The Detroit Pistons’ 60-win season last year was bolstered by an Eastern Conference that was terrible at the bottom, but that won’t be the case next season.
A lot of time has been spent talking about the improved East this offseason, with most of the focus going to the top, with debates around teams like the Celtics, 76ers and Heat and whether they’ve done enough to topple the Knicks.
The Pistons will be an afterthought as usual, and I am sure we’ll see them dip in preseason predictions once again after a relatively quiet offseason.
Detroit will definitely have more competition for the Eastern crown, but things will also be more difficult against the bottom of the league, a group the Pistons feasted on last year.
There won’t be as many tankers in the Eastern Conference
The new draft lottery rules will have teams thinking twice about tanking, as there is no advantage to finishing in the bottom three. There will obviously still be bad teams, as there are every year, but fewer of them will be intentionally bad, as there is no longer an advantage.
That wasn’t the case in the East last season, when the Wizards, Pacers, Nets, Bulls and Bucks were all tanking at various points in the season.
The Pistons went a combined 16-4 against this group last season, and if you are counting, that is more than a quarter of their total wins.
Those won’t be freebies next year, as all of those teams are improved and will no longer be strategically sitting out players in order to lose on purpose.
The Wizards added the #1 pick in the draft along with Anthony Davis and Trae Young, so they will be trying to crawl out of the cellar. Either way, they should be much improved with a suddenly intriguing mix of veteran and young talent.
The Pacers are getting Tyrese Haliburton back and will add Ivica Zubac at center, so they should be right back in the mix.
The Nets will likely still be bad, but they won’t be doing it on purpose and have added Julius Randle to a team with a lot of young talent.
The Bulls will probably be the 10th seed again as they are every season, but they too have some good young players to at least be excited about.
The Bucks are expected to take a step back after trading Giannis, but you never know how these superstar trades will go down, and they at least bolstered their depth. Tyler Herro will be out to prove himself after getting dumped by Miami and beaten up by his old teammate, so I wouldn’t count on the Bucks to be a complete pushover either.
We may not see a team in the East win 60 games next season, and if I had to guess, there will be a group of teams bunched together with almost complete parity from 1-6, so the Pistons won’t have an easy road in the East.
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