Dumars Gets Education From Losing!
If you can learn by losing then Detroit Pistons President Of Basketball Operations Joe Dumars should be just about as smart as Albert Einstein after the last two seasons. Wednesday the “Detroit Free Press” reported that Dumars had addressed the media about the last two seasons for the Pistons; a period that saw them go from being an elite team in the NBA to one that is now in “Lottery-Land.” Dumars said that the experience has only strengthened his convictions of what it takes to win in the NBA.
The Pistons were at a crossroads two years ago after losing to the Boston Celtics in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. The nucleus of the team that had made Detroit a winner for about a decade was aging and the team decided that it was time to make some in-house changes. The Pistons fired head coach Flip Saunders who had winning seasons every year on the bench but what was not able to get the team an NBA Championship like his predecessor Larry Brown had. Dumars decided to fill the slot with rookie head coach Michael Curry and the ball started rolling down-hill from there.
Dumars tinkering had not stopped there as a few weeks into the season the Pistons Team President traded the heart and soul of the club and received a cancer in return. Detroit traded point guard Chauncey Billups to the Denver Nuggets for Allen Iverson a move which would help take Denver to the Western Conference Finals. It was a move that put a hole in the side of the “S.S. Pistons” as the ship had to keep bailing water for the rest of the season.
The story gets better: At the end of the season after getting knocked out of the Playoffs in the first round Joey-D fires Curry and says he is going to bring in a veteran head coach. Instead he brings in another rookie in former Cleveland assistant John Kuester. Then he took the family cow and traded it for some magic beans; or pretty close anyways.
Needless to say the Pistons did not bring back Iverson who became a Free Agent after the 2009 NBA season. With his departure Detroit had room under the salary cap to fix the problems that the club had. But instead Joey-D signed two players in postitons where the Pistons were already set.
Dumars brought in former Chicago Bulls guard Ben Gordon while the team already had Richard Hamilton. And they signed former Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva while they basically had the same player on the roster in Jason Maxiell. And by the end of the season both those players were on the bench at the beginning of games as they were replaced by rookie Jonas Jerebko. To top things off reports out of Detroit a few weeks ago were that the team had started to sour on point guard Rodney Stuckey, the man whose skills made Billups expendable in the club’s thinking to begin with.
Dumars told the media that the last two seasons were definitely an education for him. He said “You just don’t learn from winning. You learn from losing as well. And what we’ve learned is that we’re more committed now than ever before to maintain our core values and not get away from that and not have the type of slippage that you saw this year. We had some slippage in terms of the toughness and grit that we’ve had for the last 10 years. We drifted some from what we were when we were successful.”
The Palace at Auburn Hills was a place that NBA teams dreaded to go to just a couple of years ago. That is not the case right now. Dumars was also asked about the two Free Agents he had brought in last summer. The Pistons President response was “I wish we could have gotten more from Ben and Charlie, but they were both fighting injuries and adjusting to a new situation. I really think both of them will be better this year.”
Detroit has the number seven pick in the 2010 NBA Draft and they play in the Eastern Conference which is a lot easier to turn a team around in than the West. We will see how much learning he has actually done over the coming weeks as well as next season. There is no doubt that Joey-D has his work cut out for him in Motown.









New York Vinnie will never start a fight, but he's not afraid to finish one.. Mess with New York Vinnie and he'll rip your nuts off and throw them down the sewer!