Why Do I Do This To Myself?

Last week, the Detroit Pistons tied the all-time losing streak record at 28 games with an overtime loss to the Boston Celtics. They managed to break that streak two nights later against a shell-shocked Toronto Raptors squad that had just traded one of their best players in OG Anunoby earlier that same day, but there was no avoiding the obvious.

This is one of, if not THE worst team in NBA history.

There is no such thing as a "winnable" game for this squad right now, only slightly differing scales of heartbreak and rage for a fanbase that has gone 15 years without seeing a single playoff victory, with no immediate end in sight.

It wasn't always like this though.

Two weeks ago, as Detroit dropped yet another game to what was essentially a glorified G-League squad in a Utah Jazz team missing 8 players from its roster, my girlfriend asked me why I'm a Pistons fan. She's not the first person to ask me that question this year, and as the losses continue to mount, I doubt she'll be the last.

After a decade and a half of futility, you'd think that question would be difficult to come up with a response to, but it remains as easy for me as it always has.

The Going To Work Pistons aren't exactly the NBA's sexiest championship team. In fact, many (including the league's leadership, considering how defense has essentially been legislated out of the game in recent years) would probably view them as a low point in the history of the league. A team with no superstars, no First Team All-NBA players, and to date only one player in the Hall Of Fame isn't exactly what you think about when you think of the litany of superstars and household names who have taken home a ring. But the 2004 Pistons, to me, represent something bigger than what the NBA wants from its champions. They embodied not just the essence of a city, but something bigger than that, something I believe makes us all special, something quintessentially human.

I come from a long line of radical leftists. My great-great grandfather, Jesse Young was a coal miner in rural Ohio. When my great-grandmother Irene was a little girl, he took her to watch iconic socialist politician Eugene V. Debs speak. He boosted her onto his shoulders as Debs began talking about workers of the world uniting to break the bonds that held them all down, and how they could create a better future by coming together to work in pursuit of a common goal. "You hear that?" he asked. "That's the smartest man in the world."

My great-grandmother eventually met my great-grandfather Tony working in those same mines her father labored in. He was an immigrant from then Yugoslavia, they married, and moved to Detroit to work for Henry Ford, in pursuit of a better life. They struggled to find it. While the auto industry did provide a consistent working wage, it wasn't enough to support a family with two young children.

At one point, they had even considered moving to the USSR (that idea was quickly scrapped once my great-grandfather arrived in Russia to find men walking into the mines barefoot. He refused to take a single step into the shaft and was on the next boat back to America.) Irene was a strong willed, brilliant young woman, but it was the 1920's, and well, she was a woman. Tony was a powerful, respected man on the assembly line, but still just an uneducated immigrant. Alone, they had very few opportunities to improve their lives.

That was when they turned to organizing. Irene was fired and re-hired at Ford 16 times as she hid her status as a mother (at the time, Ford refused to hire women with children at home) and Tony was forced to slip union pamphlets onto the assembly line, hoping they'd find his fellow workers instead of the goons Ford hired to find such material. They had to fight for every single bit of progress that they made. Tony was thrown over a bridge straight onto his head at the Battle Of The Overpass while trying to protect UAW president Walter Reuther, nearly killing him and leaving him permanently affected by the trauma. It took them years, but eventually they and their comrades, the workers of Detroit, prevailed. The key to this story isn't that they did it themselves, or for themselves. They did it next to their brothers and sisters, they did it FOR their brothers and sisters, the Blacks, Whites, Jews, immigrants, women, and men who fought next to them and for them with just as much vigor and passion as they did.

No sports team in my lifetime has embodied those same principles of unity, fraternity, sacrifice, and selflessness more than the 2004 Detroit Pistons.

They were castoffs, they were "busts," they were the rejects of the NBA in every sense of the word. From Chauncey Billups, who was traded and forced to change positions over and over again, to Ben Wallace, who went undrafted and was essentially a throw-in piece when Detroit was put into a position where they had to trade superstar Grant Hill to the Orlando Magic, to Rasheed Wallace who was basically seen as the poster child for everything wrong about the early 2000's NBA with his numerous technical fouls and association with the "JailBlazers" teams in Portland. Even their head coach, Larry Brown, was notorious for flaming out at just about every place he was hired at.

If you're reading this, you probably already know what they went up against in the Finals that year. All I need to do to impart how much of an underdog story they were is type the names of the players they faced on that opposing Lakers squad. Shaq. Kobe. Malone. Payton. Four players of the NBA's 75 greatest players of all time. The Pistons had no such player on that list.

And yet, they absolutely dominated Los Angeles, en route to the famous "five game sweep," in a series they controlled so completely that even losing a game couldn't take away from the overall feeling that they had basically taken the series from the opening tip and never allowed Los Angeles to compete in any meaningful manner.

That's why I love the Pistons. It's why I still watch every game I can. Detroit was built on the same principles that its team won with. Togetherness. Sacrifice. Selflessness. The belief that together, we can accomplish far more than we can achieve just by ourselves. That a group, a brotherhood, is capable of far, far more than any collection of individual talents can. That is, to me, the essence of not just sports, but humanity itself. Yes, some of us are born smarter, or stronger, or more creatively inclined than others. That's just the reality of life. But nobody is born smart, or strong, or creative enough to accomplish more than a group of people with lesser skills that work together in pursuit of a common goal.

As head coach Monty Williams, GM Troy Weaver, and the assortment of front office lackeys and cronies that team owner Tom Gores has put together continue to embarrass and humiliate both this organization and the entire city of Detroit, that's what I hold onto.

Things can and will get better if you put in the work to make it so.

Nobody's fate is etched in stone, nothing is inevitable if you believe in the impossible. Even in the darkest days of this franchise's history, there are reasons to hope for the future.

That's why I continue to watch games, that's why I still love the Pistons and the city of Detroit. Because when everyone counts us out, that's when we rise to the occasion. The national media attention on this team will likely fade now that the streak is over. But Pistons fans aren't going anywhere.

This is our team, our city. We'll never stop caring about them and we'll never stop fighting for a better tomorrow.

https://youtu.be/LhUCKnp4EYo