The Troy Weaver era is over for the Detroit Pistons.A source confirmed with the Free Press on Friday the team intends to part ways with the much-maligned general manager after four unsuccessful years.
The move is not all that shocking after the team announced almost immediately after the season they intended to hire a president of basketball operations that would render Weaver obsolete.After years of middling and struggling to break through the middle of the pack, Weaver quickly committed to a full rebuild for the franchise, but instead labeled it as a “restore.”
Sometimes you have to go to the bottom of the NBA standings to reset and pick up some assets, but what was supposed to be a short stop on the ground floor turned into an unstoppable descent. The Pistons never won more than 23 games under Weaver, including just 17 wins in 2022-23 and a franchise-worst mark of 14-68 this past season, rubber-stamped by a 28-game losing streak.
With that amount of losing, there are a lot of issues you can point to, but here are the five areas where things went wrong for the Pistons under Weaver.
If Victor Wembanyama was with the Pistons right now, it’s safe to say that Weaver would still have a job.
It’s not to say Weaver and the Pistons had all bad luck. They did land the No. 1 overall pick (Cade Cunningham) after Weaver’s first year in charge, but after that, it was all downhill. The team dropped from third to fifth in 2022 and then from first to fifth (the furthest possible drop) in each of the last two seasons. In 2024’s starless draft, it wasn’t as painful, but losing out on the chance to take Wembanyama (a generational star) or even Brandon Miller out of Alabama or Scoot Henderson from the G League really dampened the outlook.
