Sound the alarm on these 5 grossly underachieving NBA teams

We’re about a month into the new NBA season, and we’re finally getting enough data on teams to start updating our predictions and forecasts of how teams and players will fare throughout the 2022–23 season.

There have already been a number of surprising developments in the first dozen or so NBA games this season. We’ve seen surprising starts for the Utah Jazz and San Antonio Spurs—two teams who were widely forecasted to be in a race to the bottom of the NBA standings—and a number of teams having to deal with injuries and a lack of depth on their respective rosters.

But the biggest surprise of the young NBA season has been a handful of teams that are grossly underperforming and underachieving despite having no real setbacks to deal with. We’re taking a quick look at five teams that have played shockingly poorly at the start of the 2022-23 NBA season.

Young Detroit Pistons still searching for NBA identity

The Detroit Pistons made several moves this offseason to improve their roster this offseason: drafting Jaden Ivey, trading for Jalen Duren on draft night, bringing in Bojan Bogdanovic from the Jazz, and re-signing Marvin Bagley III to a multi-year contract extension.

But for all those moves and the talent now on their roster, the Pistons are on pace to be worse than they were last season. As of this writing, the Detroit Pistons are 3-8 (.273) and searching to find out how to work together and improve on last season’s record of 23-59 (.280).

The Pistons have the talent to be so much better than this, but yet, here they are in the tank sweepstakes.