2008 Record: 59-23
Division Finish: 1st – Central
2008 Playoffs: Lost, 4-2, to the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals

Head Coach: Michael Curry
Season: First Season

Offseason Acquisitions:
Kwame Brown, C, 6-11, 5.7 ppg, 5.7 rpg, Signed from Memphis Grizzles

Offseason Transactions:
Resigned forward Walter Herrman

Offseason Losses:
Jarvis Hayes, F, 6-8, 6.7 ppg, 2.2 rpg, Signed with New Jersey Nets
Juan Dixon, G, 6-3, 6.5 ppg, 1.6, rpg, Signed with Washington Wizards

Rookies:
Walter Sharpe, F, 6-9, Alabama-Birmingham

The Skinny:
Teams have come and gone over the last six years in the Eastern Conference, but one constant has been the Detroit Pistons. With their core still in tact from last year’s conference finals there is no reason to believe that the team won’t be back in the Eastern Finals or beyond once again this year.

With a 59-23 record the Pistons had the second-best record in the NBA last season. The only team with a better mark was the Boston Celtics. A big reason for the two best records coming out of the same conference is that the East is pretty week. The number of really good teams in the East you can count with your ears and nose. There are only a handful of decent teams and then there are the dregs of the league.

The West is completely different. You’ve got a bunch of really good teams with no one really head and shoulders better than another. Few would have expected the Lakers to make the Finals, but really there is so much talent in the conference that who ever is hot in the West can make a run. The talent in the East is not that good. Even a really hot team will struggle to beat one of the top dogs.

Two teams have been as consistent as it comes. One is San Antonio and the other is the Pistons. They have seen very little turnover in their roster during the last six years and as a result they’ve been able to rule a mediocre Eastern Conference.

Five key players have been with the team for at least four years. Guards Richard “Rip” Hamilton and Chauncey Billups along with forward Tayshaun Prince have all been with the team for six years. Center Rasheed Wallace has been there five years and forward Antonio McDyess has been there the last four.

That’s a great group of talented players that have been with each other for a while now. They know how to anticipate everyone’s moves and they all know how to win it all as members of the Pistons’ 2004 World Championship team.

No team may have more of its team returning from last year than the Pistons. Detroit brings back its top seven scorers from last year’s squad that was on the doorstep of the NBA Finals. The starting five averaged 69.0 points per game last season and accounted for 386 starts out of a possible 410.

The biggest problem the Pistons have is their frontcourt. Not since the days of the Bad Boys has Detroit been big on the inside. Even when they had Ben Wallace they still weren’t dominant. Wallace was a tremendous rebounder, but he wasn’t much of a threat on offense. Rasheed Wallace has the size of a center, but the skills of a power forward and presents such a tough match-up at the offensive end of the floor, but just the opposite of Wallace he’s not much on defense.

In an effort to strengthen the inside, during the offseason the Pistons acquired the services of center Kwame Brown from the Memphis Grizzles. After averaging 5.7 ppg. and 5.7 rpg., Brown was shipped to Memphis as part of the Pau Gaol deal. They also drafted 6-9 forward Walter Sharpe from Alabama-Birmingham who was averaging 14.2 ppg. and 6.8 rpg. before he was declared academically ineligible for the spring semester. Second-year center Cheikh Samb from Senegal could pay benefits down the line. He’s 7-foot-1 and is pretty solid at 245.

Unlike some teams, the Pistons appear to be ahead of the curve when it comes time to replace their vets. General Manager Joe Dumars knows that Billups and Hamilton aren’t getting any younger, that’s why they drafted guard Arron Afflalo and Will Bynum. Both are pretty good college players and if they listen to what the vets have to say they could step in and keep the train rolling.

Prediction
Even though Detroit has much talent back across the board, the one big intangible is its new coach. With only one year of experience as an assistant, Michael Curry was handed the keys to the Pistons after Flip Saunders was fired.

Curry has long had the respect of Dumars when he was signed to a 10-day contract with the team a few years back. Now the question is will he have the respect of his players. At 39-years old he’s only about four years older that Wallace and McDyess.

With such a veteran team this maybe the perfect situation for Curry. Billups and Hamilton can pretty much run the team from the floor so all Curry really needs to be able to do is manage all the egos in the locker room. As a former member of the Players’ Association he knows how to deal with a lot of egos so he may be the perfect man for the job.

I think this will be the year that the Pistons get back to the NBA Finals. As good as Boston is, I think the Pistons will figure them out. I also think that Detroit is much deeper than the Celtics are and the combination of those two factors will give them the edge of Boston come playoff time.

Before he got traded to Memphis, Brown was finally starting to develop into a good role player on the inside. It also helped that it was able to get out of Los Angeles because he was starting to get into trouble off the court there. This could be a second life for him in Detroit. Sharpe and Samb could also give some help on the inside.

This could be their last hurrah, but I think the Pistons will win it all this year. No one in the East besides Boston will give them a run and I don’t think Boston has it this year. The West is better from top to bottom, but they’ll beat themselves up and only San Antonio is as good as Detroit 1-5 with any sort of bench.

As the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, the Detroit Pistons were a member team of the old National Basketball League (NBL) and the Basketball Association of America (BAA) before joining the NBA in 1949 and becoming the Detroit Pistons in 1957.

Today, the three-time champion Detroit Pistons play their home games at The Palace of Auburn Hills. Their head coach is the newly-hired Michael Curry, and their general manager is Joe Dumars, who played on the back-to-back title winning Pistons of 1989 and 1990.

Early Years in Detroit

When the Pistons first moved to Detroit in 1957, they immediately established themselves as a tough team to beat. They made the playoffs in each of their firsts six seasons in Detroit, though they didn’t get past the division finals.

The 1960s and 1970s were far from kind to the Pistons, who boasted some big names of the era but could not translate that into winning seasons. Between 1963 and 1973, the team only appeared in the playoffs once, despite having high-profile players like Bob Lanier, Dave DeBusschere, Dave Bing, and Jimmy Walker.

Despite a few playoff berths in the mid-1970s, the Detroit Pistons did not begin to establish themselves as an NBA contender until they drafted an Indiana point guard named Isiah Thomas in 1981.

Isiah and the Bad Boys

The Pistons continued to build after drafting Thomas. They acquired guard Vinnie Johnson and center Bill Laimbeer in 1982. This paid quick dividends for the team, as they returned to the playoffs in the 1983-84 season. They lost in the first round to the New York Knicks, but things were beginning to look up for Detroit.

The Pistons picked little-known shooting guard Joe Dumars in 1985, and they picked up forward Rick Mahorn in a trade that same year. Thomas, Dumars, Mahorn, Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman would form the core of the team that would earn the nickname “Bad Boys.”

The Detroit teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s had a rough, physical style of play that earned them the nickname. Rodman, Mahorn, and Laimbeer were well-known for their ability to get under the skin of opposing players. The team, under the leadership of head coach Chuck Daly, had a defense-first mentality that cast them as the polar opposite of flashier teams like the L.A. Lakers.

Championships

In the 1987-88 season, after amassing 54 regular season wins, the Pistons established themselves as the class of the Eastern Conference, beating the Washington Bullets, the Chicago Bulls and the Boston Celtics on their way to their first NBA Finals appearance since 1956 (when they were the Fort Wayne Pistons). They battled hard with the Western champion Lakers, but they eventually fell in seven games.

The following season, the Pistons won 63 games and returned to the NBA Finals bent on revenge against the Lakers. They got their revenge, sweeping the Lakers in four games.

The following year, the defending champion Pistons won 59 games and returned to the NBA Finals, this time against the Portland Trail Blazers. The opponent was different, but the result was the same. Detroit beat the Blazers in five games, making the “Bad Boys” back-to-back champions.

By the 1993-94 season, most of the core players had either retired or been traded, and the Bad Boy era came to an end.

Joe Dumars, the last holdover from the championship era, retired in 1999 and was named Detroit’s general manager in 2000. From the bottom up, he built a team that would eventually consist of Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, Tayshaun Prince, Ben Wallace, and Rasheed Wallace, among others. With these players, and the guiding hand of head coach Larry Brown (hired in 2003), Dumars constructed a team that would give him a third championship ring, and the team defeated the Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant-led Lakers in the 2004 Finals. That Finals victory had at least an indirect impact on the fate of the Lakers, who, until then, were considered the first NBA dynasty of the new millennium.

2007-08 Season

With much of the championship core still in place (Ben Wallace left for the Chicago Bulls in 2006), the 2007-08 Pistons racked up 59 regular season wins and looked to be a favorite to win the East. They beat the Philadelphia 76ers in six games and the Orlando Magic in five games before falling to the eventual champion Boston Celtics in six games.

At the end of the 2008 season, head coach Flip Saunders left the team and was replaced by assistant coach Michael Curry.

2008-09 Outlook

Rasheed Wallace, Billups, Prince and Hamilton return, though they are a year older. Young players like Jason Maxiell and Rodney Stuckey will be expected to take on additional minutes and relieve some of the pressure off the older players. If they can do that, the Pistons will be a contender to win the East.

Greatest Players

Dave Bing, Chauncey Billups, Joe Dumars, Richard “Rip” Hamilton, Grant Hill, Dennis Rodman, Isiah Thomas