was over at that stage. I think there had been some pretensions that they could keep winning and make the playoffs, but it was never going to happen after this point,

after that point. So DJ Augustine takes over his point card. The backup point card, interestingly enough, is Spencer Dimwitty, who had been Stan Van Gundy's pick in a second round pick in the 2014 draft, thanks to Dumas trading away their first round pick, Stan Van Gogh in 2014, in order to dump Ben Gordon and sign Josh Smith. Van Gundy didn't have one in 2014. And I believe that that pick was ultimately used on Noah Vonwe for what that's worth.

Anyway, so you got DJ Augustine, you got Spencer Danwitty, who was the best player, Stan Van Gundy ever drafted. And, you know, the team that's left, I mean, you lose Jennings, whatever. And the pistons, it really caught lightning in a bottle, and that was it. So about four weeks later, Van Gundy goes out and trades with Reggie Jackson. So Reggie had been a backup point guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder. He was not happy there. And he forced his way out and just like this super,

super super unprofessional way. Like basically pretended to be injured early in the season just made it very, very clear that he wanted out. And it was just completely selfish. All of his teammates came to hate him. This absolutely came to hate him, which is not usual. And he made it clear that he only wanted to play for a team that would make him the primary option.

I mean, he was very, very high in himself at the time. I'll put it that way. So he became available. And because of the way it forced himself out, because everybody knew that he only wanted to play for a team on which you would be the primary option, because hardly anybody was willing to give him that. He came cheat.

So Van Gundy got him for DJ Augustine, Kyle Singler, and I believe a couple of second round picks. So Reddy Jackson, promising point guard. Absolutely. But there's kind of the issue, you know, what people say about a partner. It's like if they'll cheat with you, they'll cheat on you. It's like that kind of applied here.

Basically that the reason you were able to get the guy was that he forced him to his way out in a super, super, super unprofessional way. and that very same ego and self-absorption was almost certainly giving me an issue for your team too when you're bringing him on. Whatever the case, you know, the rest of the season elapses. I mean, there's a lot of personnel changes amongst the role players. Greg Monroe is injured for a stretch at the end of the season, and the Pistons do much better with Anthony Tulliver at the position instead. You know, you just got much more floor spacing.

And season ends. Pistons are the eighth worst team, I think. whatever, they would go on to pick number eight in the draft. So in the offseason, you know, first comes the draft. So the Pistons, you know, you look at them, what do they need? So you've got a prospect of starting lineup, of course, of Jackson, of Andre Drummond, who at this point is seen as the Pistons future franchise player, that we still get a lot of gaps in this game at that point. Still a terrible pre-throw shooter.

Still really bad score in terms of efficiency, in terms of his touch that would never improve. And just very, very raw. at that point, traditional centers were still a big thing. Their downsides weren't nearly as big. People said this guy is just physically amazing, and he was extremely athletic for his size. And, you know, it's super strong, you know, physically speaking, and not so much mentally speaking,

but again, we'll get to that. And so, yeah, he was really seen as the big thing. So you've got Jackson, point guard of the future. You've got Drummond, who's your center of the future and your prospect of franchise player. And you've got KCP, who's, you know, only finished his second. in season, another super athletic player, a strong off, very strong off ball defender, not so good as a non-ball defender, but still isn't. And as you see this guy, it's like, okay, he only needs to get together as a three-point

shooter, and then you've got a very solid starter. And you've got a gap at the forward positions. But you look at the roster, it's like, what does the roster need right now? The roster needs scores. I mean, the roster was very short on solid scores. And ideally, you want another go-to score because there's nobody on the team. I mean, Jackson is still on test as the primary option, and there's absolutely nobody else in the team who even remotely qualifies as a go-to score, like of any ilk, number two, number three, nothing. So Van Gondy goes into the draft.

He says, I'm not going to draft based on position. I'm just going to draft the best available player. And he goes in and drafts Stanley Johnson, whose number one question mark is his offense, strong defensive player at Arizona. But in terms of his offense, I mean, this guy was super, super, super physically strong. really well-built. He was able to bully guys at the college level, just like he had in high school. You know, and just certain things don't translate to the NBA. He'd been a decent shooter, but on very low-volume. And, yeah, there were big questions about his offense. So, yeah, he drafts Stanley Johnson. And on draft night, he raves about how Stanley wants to be great,

basically saying this guy's work ethic is fantastic. And it's like, okay, cool. Well, you know, we'll see where it goes. You know, Johnson was certainly a consensus top 10 prospect in the draft for what it's worth. And, you know, we'll see where it goes. So he rounds out the offseason by signing Erson Eliasova to play power forward. Eliasov at that time, very solid three-point shooter. And, you know, on defense, not so good, but absolutely amazing at drawing charges. I mean, that guy really had it in terms of drawing charges. And he also takes on a salary cap dump from the sons of Marcus Morris and Redmond.

Bullock. Now, this was the first of, excuse me, the second after Reggie Jackson of one of these like incredibly serendipitous trades where Van Gundy just gets super lucky with Jackson. It was, okay, well, here's a very good player and he's forced his way out and nuked his trade value, so we'll give it, you know, we'll give him to you for relatively cheap. In this case, it was, and that was Sam Presti doing just what you need to do. Sam Presti is a very competent general manager. In this case, he's dealing with Brian McDonough. And yes, I'm aware that there's also a hockey player named Ryan McDonough. This guy, too, is named Ryan McDonough, who's the very incompetent general manager of the Sons. Now, at this time, both Marcus Morris and

Marquif Morris are on the Sons together, and those two are super, super, super, super, super super close. Like, I think to this day, they both deposit their paychecks into a joint bank account. So that absolutely is super, super incredibly close. And McDonough decides that he wants to try to sign Lamarcus Aldridge. And toward this end, he goes out and signs Tyson Chamler, Tyson who had previously been like a monster defensive player, but at this point was very much in decline. So he goes out and signs Tyson Chamler with an eye toward trying to attract Lamarcus Aldridge, who I think at that time was a pretty overrated player. That's a different discussion. So he needs to clear cap space in this effort to sign Lamarcus Aldridge. So he decides to

dump Bullock and Morris to the pistons. And Van Gundy just sends back a player in a second round pick in return. And so McDonough, I mean, not only was it a just a complete dream that he'd ever drum with Marcus Aldridge in the first place. And not only was it a complete fantasy that the sons would really be a contender, even if he were able to do so. But, you know, those just weren't happening. They weren't happening. And he also in the process, like, severely pissed off Markief, obviously. Because he, not only had he traded away Markiev's twin, but he and Marcus, Marquif and Marcus had signed very bargain contracts with the Sons in order to stay in Phoenix together. So they got screwed over, and he ended up trading away.

McDonnard ended up trading way in Marquif at the deadline, I believe. Yeah, at the deadline of that year. And he got a first round pick in return. So cool. That was a good return. But nonetheless, Van Gundy really benefited just from a serendipitous occurrence. It's basically a terrible GM saying, here, take some good players off my hands for nothing, basically nothing in return. So the Pistons go into the next season with.

a starting lineup of Jackson, KCP, Morris, Iliasovina, Drummond. And Stanley Johnson coming off the bench, Anthony Tulliver coming off the bench. Brandon Jennings would come back in December from his Achilles injury, though he was never the same. He was never really a capable NBA player after that. And G. have J. J. J. J. J. E. F. Jody Meeks, who got injured very early on, Steve Blake, to end up being the point guard in the backup point guard when Jennings was traded. And Bullock, who suffered from one of his character. This is every year with the Pistons, a characteristic horrible start before becoming a decent player,

that he wouldn't get into the lineup later. Then you have Darren Hilliard, who is Van Gundy's second round draft pick. And just to spare whatever, you know, further explanation on what happens, because I'm not going to talk about Michael Gabinaj, but what happened with all of Stan Van Gundy's second round draft picks, this was Dimwitty, Hilliard, and Gabinaj, it's basically, well, I'm not going to give you much time. I'm not going to, you know, time to develop. I'm not going to really give you much time. the court at all. And I'm just going to discard you very quickly. That's what happened to all three of them.

And my goodness, for 29 minutes already. Whatever the case. So you go into the season, the Pistons are doing better than they have in a very long time. And, you know, Jackson's the primary option. He's doing pretty darn well, really, borderline all-star. Like, I think that his performance in that season was a little bit inflated. It was done with an offense that absolutely played around him, very slow-paced offense. And I just don't think that's, I mean, a Pistons team where Reggie Jackson was dominating possession, and your number one option was unlikely to go far. But, you know, he did well. Marcus Morris was playing well.

Casey did all right. Ilya sober was decent, and Drummond's had one of the most overrated campaigns I've ever seen. So anyway, you get to February around the trade deadline, and Van Gundy benefits from his greatest lightning strike of serendipity that he would ever have. And Rob Hennigan, that he would ever have, is GM of the Bistons, rather. And this is Rob Hennigan, who's the completely incompetent. GM of the Orlando Magic, who has Aaron Gordon coming up, and he had Tobias Harris. He had signed him in the 2015 offseason when the Pistons, by some accounts, it entered interest in Tobias.

The Magic had signed him to a pretty affordable front-loaded contract, so it would decline in terms of the salary he was paid three years, two, three, and four. And Tobias was a solid young player, and I mean, that contract would turn out to be an absolute bargain given the cap jump that was going to happen in 2016. But Hennigan, who was, trading away this promising young player just says, oh, well, just give me expiring contracts in return, which is one of the dumbest trades of the past decade. I mean, basically, like, a solid, promising young player traded away for basically, for functionally nothing for cap space. So Van Gundy, of course, is like, absolutely, you know, take Ehrasan Eliassova and take

Brandon Jennings. And, like, cool, awesome, great. The Pistons now have, like, the best score on the team is Tobias Harris. It was very young at the time and very capable. You know, and if he's the best score on your team, you probably have issues. But nonetheless, I mean, that was a major coup for the Pistons. So they're 14 and 7 the rest of the season. They probably would have missed the playoffs without him, especially because Jackson really slowed down, you know, down the stretch of the season. But the Pistons make it. They're the eighth seed. And, you know, they're an eighth seed with 44 wins. It's a pretty strong eight seed. So you go into the postseason. They're up against the Cleveland Cavaliers, the ultimate

championship Cleveland Cavaliers. Ever. everybody on the team aside from Jackson and Dramida shooting well. Everybody. And like everybody, even down to Stanley Johnson, who had really struggled across the season from the field. He'd been super inefficient. This was a series in which Stanley Johnson said that he was getting in LeBron's head, which nobody gets in LeBron's head. But he actually played pretty solid defense on him. And the Bissons get swept. It's a competitive sweep.

I believe they could have won one or two games if Van Gundy had been coaching better. Now, this was the first point at which it became, in my opinion, clear that Van Gundy was had issues as a coach. He had been pretty mediocre throughout the season, you know, throughout his second season with the Pistons, because he was just super rigid. You would only see him run like the super heavy, pick and roll heavy, slow-based offense. His defense was, you know, too much, too many double teams in the perimeter, and not really defending well against the driving kick, whatever. But in this series, basically you saw that he was unwilling to coach Drummond's. He was unwilling to coach Jackson.

And, oh, I forgot about the Drummond post-ups. Right. This had happened the season before. Van Gundy had decided, oh, we're going to make Andre Drummond a post player. And basically, we'll just feed him in the post and, you know, take these turnaround hooks. And, you know, who cares if he's absolutely terrible at them to the, you know, to such an extent that he's more efficient from the free throw line, from which he is the worst free throw shooter in league history than he is from the post. Whatever the case, Jackson is chucking, like just constantly chucking, like just constantly chucking,

shoots 16% from three. Drummond is having a super inefficient series. Everybody else is doing well. Van Gundy will not coach them. He just won't. and they pretty much just shoot the Pistons out of the series. The Pistons could have won a couple of those games. But at the end of the day, it's like, okay, we've got a very young team. You know, they're pretty promising. You know, KCP, all these guys are young. Like Marcus Morris was the oldest one at 26.

KCP is 22. Harris is 23, Drummond's 22, Jackson's 25. You get Stanley Johnson is only 19. And, you know, you're going to next season. Things are looking good. This is an up-and-coming team. And here's where things really go off the rails. But first, a quick word from our sponsors.

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That's code TBPN, only a trafficking sportsbook and official sports betting partner in the NFL. Minimum age and eligibility restrictions apply. See show notes for details. All right. And back to the story at hand. So one thing that happens, Jackson's tendonitis really flares up. He has to go in for plasma rich plate with therapy and misses the first 20 games in the next season. And the Pistons actually, the first 21 games.

So the Pistons come out and, you know, they actually dab pretty well. they signed, well, let's go to the offseason first. They signed Ish Smith three years at $6 million apiece. And sort of puzzling signing because Ish can't shoot. But Van Gundy certainly wasn't seeing where the league was going. And Isch was a decent point guard for the business. He became less useful across the course of his contract. And then also Stan Van Gundy signs John Lueh. And there's this huge cap jump. Lauer gets $40 million, which is a terrible contract. Lue had never proven he could adequately space the four. But whatever, you go into the season. Hish is starting as the point guard. He grabs.

gradually gets better. Blue is actually pretty good off the bench, even though he still can't shoot, he can't shoot threes. But, you know, he's inefficient score like 58% true shooting off the bench, solid. And the Pistons just get better across the course of this. They're running a much more egalitarian offense that's focused in which Tobias Harris is pretty much the primary option. Marcus Morris number two, the ball moves a lot more.

And by the time Jackson comes back, I mean, they're doing really well. And then Jackson comes back, and Van Gundy says, okay, well, you know, this is completely puzzling. And this was a season in which it became clear that Van Gundy was not fit to coach and what was really developing NBA at the time, the Warriors had really spurred a tremendous change in 2015 and onward for really the spacing and efficiency era, but you had to have the shooting. You had to be efficient.

And Van Gundy would not coach shot selection. He did not know how to compose a roster that had enough shooting. And he also was just a very rigid coach. He just couldn't make changes. He couldn't adapt. absolutely couldn't make changes across games. He didn't understand how to coach in the modern NBA. He would not hold his veterans accountable. He was way too hard in his young players. And he just had no idea what he was doing on offense, ran a super inefficient offense and a not great defense.

I mean, it was okay, but he made a lot of errors on that front too. So when Jackson came back, he said, okay, we're going back to last season's offense, which is kind of like a what are you doing sort of thing. It's like plug Jackson in and just, you know, have him be part of what is. developed into a fairly good offense, but no, he doesn't do that. So he brings Jackson in. He makes Jackson the center of the offense and the offense tanks. And the defense tanks, too, because Jackson is playing pretty bad defense. And there's a lot of angst in the locker and players are pissed off at Jackson.

And this is his player's only meeting. And Jackson responds by spending the next game, just standing with his hands on his shoulders in the corner and just generally refusing to shoot. It's like, wow, man, he really showed them. And Van Gundy takes his side publicly. And, like, another thing, Jackson and Harris, who is the best score on the team from the moment he got on, we're not coexisting well in the starting lineup. So if you're Stan Van Gundy, let's see, you have a choice.

Who gets sent to the bench? Is it your best score and a guy who would actually ultimately win the season BD team's only reliable score? Or is it's the point guard who's playing absolutely terrible basketball, like terrible, terrible basketball? It's like for Van Gundy, well, the choice is clear. You're sent Tobias to the bench. Okay, great. I mean, you already had Ish Smith who had played. fairly well as a starting point card, you know, well enough, at least, whereas Jackson had been

terrible. And everything goes off the rails for the season at this point. John Lauer ends up in the starting lineup. He's terrible. That starting lineup of Jackson, KCP, Drummond's Morris and Lauer is, you know, just like the lineup I spoke about earlier in the episode, one of the least efficient lineups in terms of true shooting over the last 15 years, like sub 50% true shooting. Terrible. Drummond decides he doesn't care halfway through the season. He regresses. And, oh, I didn't mention why I thought that Drummond's season, previous season was overrated. Well, just very briefly. Sub 50% true shooting percentage, absolutely comically bad for a traditional big. Kind of like math defense and I think, and also a very, very weak crop of centers.

Like the best centers in the league that year were DeMarcusis, DeAndre Jordan, the corpse of Dwight Howard, Brooke Lopez, Hassan White's in Drummond. So Drummond, I think, largely got in the All-Star game and got his all-MBA birth on the perception that he was a real up-and-comer. because of his big raw stats and because of the fact that the people doing the voting weren't really yet aware of the, you know, the inefficient stat pattern and not particularly effective player he was. I think he was being given the benefit of doubt at that point. And the next year, really the new crop of, you know, the new generation of centers really start coming on.

Gobert, Carl Anthony Towns, Joel Embed, Nicola Yokic. Yeah, so as Drummond's one and only all-MBA birth. And the only time he made the All-Star game without being a replacement. So, yeah, Drummond decides, he, he, He hardcore regresses and also decides halfway through the season. He doesn't care. KCP hardcore regresses is just probably one of the worst players in the league in the second half of the season. One of the worst starters, certainly.

Marcus Morris becomes a chucker, one of the least efficient players in the league. And KCP is one of the least efficient volume shooters in the league. Drummond is one of the least deficient volume shooters in the league. Jackson should not be playing. Like, he's clearly injured. He's bad on offense. He is a catastrophic defensive liability. The pistons are enormously better without him.

but he stays as a starting point guard for 50 games, I believe, yeah, around 50 games. And the season goes in the crapper. The best players in the team are playing off the bench. That's Ish Smith and Tobias Harris. And Stanley Johnson has a horrendously inefficient second season. But, you know, he plays solid defense. And actually in the month of February, you know, amongst, you know, three-man lineups. And three-man lineups, you know, are always kind of like a hazy thing.

But if you look at that point in the month of February in 2017, the remand lineup of Harris, Smith, and Johnson, I believe at the highest net rating in the league, it's like, okay, Stanley still has issues, but it's basically just another case. It doesn't help that Stan Van Gundy is incredibly hard on him. Like basically, there was this one game, I think it was against the Sons,

in which Stanley committed one defensive blunder and basically got exiled for the next three games, you know, for an error that the veterans committed on a regular basis. But anyway, the best players are playing off the bench. And the bench crew is decent between Ish Smith, Tobias Harris, Stanley Johnson, and Aaron Baines. But, I mean, Van Gundy, who just never, you know, won't make changes, won't hold us to hold his veterans accountable,

is terrible at getting the best out of his better players and really just favors his worst players over them. The season goes in the craver. I mean, he eventually, when it is absolutely too late, decides to bench Jackson and then deactivate him, but it's too late at that point. So the Pistons finish in the low lottery. Another bad place to be. And things are not looking so hopeful now.

So then we go into what is the final offseason of Stan Van Gundy's career with the Pistons. And what does he do? So he has an $80 million offer on the table to KCP, who has heard a little bit too much about how the Nets are going to send him a max offer and says it's worth no more near what he wants, which is ridiculous, because he was worth no more near a max contract and ended up leaving quite a bit of many on the table. But it benefits the Pistons.

KCP's greed and ego, saved the Pistons, stave the Pistons, save Stan Van Gundy for another bad contract. So in any case, we go into the draft in the 2017 draft, and this is a fairly infamous moment. So the Pistons at this stage are capped out. They're not going to be able to add guys from free agency. And nobody's significant, rather. And this is not a team that has a very, it's like a super high ceiling at this. point you want to swing for upside and van gondy instead decides to go with a familiar commodity and uh oh my goodness how did i forget stanley ellenson in 2016 okay well stanley ellenson in 2016 uh so this was just another

example of how little just van gunny was a terrible drafter we know that and um yeah i also forgot forgot Spencer Dimwitty, my goodness. I've just been talking for two long eight, to put it that way. But Spencer Dimwitty, he basically just gave away for nothing. And Spencer, I haven't been good at that point, but he has gone on about how Van Gundy never gave him a chance to really, the chance to develop with the Pistons. And Dimwitty ended up being a fairly good NBA player.

He still is. Though he had a really bad season last year with the Wizards. So Ellinson was a guy with no NBA upside. You know, he did not have been, he had very, very below average athleticism. He could not play defense. he was never really likely to be able to attack off the dribble. He just had very, the only way he was ever going to be able to stay in the NBA

was as a role player off the bench who was extremely efficient. And he couldn't do that. He also couldn't shoot. He was never able to shoot during his season of Marquette. There's one NCAA season of Marquette either. And there was a reason he dropped to where the pistons, out of the top tens where the pistons could select him. And he was selected ahead of two three-ndy wings,

athletic three-ndy wings. And Van Gundy just didn't get it. There's a lot that Van Gandhi did not understand. about how to build a team in the NBA, in the modern NBA, rather. In any case, so yeah, so we go into this draft, and Van Gundy chooses to go, you have Donovan Mitchell and Luke Conard, are the two obvious choices. Mitchell is less proven, much higher ceiling, and Kinard is maybe a little more proven, you know, in a higher floor, but it's a much, much lower ceiling.

And he decides to go with Conard. And at this point, it's like, what are you doing? Because, you know, if you want the business to do anything, you have to take a chance on upside. Instead, he takes a chance on... He doesn't take a chance. He goes with a safe pick, and Knerd's a strong shooter, but he's a role player. Pissons don't need another role player. And you could say, well, he was just told he needed to make the playoffs, but then you have, like, you still have an $80 million offer on the table for KCP. And then Van Gundy, the beginning of free agency goes and signs Wangste Galloway, who's just another player he was, you know, he had talked about wanting to get a $21, the three or $21 million contract.

So you've already got Kinnard, like third on the depth chart at his position. you're not likely to be playing him. It was the same thing you signed John Lueh, the year before, when you just drafted Ellinson. And they were both bad, but whatever. Like the idea was, oh, you just trade Lueh or if he's bad. And it's like, okay, well, somebody has to want to trade for him. Or you trade a Ler rather if Elinson is good.

Somebody has to want to trade for him. Another issue with Van Gundy's mindset. Yeah, so he signs a player. He already has a big offer to another player at shooting guard. He signs another shooting guard. And then, you know, and he's got Kinnard at his third string. Now, KCP, the Pistons ultimately get to take advantage of the Celtics. being in a cap crunch, they want to sign Gordon Hayward, they need to dump salary.

And so the Pistons pick up Avery Bradley and renounce KCP. That's like, cool, that's a good trade. I mean, Avery Bradley was an overrated defender, but a solid defender and in a strong three-point shooter. And you bring back Anthony Toller that, Tulliver that summer also, and Tulliver is just a solid role player. Everybody likes the guy. He was a solid role player.

Everybody likes the guy, you know, good veteran presence, solid three-point shooter. So you go into the season with a lineup of Jackson, Bradley, Johnson, Harris, and Drummond. And also critically over the course of the offseason, like the assistant coaches and Jeff Van Gundy, Stan's brother, really give him some advice on, you know, they helped to formulate a new offense, a motion offense that uses Drummond as a secondary playmaker

at the top of the key rather than having him post up because he was a horrendous post player. And it was a less predictable offense and hopefully a more efficient offense and so on and so forth. So the Pistons go into the season. and they have, this is the best roster that the Pistons had fielded in a season. I mean, we're not at opening night yet, but who knows how this upcoming roster will do. This upcoming roster is about sealing.

They're still developing. But today, this is the best opening night roster. The Pistons have fielded since 2008. They go in, they're 14 and 6 with this new offense. The team is really jelling. They beat the Warriors, like the Clippers were unbeaten after six games. I think the Pistons beat them the next night. they play against the Warriors, like the Durant Warriors, and they beat them.

It's a great game. Like, they're being good teams. And at the beginning, I believe it was near the 9th of November, they beat the Celtics, who were just doing great at the time. And everything looks good. But there are some warning signs because teams are starting to catch on, starting to catch on of the Pistons offense in Van Gundy, who called all of his plays always from this very short list of plays is doing nothing to change it.

And also, like the plays he was calling were in particular. particularly efficient. Like, a lot of long twos relied way too much on Avery Bradley, who was never particularly good, you know, it's never a great score. He's not a go-to guy. And, like, just some example. And he's just punching way above his weight, like unsustainable numbers. Harris is doing super well.

Like, he'd become a much better three-point shooter thanks to corrective eye surgery and practice. And Harris is a super hard worker. Jackson is doing all right. Drummond's doing, you know, decently well. And, like, based on the, you know, the contract that he has, and I forgot to mention, he was signed to a max contract. Goodness, I'm just all over the place in this episode.

So, yeah, things start to go off the rails. But, like, as an example of one of the plays, like one of them had Harris, who's the team's best score, set an off-ball screen so that Avery Bradley could curl around and get, receive a handoff from Drummond and take a long two from just inside the three-point line. This is a terrible play. You're basically taking an awful mid-range shooter.

You're using your best score to set a screen, an off-ball screen so that an awful mid-range shooter can come and take the least efficient shot in basketball. And Van Gundy continued to not really prize Tobias Harris how he should. Harris was still the best player. Van Gundy was very intent in pointing through his guards. Harris never, ever got the role that he deserved on the team. Though Tobias Harris is your number one option is probably taking you nowhere. But nonetheless, you would have had better success doing it that way. So first thing that goes wrong, other teams figure out the offense.

Van Gundy does nothing to change it. Second thing that goes wrong, Avery Bradley Hurts is growing, and that's where. really where the piston started to regress because Van Gundy really relied on him and continued to rely on him with this idiotic handoff offense. So the pistons start losing games, they don't lose them by much. You could say that coaching is really the difference there. And then, and like, yeah, Avery Bradley is terrifically inefficient, like one of the worst starters in the league. He's still having a majority, you know, so many calls played for him by, excuse me, plays called for him by Van Gundy. And then Reggie Jackson gets injured near the end of December.

great three ankle sprain. He's out for a while. So Van Gundy turns, but weans even more heavily upon Bradley. And these handoff plays he's running are less efficient than drum and post-ups, which were comically inefficient. And Tobias is, like, there's this myth that he was the primary option. He never was. I mean, he was run on inefficient two-point sets. The offense was never played around him throughout the entirety of his time with the pistons. And the pistons are, I think, go like three of three and twelve after jackson's injury and the only sensible thing to do at this point is you say like okay the season's lost let's tank it out you know we'll just have jackson not

come back the season which would have been the ideal thing to do anyway because he really needed the time to recover and you know betrayed bradley you know trade whoever else and we just tank for a good pick and a super strong draft and when i personally saw it they could tweet that you know wode said, oh, the pistons that made Avery Bradley available in trade talks. I was like, good. That's what we're doing. And Van Gundy throws a curveball and comes back with the exact opposite, which is to trade Avery Bradley, Tobias Harris, and a very, very, very lightly protected, 2018 first-round

pick and a second round pick as well, I think, in 2018, too. I've tried to track this down, but it's in the past, but I'm not sure exactly where it went. I think it was 2019 second-round pick, yeah, but I'm not sure exactly where it went. after that. It's proven difficult to trace. So he trades all that for Blake Griffin. So Blake Griffin had signs a max contract in the previous offseason. Now, the Clippers front office, including Jerry West, did not want it to resign Griffin. They just wanted to rebuild.

They said, we shouldn't max. This guy's too injury prone. We're never going to build a good team around, you know, a contender around him. Steve Balmer hadn't wanted a tank, and he said, no, we're going to resign Griffin. They gave him this mock jersey retirement complete with a choir and whatnot, and he resigned there. Balmer came around to his front office's point of view soon afterward. But, you know, and at that point, it's like, how are we going to offload this guy who's got four and a half years left in a max contract?

It's very injury prone. Like, he was going to take him. Well, the, you know, this is a negative value contract. And the Clippers wanted to be done with him. And the answer was that Stan Van Gundy was desperate to save his job. Just like Dumas have been desperate to save his own job back in 2014. And a fun fact, here's one. So the Pistons traded.

Dumars traded Brandon Knight and Chris Middleton to the bucks. This was during the course of Dumars' last gasp effort to save his own job. And they traded them for Brandon Jennings. They traded Brandon Jennings alongside Eras on Elias Silver for Tobias Harris. And then Tobias Harris was used by Stan Van Gundy and his last gasp effort to save his own job. So you trade for Griffin and you're capped out. There's no way to improve the team from here. This team has far too little shooting.

It is super weak on the wing. it has really only one strong interior score, only one strong creator. And that is Blake Griffin. And you can't really do anything to improve the team in the next couple of years, even if he's healthy, which, as we know, Pee was not. So now you've got a starting lineup of Ir Smith, Reggie Bullock, Stanley Johnson, Blake Griffin and Andre Drummond, and of course this team is a mess.

They win their first four games, but they're playing all four games at home against teams that are exhausted. like teams that are playing in a way game, second night in the back-to-back, and for the third time in four nights. And then they start playing against actually difficult opposition, and it's very, very ugly. Van Gundy is still coaching terribly.

Like his way of trying to make Drummond and Jackson, Drummond and Griffin work together is, oh, we're going to put Drummond back in the post. It's like, dude, Drummond should be taking zero post up to game, but you didn't know what else to do. Again, just to coach who was completely out of his depth. And ultimately the Pistons,

it would take them until March, so close to two months. months to finally win a game against the team that wasn't either tanking or exhausted. Again, those criteria away game, second night of a back-to-back, third game in four nights. And that was against the Lakers who were missing Brandon Ingram, and I believe Josh Hart, who were a bad team, and it was Griffin's last game of the season. Van Gundy also brought Reggie Jackson back way too early for the sake of winning meaningless games. Jackson would end up needing to take the entire summer to rehab, and he wasn't

back in a game shape of the next season for about half the season. season. So, yep, season goes on, Pistons lose, Van Gundy gets fired. And then Dwayne Gacy comes in, Ed Stefanski manages, you know, comes in as a consultant to help the coaching search and the GM search and ends up hiring himself, basically, as general manager. He did okay for the Pistons. I'm not too unhappy about that in retrospect. But that's it for the Stan Van Gondi era. It was quite unsuccessful. The Pistons ended up basically needing to do a, you know, they would do kind of like, you know, make many personnel changes in the year after that and then going into the 2019 season. But this was never, ever going to be a contender. And as we know, the team got

legitimately, like, literally completely overhauled by Troy Weaver just two years later. So all the mistakes he made, I mean, number one, trying to build your team around Drummond, who never had the skill to be a number one option, and really had to be built around in order to make him worthwhile as a max contract player. But it was if you build around him, you're not going to win and had his big issues in terms of his mentality, which is probably his number one issue, though he's never going to be a great scorer because he has no touch. And he's never going to be a decent scorer, rather.

It's okay to not be a great scorer, but he was never going to be a decent scorer because he has such bad touch. And if he committed himself fully to defense, maybe he could have been a great defensive player, though, you know, he went into physical decline at the age of 27. Yeah, so there was that. He couldn't coach in the modern NBA. Van Gundy could not.

He did not know how to build a team in the modern NBA to have enough shooting. And he made a lot of bad decisions in the draft. He made some really bad personnel decisions. He got to where he was, I think, because he got very, very fortunate. You know, when the team peaked, the team peaked in 2015, 2016, he had gotten exceedingly fortunate in the personnel who would become available to him by trade. And had legitimately had three very advantageous trades just thrown into his lap. but from then on from the 2016 offseason onward

he basically just only made bad decisions and that culminated in him making a desperate trade for Blake Griffin that was terrible for the team and you could say okay maybe maybe it was ultimately a decent trade and you know not that it was actually a good trade at the time but that it helped the pistons to a point where they decided to rebuild and and you know and maybe this was a key thing

and Tom Gora seeing well you have Blake Griffin who's really a huge name and he has an excellent season and you still get slaughtered in the first round of the playoffs in 2019, and then he gets injured the next season. But you see that just having a star and a big name is not necessarily going to make you a good team. And that maybe not allowing the team to rebuild is a bad thing. And he ultimately came around to that, though I think that Ed Stefanski really played a big role in that

because the next season you saw Stefanski saying, well, we're not making win now trades. Trade away Reggie Bullock instead of paying to keep him in the offseason, which they may not have been able to do. So really unsuccessful. I mean, it was it was a period in Piston's history that looked hopeful. But ultimately, you know, there was, I hate to quote Shakespeare. I'm not big on theater. I really don't like theater. Nothing against those who do, but I think it's like one of my least favorite things. I was going to come up with this, you know, something rotten in the state of Michigan. I don't know, pretty lame. But yeah, I think that's

the pistons, you know, looked like they were heading in the right direction. And a lot of things went badly after that, after that 2015-2016 season. But you also had a guy who was, you know, who was in charge of personnel, didn't know how to put it together, did not know how to put a good team together. And he was also a coach who was not fit to be leading a team and giving it its best chance to succeed in an NBA that was developing very fast and past his capabilities. So that is the Stan Van Gundy era. So if you've made it all the way to 57 minutes of me talking about the Stan Van Gondi era, I suppose I commend you. I intended for this to be like a 30-minute episode, but there was just a lot to talk about.

In any case, so that's going to be it for this episode. Like I said, have some season preview content coming up for the next couple episodes before preseason comes along. And until then, thank you all for listening. Catch you in the next episode.