It can't get much worse for the Pistons

They've lost 27 straight games. It's not easy to be this bad.

In the modern NBA, three-point variance can flip any game. A team can get hot and shoot 50 percent on any given night. Don’t tell that to the Pistons.

Detroit has somehow lost 27 straight games after winning two of their first three. That’s a single-season record, and they’re close to breaking the overall losing streak record — set over two seasons by the 2015 Sixers.

This is a team that wants to win. Unlike the Wizards, who are in the first year of a rebuild, the Pistons are in year four, stocked with young players meant to serve as their core. They outbid other suitors to bring in Monty Williams as coach. They kept veteran scorer Bojan Bogdanovic around to fill out the squad.

And yet, they are abjectly terrible. On paper, it’s not obvious why they’ve been such a failure. They’re not last in either offense or defense (28th and 26th). There’s actual talent here, headlined by recent top five picks Cade Cunningham, Jaden Ivey, and Ausar Thompson.

What’s going wrong? Let’s run through a few reasons.

Three-point shooting and spacing

Teams don’t care much when most of the Pistons shoot threes. Especially before Bogdanovic’s return (he missed the first 19 games with injury), it was easy for opponents to cramp the floor for Cunningham and Ivey’s drives.

Williams’s focus on playing two big men together didn’t help. Isaiah Stewart, an undersized center but underqualified power forward, served as the team’s primary catch-and-shoot threat in the starting lineup for nearly two-thirds of this losing streak. Stewart, to be fair, is shooting 39.8 percent on 3.5 attempts per game. But teams still sag off of him.

Complicating things further is a lack of connective playmaking. Stewart, despite his three-point success, struggles to put the ball on the floor and attack closeouts. The role players who struggle from three (Thompson, Killian Hayes) rarely get a chance to attack closeouts because no one is closing out on them.

Ivey, another bricky shooter, has a turnover problem and runs into walls frequently. On spot-up possessions, per NBA.com, Ivey scores just 0.71 points per chance — one of the worst numbers in the league. (Teammates Isaiah Livers and Thompson are even worse.)

The result is that the Pistons offense has no flow or movement, rarely creating advantages. They take the fourth-most midrange shots per game, and rarely generate catch-and-shoot threes.

Their offensive aimlessness manifests most in crunch time. In clutch minutes, they have an offensive rating of 63.2 — incomprehensibly bad.

The confusing rotations

As the streak has progressed, Williams has tried just about everything with his rotation. He’s used every player at his disposal, trying all sorts of combinations. I’m not sure where to begin in describing what this team’s rotation looks like, because it changes every game.

Too often, though, Williams has gone away from promising combinations. The intriguing five-man unit of Cunningham, Ivey, Bogdanovic, Thompson, and Jalen Duren has played just two minutes together. That’s partially due to injuries, but why not try that as a starting lineup?

Overlapping skillsets

The puzzle pieces on this team simply do not fit. Cunningham and Ivey need the ball to succeed and have shown little indication that they can play together. Backup (and sometimes starting) guards Hayes and Alec Burks also need the ball, and are not plus playmakers. Two-big lineups with Stewart at the four don’t help.

Thompson, the rookie fifth-overall pick, is a keeper — a monster on defense and heady offensive connector — but on a bad team with zero shooting or offensive creativity, he makes no sense. His current lack of scoring ability makes the problem worse.

Williams has attempted to extract spacing from role players Livers, Marcus Sasser, and, lately, Kevin Knox, but at that point, the Pistons are suffering from a talent deficiency.

Defensive inattention

With the exception of the mistake-prone Wizards, the Pistons must lead the league in ugly defensive breakdowns. Their perimeter defensive talent is not bad (Thompson will be elite), but the team as a whole fails to execute schemes. Youth, poor coaching, and losing malaise all likely contribute to this problem.

There’s no rim protector to swallow up easy layups, either. Duren has a ways to go. Marvin Bagley III has never been that guy. James Wiseman, as ever, looks lost on the defensive end. With drop coverage struggling, Williams has tried a switch-everything scheme in recent games — conceding mismatches.

I’m not sure what’s going to fix all of this. Cunningham’s recent hot streak is promising, and makes him look more palatable as a long-term foundational piece. But it’s rare for a young core to have so little success playing together. It’s the worst possible result of rebuilding for years — you draft a bunch of lottery picks who apparently don’t fit together whatsoever, and for the most part don’t carry high trade value.

The clock is ticking for the Pistons to figure out who they want to keep around, and who they should send out the door.