Time to face reality about Cade

[Notanoob]

As much as it sucks, we're too bad to trade away stuff to try to get better. The hope is that we land Flagg next year at this point.

Cade is okay, but if he was a huge difference-maker the team wouldn't be this bad. He'll look better with better teammates, with more experience, but he's looking like he's just a guy and not a Franchise Player. Until we get one of those we just hope to get lucky in the draft I guess.

The real problem is the people running the team can't evaluate players or value correctly. Doesn't matter if we have draft picks if we pick the wrong guys, doesn't matter if we're willing to spend on free agents if we get guys who suck, doesn't matter if we trade for guys if they can't play and don't fit. Another terrible season is probably necessary just force Gores to clean house.

[tradez401]

Watch on YouTube

the only bright spot for the team this year didnt mentally check out and kept playin till the end.

[tacosman]

Here is the problem with how some fans of the pistons(which is true for many fairly young and consistently bad teams), or rather the two assumptions that tends to burn people for teams like this:

1) There is an assumption of progress, both on an individual and team level

There is this idea that a young team who picks fairly high for several consecutive years is going to have a linear(and positive) win direction year after year and over a long time. And that's just not how it works. Occasionally it has worked like that, but that's not the norm.
I see things like people projecting a win progression per season of 20-25-30-35-40-45-50-55-etc.......Like no, that's usually not how it works.
For every OKC from 12-15 years ago(or what they are doing now), there are 10 other examples where it doesn't happen like that.
It's great to want the team to have this long and consistently upward climb in a linear manner; but wanting and expecting are two different things.

2) *Someone* has to be the one scoring and putting up stats. Let's imagine a hypothetical team with a bunch of young players who has a season +/- per 48 or -20. I mean that's a historically bad team. Let's their they average 100 a game(ie terrible) and give up 120 a game(ie terrible).
Well *someone* or likely a couple of the young guys on the roster are going to put up 22/6 or whatever on middling efficiency. I mean there is 100 points to be divided up.

So fans see a collection of young players who were high draft picks and say "hey he's only 21(or 22 or 23 or whatever) and is putting up 21/7/5 on 45/35/78. That's a real keeper". And he may be or he(more likely) isn't, but this isn't seeing the forest through the trees.

I mean let's be honest. These last few years, or this 'rebuild' so far for the pistons has been terrible. Literally as bad as one could expect. The team was terrible when they started it, and they are still terrible. They haven't any progress at all as a team.

And yet many of the posters here think there is one really good young player who has all-nba potential and then a number of other "quality building blocks for the future"(I pulled that as a quote on here recently; cant remember from who)

Instead, the right way to look at it is this: Start with the realization that this team sucks. I mean really really sucks. A few years into the rebuild the detroit pistons are the WORST.TEAM.IN.NBA.

So then when one is reminded of this fact, let's ask ourselves- Who gets the 'credit' for the pistons being the worst team in the nba?

Well, the obvious next step is to see whose playing all these minutes to make them the absolute worst team in the nba.

And they are(in order and taking away players who played well less than half the games due to trades/injury):

Cunningham
Ivey
Duren
Stewart

So there it is....mostly it's the young players and high(er) draft picks that are supposedly the 'building blocks' that have led them to this worst in the nba status.

That's a problem.

I mean cunningham is supposedly the freaking centerpiece of this. And he's on the court more than anyone and even more importantly has the ball in his hands and has a usage rate far higher than anyone and........14 wins.

Ivey is next and he's a top 5 pick with two seasons under his belt.

You get where I'm going with this.

The players that many fans are counting on as the 'up and coming pieces' are responsible far more than anyone else for what has been pretty much historically bad basketball lately.

If it was going to work with these guys, there *would* be some progression. I'm not asking them to go 44-38 or whatever. But this??

And don't blame the coach or some other nonsense....this team has won 14 games because the guys that have been out there on the court have really really sucked. Period.

I mean as far as Cade's possible extension goes....I mean why not? What other choice do you have? but just because they give him an extension in no way means this is going in the right direction. With cade or anyone on this team.

[tacosman]

and yes, before anyone flames me about nets- we suck and I know it and our future isn't good either lol.....

[Billl]

Sleep on cade if you want. The rest of the league seems to know he can play.

[JennetteMcCurdy]

Here is the problem with how some fans of the pistons(which is true for many fairly young and consistently bad teams), or rather the two assumptions that tends to burn people for teams like this:

1) There is an assumption of progress, both on an individual and team level

There is this idea that a young team who picks fairly high for several consecutive years is going to have a linear(and positive) win direction year after year and over a long time. And that's just not how it works. Occasionally it has worked like that, but that's not the norm.
I see things like people projecting a win progression per season of 20-25-30-35-40-45-50-55-etc.......Like no, that's usually not how it works.
For every OKC from 12-15 years ago(or what they are doing now), there are 10 other examples where it doesn't happen like that.
It's great to want the team to have this long and consistently upward climb in a linear manner; but wanting and expecting are two different things.

2) *Someone* has to be the one scoring and putting up stats. Let's imagine a hypothetical team with a bunch of young players who has a season +/- per 48 or -20. I mean that's a historically bad team. Let's their they average 100 a game(ie terrible) and give up 120 a game(ie terrible).
Well *someone* or likely a couple of the young guys on the roster are going to put up 22/6 or whatever on middling efficiency. I mean there is 100 points to be divided up.

So fans see a collection of young players who were high draft picks and say "hey he's only 21(or 22 or 23 or whatever) and is putting up 21/7/5 on 45/35/78. That's a real keeper". And he may be or he(more likely) isn't, but this isn't seeing the forest through the trees.

I mean let's be honest. These last few years, or this 'rebuild' so far for the pistons has been terrible. Literally as bad as one could expect. The team was terrible when they started it, and they are still terrible. They haven't any progress at all as a team.

And yet many of the posters here think there is one really good young player who has all-nba potential and then a number of other "quality building blocks for the future"(I pulled that as a quote on here recently; cant remember from who)

Instead, the right way to look at it is this: Start with the realization that this team sucks. I mean really really sucks. A few years into the rebuild the detroit pistons are the WORST.TEAM.IN.NBA.

So then when one is reminded of this fact, let's ask ourselves- Who gets the 'credit' for the pistons being the worst team in the nba?

Well, the obvious next step is to see whose playing all these minutes to make them the absolute worst team in the nba.

And they are(in order and taking away players who played well less than half the games due to trades/injury):

Cunningham
Ivey
Duren
Stewart

So there it is....mostly it's the young players and high(er) draft picks that are supposedly the 'building blocks' that have led them to this worst in the nba status.

That's a problem.

I mean cunningham is supposedly the freaking centerpiece of this. And he's on the court more than anyone and even more importantly has the ball in his hands and has a usage rate far higher than anyone and........14 wins.

Ivey is next and he's a top 5 pick with two seasons under his belt.

You get where I'm going with this.

The players that many fans are counting on as the 'up and coming pieces' are responsible far more than anyone else for what has been pretty much historically bad basketball lately.

If it was going to work with these guys, there *would* be some progression. I'm not asking them to go 44-38 or whatever. But this??

And don't blame the coach or some other nonsense....this team has won 14 games because the guys that have been out there on the court have really really sucked. Period.

I mean as far as Cade's possible extension goes....I mean why not? What other choice do you have? but just because they give him an extension in no way means this is going in the right direction. With cade or anyone on this team.

I think it’s very smart to not extend Cade this summer. I also think the new HOBO should see what Cade would get in a trade - I think it’s less than what many here would guess.

Cade’s a good player. Is he an All-Star? Should we give him a max deal because he’s our best player? How many games did we win last year? Can he stay healthy?

I’m curious to see what Cade would get us in a trade. I’m even curious to see what teams would even want him. I can’t get the Jalen Rose comparisons out of my head, and he peaked out as the second or third best player on a good Pacers team. Is that worth the max?

[Rip32]

Please trade Cade! He isn't a generational talent. Hell, he doesn't have the DNA of a true Piston..The guy is soft similar to Grant Hill. It was not coincidence we won the chip after Hill left

[BDM22]

Sleep on cade if you want. The rest of the league seems to know he can play.

Who said he "can't play"?

I think if you have a Victor Wembanyama, Cade's an amazing piece to have. You can pencil him in there as the #2 guy and be thrilled with that for 10 years. The issue is we're going into year 4 after 14 wins and he's going to be on a max deal soon, with the pathways toward improving the team becoming more and more difficult.

If you get a giant haul of picks for him and some of the other guys (Stew, Fontecchio, Duren, Ivey, whoever), you give yourself a lot more chances at finding a real #1 franchise player.

[MotownMadness]

We're still getting top 5 picks with him though. We're not stuck in some treadmill zone currently

[BDM22]

We're still getting top 5 picks with him though. We're not stuck in some treadmill zone currently

Yeah, the idea of trading him would be doing so before the inevitable desperation moves that are coming this offseason. I think it'll be a win-now mandate from Gores, especially since it's the last shot at big cap space. Gores wants his 35 wins at all costs. We'll see how far we have to set back the future to get there...

[Kalamazoo317]

We're still getting top 5 picks with him though. We're not stuck in some treadmill zone currently

Not to mention, play-in teams are getting the first overall pick, so I'm not sure a "treadmill" exists in the same way it used to. There's no real incentive not to at least try to compete for the play-in every year, imo. And having a more "winning" situation is going to make your assets look better for trades and make you more appealing for the B-level free agents we have a hope of getting.

In no way does having Cade diminish our chances of adding a better player than Cade over the longterm, imo. That's a very hard thing to accomplish in general, but we should just be focused on adding as many top 100 players to the roster as we can, any way we can (ideally ones that fit well, but we can also move said players for better fits as well).

[BDM22]

We're still getting top 5 picks with him though. We're not stuck in some treadmill zone currently

Not to mention, play-in teams are getting the first overall pick, so I'm not sure a "treadmill" exists in the same way it used to. There's no real incentive not to at least try to compete for the play-in every year, imo. And having a more "winning" situation is going to make your assets look better for trades and make you more appealing for the B-level free agents we have a hope of getting.

In no way does having Cade diminish our chances of adding a better player than Cade over the longterm, imo. That's a very hard thing to accomplish in general, but we should just be focused on adding as many top 100 players to the roster as we can, any way we can (ideally ones that fit well, but we can also move said players for better fits as well).

Cade only doesn't diminish our chances of adding a better player than Cade if you think he doesn't improve the team at all. Statistically, it still does diminish it if he a positive for the team, if we're gonna be technical about it. how much it diminishes with the flattened lotto odds could be debated, but if you ran the lottery 100 times, we'd have likely won it 14 times and Atlanta would have won it like 3 times. You're just betting even more on luck later on. You'd still always rather have top lotto odds, even if the margin is less now.

But far more importantly (as I'm not a pure tanking advocate), there is pressure to put win-now veteran players around Cade and it's difficult for us to add win-now players without doing things like trading future assets. It's all we have and we don't have a lot of them.

If we trade this #5 pick on draft night for an established player, that's a move to increase the floor of the team at the expense of the "potential" for that #5 player to become the franchise cornerstone. If we trade any future picks or an untapped player like Ausar (or whoever) for floor raising, ceiling dropping players, the same applies.

[Rip32]

Wonder if Charlotte would bite, Brandon Miller and Bridges for Cade and Ausar???

[Kalamazoo317]

You'd still always rather have top lotto odds, even if the margin is less now.

Not at the cost of a winning culture, I wouldn't. Showing you're an up and coming team on the rise and that Cade is a player other good players want to play with is as likely or more likely of a way out of this mess than consistently getting top picks in the lottery.

Also, other than years with players like Wemby, the real wins in the draft come from drafting well, which you can do outside of the top pick (and which teams often don't do with the top pick). Look at Luka's draft for instance. Or Giannis' or Jokic's.

I'm not saying to give up future assets as well. I'm just saying not to be afraid of winning, not to be afraid of adding players around Cade, and not to be afraid of Cade being good. These things don't hurt our chances of getting better overall. They help them.

If we trade this #5 pick on draft night for an established player, that's a move to increase the floor of the team at the expense of the "potential" for that #5 player to become the franchise cornerstone. If we trade any future picks or an untapped player like Ausar (or whoever) for floor raising, ceiling dropping players, the same applies.

Potential is overrated and this take also overlooks the potential for the established player to get better in a new role, with new opportunities. If the player we get truly raises the floor in a significant way, I struggle to see them also dropping the ceiling.

Fwiw, though, I want to keep Ausar, as I think he's potentially special on one side of the ball. I don't think Duren or Ivey project to be.

[Rip32]

As much as it sucks, we're too bad to trade away stuff to try to get better. The hope is that we land Flagg next year at this point.

Cade is okay, but if he was a huge difference-maker the team wouldn't be this bad. He'll look better with better teammates, with more experience, but he's looking like he's just a guy and not a Franchise Player. Until we get one of those we just hope to get lucky in the draft I guess.

The real problem is the people running the team can't evaluate players or value correctly. Doesn't matter if we have draft picks if we pick the wrong guys, doesn't matter if we're willing to spend on free agents if we get guys who suck, doesn't matter if we trade for guys if they can't play and don't fit. Another terrible season is probably necessary just force Gores to clean house.

I'm afraid the org hyping Cade and he is not the type of player you build around. Folks are so sucked in, they want a player like Cade, them surround him with shooters who can't created their own shoot and terrible defensively. The is a recipe for disaster imo. Uconn coach just told you the recipe for winning, quote, "We recruit guys who could be great individually on other teams but they come to UConn for winnning and knowing they have to sacrifice for the team!" So in otherwords, they have 5 ballers and not guys who just can shoot. I f'ing hate when people say Cade needs shooters