Joe-D's Top-10 Mistakes (warning - painful)

I was vague in my initial post, but I meant complimentary talent of the James Posey on the '08 C's variety.

If you keep losing two steps from the goal it probably is broken also.

The pre-AI '09 team could have played in the ECF once KG got hurt.

The '04 Championship team wasn't any better than the subsequent years' teams. It just had some lucky breaks along the way and the pieces just happen to fall in place that year.

I'm going to stand with you, may I ? I've followed AJ and AA's game record with sentiment ever since. Guessed that JD said hey guys there's very few opportunity for you two and Imma gonna send you to some places where you can play.
One more point, is Stuckey victim of our coaches carousel ?

They had a bench of Okur, Hunter, Campell, Corliss W, Mike James et al. They never came close to that group again.

Yeah, the bench was crazy. Love Corliss Williamson bulldoging defenders.

How quickly you forget Walter Herrmann and Jarvis Hayes....

I think Walter is totally on-point in that drafting is a total poop-shoot. I'll give most GMs a pass for making a pick that in hindsight, doesn't work out as planned. Every single draft in every sport has guys that end up being better than other guys who were picked before them. If I had to choose a pick that was perhaps more "un-forgivable" than others, I'd go with the Rodney White pick. That one was a head scratcher while the Darko selection was a no-brainer for most GMs.

I had trouble assigning any sort of 1 to 10 rank to these but here are my initial "shoot from the hip" thoughts. I kinda went in chonological order:

• Not adding complimentary pieces to the Goin to Work Pistons. Ernie touched on this. Aside from McDyess, Joe kinda took a prolonged popcorn break after winning that one championship.
• Bad coaching hires: Twitch, Tablecloth & Coach Clueless
• Trading Spellcheck to Denver for dryer lint.
• Joe hooking his buddy John Hammond up with the Amir Johnson for Fabricio Oberto deal (wow, we save a whopping 1 mil in cap space in that "fiscal decision".)
• Re-signing Rip Hamilton just days before he chose to blow up the team by trading Chauncey for cap space. He should have went one way or the other (keep it together or get rid of ALL of the '04 core). Hamilton was never the same player without his backcourt mate. It was a half-assed rebuild on the fly attempt and it didn't work. It appeared that Joe was working without any sort of a plan.
• Jumping the gun and bidding against himself on Ben Gordon which saddled the team with one of the worst contracts in the entire league.
• Charlie Villanueava (no explanation needed).
• Not convincing ownership to actually allow him to manage the roster during the sale of the team. If the goal was to make the team look better on paper, alow him to make sensible moves to cut salary. If the goal was to look better on the court, allow him to make moves that would have created some forward progress instead of 2 years of stagnation. This whole situation was aweful (not really Joe's fault but it's a BIG mistake that the team is still paying for).
• Re-signing Stuckey in 2011. Joe made good use of his god-given ability to OVER-value his players and bid against exactly NO other NBA team to make Stuck the 2nd highest player on the team. This contract all but guaranteed that his annointed pet project would remain a Piston due to the fact that he had/has an almost un-tradeable contract.
• Re-Signing Tay Prince. Pretty big mistake that Joe recovered from nicely by snagging Calderon and his expiring deal. It ended up costing us Austin Daye but I don't view that as being a big issue.

Those 2 were much later.
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I would've loved hearing the political infighting of trying to figure out who should play between Bosh, Melo or Wade and Rip, Tay or Wallace. I don't think LB woulda "wasted" 5 min. on any of them. He woulda locked in his starters and played the bench the right way.
Note: Could you imagine the kaniption fits Lee woulda had with that kinda talent not being worked into the rotation ?

In hindsight, only champion's GM do not make mistakes. 29 GMs do. Guess that's not so easy job as bitching for fans. 30 GMs cant take that one player with 20-25 pick and so on...

Ben Gordon was on the verge of NBA stardom and Dumars decided to took the bite. Flat out scorers are not exactly abundant commodity in NBA, there is only one Sixth Player of The Year per season and by all accounts that particular player was ready for the next step...

Only resigning Rip Hamilton was something not so understandable - even Silvertongue spins were not enough for justification...

Let us not forget he turned Prince on a multi year, overpaid deal and Daye into Jose Calderon for more than 5 seconds.

Thats gotta bring him close to neutral.

we've had similar discusssions during "nothing is going to work" era here(prevous era was "going to work") . IMO there is no reason to bring it up again....

There's about 6 Gm's constantly drafting in the 26-32 range, cause that's where his fans like their team to hang.

I will try to answer this with little quotes of those who answer before me.

100% agree.

I think that the signing of ben Gordon was not a mistake, the mistake was paying him 55M for 5 years and then re-sign Hamilton. ... That "thought" of Dumars of playing a 3 guard rotation with NO REAL Point Guard was the mistake.

CV was a mistake, that's for sure.

Agree on that.

Yes!! the unforgettable no-trade for Rondo is always on my mind... though sometimes I think he would refuse to come back because we didn't have good inside players who can make a difference by that time and that, perhaps, would've ended up in Ray Allen leaving too.

Afflalo was a mistake too, but there was no room with Iverson, Stuckey and Hamilton for him to grow up in here, I think it was more of a favor from Dumars to him.

Not trading Maxiell a few years ago, and Stuckey (and now CV) are also mistakes.

But he did some great things here too. Let's not forget that.

I didn't mind the Chauncey trade then and still don't know. Whether AI was the right fit is a worthwhile argument, but those Pistons teams seemed to plateau. They were still achieving success in a weak Eastern Conference, but I don't blame them for finally trying to shake things up. It seemed due.

The EC finals is a pretty high plateau.
A tweak or two to the roster and a lucky bounce and you're off to the jewelry store to get fitted for a ring.

I liked the idea of breaking up the squad by 2008.
I just woulda moved Tay instead, and never brought Ben back.

Some of you are being a little too sympathetic with Joe