Evaluating this team right now is genuinely difficult given the quality of competition they've been facing. Beating a squad that's handing 12 minutes to 40-year-old Taj Gibson doesn't exactly move the needle as a measuring stick.
The schedule is what it is — the Pistons can't control who's injured or who's quietly packing it in for the lottery. But the pattern is hard to ignore: against good, healthy teams, they've been losing. You have to go all the way back to February 19th against the Knicks to find a truly meaningful win.
The defensive numbers are slipping too, and yes, Ausar's absence is part of that story — but only part of it. Scroll back to when he was healthy and the trend was already heading in the wrong direction.
With the playoffs roughly a month away, you'd expect a team with genuine aspirations to be rounding into form, playing their sharpest basketball of the season. Right now, that's not what this looks like. There's still some ground to cover before this team resembles a playoff-ready version of itself.