Detroit Pistons: Breaking down their recent struggles

1. Consistency outside of Blake Griffin

The Pistons added Griffin last season in an effort to expedite their rebuild back to relevance. This season, he’s made that look like one of the smartest moves of last season’s trade deadline. Griffin has only missed one game, and he has been excellent.

So far this year, he’s averaging 25.7 points, 9.1 rebounds and 5.0 assists per game. Griffin missed the team’s road loss to the 76ers, but he was the only player to score at least 20 points in every game over this recent stretch.

Unfortunately, the Pistons needed to sacrifice a lot of pieces to land the five-time All-Star in last season’s trade. Players like Avery Bradley and Tobias Harris would be very good fits alongside Griffin. Small forward has been a major position of weakness and inconsistency for this team, and Stanley Johnson continues to struggle to take that next leap needed of him. Andre Drummond is normally good for about 20 points and 15 rebounds every night, but that consistency wasn’t there.

Early in the season, inconsistency is going to happen. After a quarter of the year is over, that’s not okay. Griffin is capable of carrying a load like this, as we saw when Chris Paul went down with an injury in the 2013-14 season. However, he’s older now, and the players around him need to step up to take some of that load off of him. If this inconsistency continues moving forward, the Pistons’ struggles will only continue.