Why Don’t We Believe in the Pistons?

The Detroit Pistons have been the most consistent team in the East all season, so why don’t we think they can win a championship?

There is no reasonable argument to be had that the Detroit Pistons aren’t the favorites in the Eastern Conference. They’re 39-13 with a five-and-a-half-game lead over the second-place New York Knicks, not to mention the season tie-breaker, own the best net rating in the conference at +7.8, have been the most consistent team in the league, and, due to the 65 games played rule, have a potential MVP in Cade Cunningham. Yet, despite all of that, they’re routinely third, fourth, fifth, and even sixth in championship odds by the bookmakers.

*Odds as of Tuesday, February 10

And it isn’t just the bookies that are skeptical. Many rational media figures still have the Knicks as favorites, the addition of James Harden, a noted playoff catastrospher, has pushed the Cavaliers back to the forefront, and should Jayson Tatum return, which is looking more likely, the Celtics might vault them all. For some reason, the best, most consistent team in the Eastern Conference continues to sit at the kids’ table, and I want to know why.

Skipping Stepping Stones

One area where the Pistons are almost assuredly being docked is that they haven’t suffered enough in the playoffs. The general belief is that teams slowly build up to a championship. First, you make the playoffs, then you win a round, then you make it to the Conference Finals, and only then have you built up enough “playoff experience” to break through. Looking at the past seven champions, there is some rhyme and reason to that mantra.

*Made Playoffs, but lost in the first round

Every single champion, outside of the Lakers, who added LeBron James and then Anthony Davis in consecutive offseasons, had won at least one playoff series with their championship core, prior to winning the title. The Pistons’ current core made the playoffs for the first time last season, but were eliminated by the New York Knicks in six games. Based on this logic, the Pistons are still one more playoff run away from their breakthrough point. However, the question isn’t if they will win the title; the question is, why doesn’t anyone think they will make the Finals?

Doing the same exercise, just with the runners-up, we see a similar trend. Teams usually have some level of playoff success before breaking through. The notable exceptions are the 2019-20 Heat and the 2020-21 Phoenix Suns. However, they added All-NBA stars with loads of playoff experience, namely Jimmy Butler and Chris Paul, in the season they made the finals.

While recent history does suggest that the Pistons are a bit light on playoff experience, it misses one crucial point– team quality. The Pistons’ +7.8 net rating doesn’t break the scale, but compared to recent Finalists, it stands out.

As it currently stands, the Pistons’ net rating of +7.8 would be the third highest among teams to make the NBA Finals over the past seven seasons. So, while they lack the typical “experience” of a Conference champion, they more than make up for that with actual on-court quality. Perhaps the Pistons’ perception gap is just an artifact of the playoff experience manifesto, but I think there’s more at play here.

When Depth is a Dirty Word

Judging a team’s playoff prospects by season-long and team-wide net rating can overrate and undervalue certain sides. Take the 2022-23 Nuggets as a prime example. Their +3.4 net rating is one of the lowest among NBA Champions, but their starting five of Nikola Jokic, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, and Michael Porter Jr tormented the opposition to a +12.95 net rating. Considering that that five man lineup played in 377 out of 960 (39.3%) playoff minutes, compared to 706 out of 3,936 (17.9%) regular season minutes, it’s no surprise that the Nuggets saw their net rating explode to +8.7 in the playoffs.

Having a deep stable of competent NBA players is a huge advantage in the regular season, but in the playoffs, starters routinely eclipse 40 minutes. And the Pistons have leveraged their depth to great effect this season. They’re one of four teams with six qualified players who have a box plus/minus (BPM) greater than 0.0, and that doesn’t include Isaiah Stewart (-0.3) and Ron Holland (-1.7) due to poor offensive metrics, or Paul Reed (3.8), Caris LeVert (0.4), and Daniss Jenkins (0.3) due to minutes played.

Now, what’s so impressive about a BPM of 0.0? Well, according to Daniel Myers, the developer of BPM, 0.0 roughly translates to a decent starter or solid sixth man. So, if you’re counting at home, the Pistons have nine players producing at a starter or sixth man level, plus two defensive aces in Stewart and Holland. Having 11 real NBA players to throw at every game is a massive advantage, just look at their team ranked by Value Over a Replacement Player (VORP), the volume component of BPM.

However, the idea that the Pistons are solely winning games because they have 48 minutes of NBA competence is a misnomer. Their best five-man lineup of Cade Cunningham, Jalen Duren, Ausar Thompson, Duncan Robinson, and Tobias Harris has a +12.16 net rating in 396 minutes of action. It just so happens that in the 308 minutes when none of those guys were on the court, they produced a net rating of +7.78.

The Pistons have real depth, but their top-end lineup is also championship-worthy. While there are legitimate concerns over whether teams will acknowledge Ausar Thompson’s existence on offense and how mercilessly Duncan Robinson will be targeted on defense in the playoffs, the Pistons have managed those two concerns with aplomb during the regular season. That being said, the Pistons’ roster has one “glaring” flaw– the offense.

Will the Offense be Enough?

Statistically, the Pistons’ offense appears as only a slight blemish. At 117.1 points per 100 possessions, it’s +1.6 above the league average, and while they rank 11th in offensive rating, they’re only 0.2 points and 0.4 points behind the Lakers in tenth and the Spurs in ninth. For all intents and purposes, the Pistons have a top-ten offense to support their second-ranked, with a bullet in the head, defense.

However, the Pistons get to their 11th-ranked offense through sheer brutality. Their eFG% of 54.2% is 15th, and just below the league average of 54.3%. They also turn the ball over a considerable amount, owning the 18th-ranked turnover percentage at 13.1%. They make up for those two flaws by crashing the glass with authority, ranking third in offensive rebound percentage (30.4%), and getting to the line, also ranking third in free throw attempt rate (.300). While the brutality over beauty offensive approach works, it doesn’t seem to produce champions.

Over the past seven seasons, the teams that have made the NBA Finals have been the complete inverse of the Pistons on offense. On average, the 14 championship participants have had a regular season eFG% 3.29% greater than league average, a turnover percentage 2.6% better than league average, an offensive rebound rate 2.37% below league average, and a free throw to field goal attempt ratio 1.57% below league average.

*100 is league average

Now, as I’m sure you can see, the Pistons’ strengths far exceed their weaknesses, but their weaknesses are far more important than their strengths. This season, roughly, eFG% explains 42% of offensive rating, followed by turnover TOV% at 34%, then ORB% at 16%, and finally FT/FGA at 8%. This hierarchy of offensive importance has held throughout most of basketball history and explains the offensive tradeoffs NBA Finalists generally make. The Pistons have built a solid, if unspectacular, offense through zigging extremely well, while the rest of the league is zagging, so to speak.

Overall, the Pistons have a solid offense, but people remaining skeptical of its viability come playoff time is a reasonable concern. And that doesn’t even take into account how basketball changes in the postseason.

Are the Pistons Built for the Playoffs

In the 21st century, or starting with the 1999-00 season, the NBA playoffs have seen a slight decline in offensive efficiency from the regular season. And when I say slight, I mean slight. The average decline in offensive rating has been -0.05, or -0.046%. That’s not nothing, but it’s pretty dang close. However, while the overall efficiency landscape, on average, doesn’t change much, you do see some pretty consistent changes.

First, stylistically, the game slows down. On average, pace declines by -2.75%, and only once over the past 26 seasons has it increased in the playoffs compared to the regular season. Two other very consistent trends are a significant spike in free-throw attempt rate (+7.82%) and 3-point attempt rate (+6.53%). These three changes make sense in conjunction. Defenses get more intense, wall off the paint, and physicality increases. That should lead to a slower pace of play, more fouls leading to free throws, and teams being left with threes as their best shot more often.

Statistically, these shifts have led to a -1.39% drop in eFG% and a 7.51% increase in FT/FGA, but, somewhat surprisingly, a -3.82% decline in TOV% and a slight -1.91% reduction in ORB%. With these historical trends, we can “project” what the Pistons’ current regular-season figures would translate to in the playoffs, and see if they’re doomed to collapse in the playoffs. Now, the system I used is a tad convoluted, and shouldn’t be viewed as gospel, but I’ll do my best to explain. If you don’t care about the nuts and bolts, you can skip over the next paragraph and trust I mathed okay.

Thanks to a brief social media correspondence with Dean Oliver, the creator/discoverer of the Four Factors (eFG%, TOV%, O/DRB%, FT/FGA), I was able to ascertain each factor’s current weight as it pertains to offensive and defensive rating. However, the Four Factors found on Basketball Reference were spitting out figures that didn’t align with teams’ offensive and defensive ratings. Instead, I found that calculating each team’s four factors based on their per 100 numbers gave much more consistent results, even if they weren’t exactly their listed ratings. This isn’t something to fret over, as NBA.com’s and Basketball-Reference’s ratings differ; what matters is consistency in application. To normalize for this slight discrepancy, I simply calculated team offensive and defensive ratings based on my manual four factors for the regular season, then factored in the historic playoff percentage changes in eFG%, TOV%, O/DRB%, and FT/FGA to build a new playoff four factors to then project playoff offensive, defensive, and net ratings.

Alright, so there is definitely credence to the notion that the Pistons are uniquely ill-suited to the playoffs. Interestingly, the Pistons’ defense has by far the worst projected portability to the playoffs, as they’re the only team that projects to see their defensive rating increase, which is the opposite of what you want. Now, as these figures show, the projected changes in net rating border on negligible. While that doesn’t mean certain teams aren’t built as well for the playoffs, it means scouring the four factors probably isn’t the best course of action. At the end of the day, the Pistons still project to have the best playoff net rating in the Eastern Conference.

Why Don’t We Believe in the Pistons?

There aren’t any particularly strong statistical reasons to be skeptical of the Pistons, but that doesn’t mean concerns aren’t valid. Playoff experience does seem matter. While that doesn’t feel like real analysis, the last time a team won a Championship without a core member having won a playoff series was the 1976-77 Trail Blazers.

From a basketball standpoint, I do think the Pistons will run into issues during the playoffs. Cade Cunningham has been excellent this season, but he’s the Pistons’ only playoff-caliber creator, and even though he’s very good, he’s not at such a level where you should reasonably expect him to carry an offense to three series wins. His current offensive BPM of 4.5 ranks 18th in the league and would be on the low-end for a primary option of an NBA Finalist, especially for a team without another true on-ball creator. This isn’t so much a gripe about Cunningham as it is an acknowledgment that championship-level teams usually have multiple sources of offense.

The final bit of mostly-legitimate concern stems from the Pistons’ excellent defense. The Pistons have functionally sacrificed the free-throw line to win the shooting efficiency and turnover battle. It has been a worthy tradeoff; they have an elite defense after all, but it does raise some concerns. Generally, free throws increase in the playoffs, and free throws come from fouls, and fouls are a finite resource. In the regular season, it’s a lot easier to send wave after wave of defenders to exhaust their six fouls than it is in the playoffs. If the Pistons’ approach leads to massive free throw totals for their opponents and foul trouble for their preferred eight-man rotation, it could have a negative cascading effect. Or the Pistons might have to dial down their aggression, which could hurt their turnover generation and shot suppression. For a defense-first team, that’s more uncertainty than you’d like.

Despite all of that, I still think the Pistons are being slept on. They have been the best team in the Eastern Conference, have an elite defense, and are led by one of the 20-best offensive players in the league. In a normal season, I’d agree that they’re probably a season away, but this isn’t a normal season. The Cavaliers were such a mess that they decided to trade up ten years in age to land James Harden, and the Knicks have been outscored by 69 total points in their two games against the Pistons. At this point, the most dangerous-looking challenger in the East is the Boston Celtics, who spent the trade deadline shedding salary.

The Pistons might not deserve our trust completely, but they deserve more than they’re getting. There are more reasons to believe in them than not, and the real question is, why do you trust anyone else more? Until you can answer that, you should probably ride with the best team in the Conference.

For any inquiries about work, discussion, and the like, you can email me at nevin.l.brown@gmail.com.