NBA Powerless Rankings: Pistons making business decisions like a business does

5. Avery Bradley

“Whatever,” basically.

If we’re going to introduce basketball as a decision, let’s start with the short, useless story of Avery Bradley as a Detroit Piston.

He was businessed onto the team this past summer when Stan Van Gundy decided Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was going to cost more money than he wanted to pay. Avery Bradley was picked to be the realized version of KCP. He could play defense and hit 3s, and that was all we wanted. That was all we needed.

That was it, Avery. No long twos or creating off the dribble. Just play really good defense and hit some 3s and you’ll be maybe the second-best player on the Pistons.

Well, Avery didn’t do that. He instead made the team noticeably worse in the minutes that he did happen to play, and then the Pistons businessed him right back out of Detroit.

There wasn’t a lot of time for Bradley to dig out a little hole in my heart. Most of my heart was already clogged with Andre Drummond and great deals on artisan cheese. I was just hoping for a quick, simple slide from KCP to older, improved KCP. If it’s just nice and simple, that will be a good year and we can re-evaluate his next contract when the summer comes.

He was bad instead. Whatever space was there in one of the ventricles was quickly taken up by an additional injection of Tobias Harris. By the time he was gone, I was relieved. It wasn’t personal, it was business.