Leon Halip-USA TODAY Sports
Detroit Pistons‘ president Joe Dumars fired another coach on Thursday when he put an end to two seasons of Lawrence Frank.
The question continues to burn among Pistons fans on how much responsibility does Dumars own for the franchise’s decline and inability to have a playoff team the last four seasons?
Dumars continues to make the coach the scapegoat, but he will eventually have to face fact himself. The question of whether or not he’s doing a good job of putting a team together for owner Tom Gores has come into question in recent years.
The 2012 -13 team was supposed to be an NBA playoff contender. It wasn’t even close. In Frank’s defense, the Pistons got an awful schedule to start the season, and he could never get the team back into a good winning trend until, ironically, the last few days of the season when they had a four-game winning streak prior to dropping the season finale to the Brooklyn Nets 103-99.
While Dumars has made some decent draft moves over the years, he still has the fiasco of drafting Darko Milicic instead of Carmelo Anthony with the No. 2 pick overall in 2003 on his hands. At that time, Dumars contended the Pistons had enough guards and needed a post player. But how many Piston fans would mind having seen Anthony in a Detroit uniform now? Dumars forgot the old rule of drafting the best player available.
Dumars does seem to have some nice pieces together with Andre Drummond, Greg Monroe, Brandon Knight and Kyle Singler. How well he handles the open $25 million of salary cap space with some decent offseason acquisitions remains to be seen. The last time he tried it, Dumars signed Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva. Both signings turned out to be problems. Eventually, Dumars has to be accountable for the team’s failures.
