The Pistons are the same as before and somehow completely different

I hate visual metaphors. I’m trying to bleed all the hate I have about the Pistons’ season in the next few hundred words, so here. Have a visual metaphor.

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The connection may not be immediately obvious. That’s the Capybara Mountain of Success paying no mind to the efforts of the Baby Goat Pistons.

I was very wrong about things this year. I don’t often make predictions. Usually that’s because predictions are often in relation to performance, and I don’t understand life well enough to start projecting into the future even in quantifiable ways. I didn’t know how the Pistons would do this year. I was hoping for some sort of improvement.

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What I predicted was that this Pistons team would be likable. You can find these terrible words here:

"This is awesome. I had to think about this. I usually don’t like thinking because I’m not great at it, but this was a good thinking thing. I had reason to have internal debate on which Detroit Pistons player is the most likable.Heck yeah! The Pistons have likable people on the team again! Do you know how long it’s been? I could cry."

I could cry. That’s the bouncy diction of a happier time.

This is like stumbling across your hopeful senior quote in your high school yearbook while cleaning out your studio apartment to move back into your parent’s house.

The Pistons season never got off the ground. We went straight from hope to disappointment with very little transition period.

After Reggie Jackson’s injury at the beginning of the season, the Pistons just wanted to tread water. And they did! This kept the hope floating. The team out there playing around .500 with Ish Smith at the helm was not the team we’d see once Jackson was healthy. At the time that was considered a good thing.

Let’s journey back into the long-long ago. At the end of the 2015-16 season, the Pistons were back in the playoffs with a young, hungry starting five of Andre Drummond, Reggie Jackson, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Tobias Harris and Marcus Morris. These five challenged the Cavaliers as well as any team can while being swept.

Drummond and Jackson were a legitimate pick-and-roll threat. KCP was finally coming into his shooting stroke. Morris could get hot and had a great beard. Harris filled the empty spaces in the starting five that existed before his trade like blood fills a bathtub.

And there was still room to grow! The problem was the bench. The bench was improved. Some people had them pegged as the fourth-best team in the Eastern Conference.

When Jackson returned from injury, there was about half a game in which the world was the way I wanted it. For a bit the struggles seemed like growing pains. The team was just collecting energy to make a push toward the top of the standings.

Any inclination of that was gone by the end of December. A players-only meeting indicated the problems were more than just fitting puzzle pieces back together. The puzzle pieces were mad at each other.

What was happening wasn’t working, and something had to change. Stan Van Gundy decided maybe it’d be shaking up the starting lineup. Jon Leuer would start over Harris.

That didn’t help, really. Nothing helped. Game after game the Pistons looked disinterested. There was little fire, little friendliness. The same five players that looked like the future of the team were like kids in the back seat of a car on a road trip they didn’t want to be on. They were now available because “There’s no one in this league who is off limits.” The Pistons’ engine could be broken down into exchangeable parts.

Except it wasn’t. The trade deadline passed and everything was the same. A team with big, bright, shining flaws were still in there together. They were just being rearranged every once in a while.

This kept happening, then the season started ending, and Jackson was mercifully shut down. The brightest spots at the end of the season were getting to see Boban Marjanovic and Henry Ellenson play (and play relatively well!) in garbage time because at this point garbage time was all 48 minutes.

At the end of last season, there were things of substance to be excited for. Hope felt real. It felt solid. There was a group of guys to rally around rather than one or two players that maybe could help the franchise out at some point in the next few years.

Well, Drummond plateaued. Jackson could be injured. KCP is going to be expensive and may not even be here next year. I don’t know what to say about Morris or Harris. Harris still seems like a wonderful human being outside of basketball, so that’s nice.

The team at the end of this season is almost the same as the team from last season, but somehow they’re completely different. Something happened, or something needs to happen. I don’t know.

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This isn’t to say they can’t turn it around. Whatever there was to inspire that hope with these players can still have reason to exist, I suppose. I’m just burnt out on hope right now. I’ll try to remind myself to never do it again.