Detroit Pistons: 3 players facing the most pressure in 2018-19
By Amaar Burton
There’s pressure on the Detroit Pistons as a franchise to win, but some players have additional reasons why they’ll be under heavy scrutiny in 2018-19.
The Detroit Pistons have three key ingredients that make for a pressure-packed season in 2018-19.
While the team is not facing the high expectations of being a championship contender, the Pistons do have their own issues that will create an immediate climate of tension if and when losses start piling up at any point during the schedule:
- A high payroll
- A long drought of playoff success
- A frustrated fanbase
Detroit has the NBA’s eighth-largest payroll for the upcoming season. Franchise owner Tom Gores is a billionaire a few times over, but even the world’s richest man wouldn’t be pleased spending upwards of $125 million in salary for a team that doesn’t produce victories and barely registers on the radar of mainstream notoriety.
Conventional wisdom says the most expensive teams are the most talented teams, but the Pistons have recently indicated that wisdom is inaccurate. They’ve missed the playoffs in eight of the last nine years, and haven’t won a playoff game since 2008; their last two postseason appearances (2016, 2009) ended with first round sweeps.
The losing hasn’t gone over well in the Motor City, where fans are accustomed to success.
The Pistons have won three NBA championships, most recently in 2004, and have employed some of the game’s greatest players and coaches of all time. This franchise was one of the NBA’s defining powerhouses of the 1980s and early-1990s, and again in the 2000s.
The fans have been letting their dollars and their absence speak: The Pistons ranked 19th out of 30 teams in average home attendance last season, and 29th in attendance percentage, despite opening up a new arena. They were also in the bottom half of the league for merchandise sales.
Hitting the reset button this summer does buy the Pistons some patience and leeway, but not a whole lot. Reasonable fans won’t expect a championship in the near future, but making the playoffs in the Eastern Conference isn’t too much to ask.
The pressure is on this team to win. For some Pistons players, however, there are other factors involved in making this season one in which they’ll be until a microscope individually.