When rebuilds go wrong: What's happening with dreadful Spurs, Pistons?

Two NBA teams have shed the tag of "rebuilding" this season and placed themselves among the league's contenders. After a few years of turmoil, Oklahoma City and Orlando have built competitive rosters, potentially creating blueprints for future rebuilding teams in the process.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, the Pistons are 2-25, have lost 24 straight and things look bleak for the foreseeable future. In San Antonio, the Spurs have a once-a-generation talent in Victor Wembanyama, but they are getting blown out regularly and must be careful of getting complacent while building the team around Wemby.

Combined, Detroit and San Antonio are 6-47. How did we get here, and what happens next?

In San Antonio, this lack of success is collateral damage from drafting Wembanyama. In other words, San Antonio earned the No. 1 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft, which allowed them to draft Wembanyama, but had to be woeful as a team last season to even put themselves in position to earn that pick in the first place. 

And no matter how good Wemby has been — he's already an All-Defense-level defender — the Spurs are learning firsthand that a 19 year old doesn't fix a team overnight, no matter how talented that teen may be.

New Orleans should be a cautionary tale for the Spurs.

In 2012, the Pelicans (then Hornets) drafted super-prospect Anthony Davis, a surefire, franchise-changing talent. But to draft Davis, New Orleans tore up its roster to lose a bunch of games and earn high odds in the draft lottery — much like San Antonio did last season.

When New Orleans drafted Davis, the roster was so barren of talent otherwise that the front office couldn't build a competitive team, even while AD blossomed into a superstar. 

With Davis, New Orleans won one playoff series in seven seasons. Acquiring a player like AD or Wemby is the beginning of a rebuild, not the end of it. 

For San Antonio, Devin Vassell (18.2 PPG) and Keldon Johnson (17.5 PPG) are solid players, and Gregg Popovich is one of the greatest coaches in the league and the highest paid, but San Antonio still isn't close to competing at a high level. 

A team failing to find success after drafting a generational talent is not unprecedented in the league. But San Antonio must spend money now on players who are good now. Buying as a 4-21 team sounds crazy, but every season that San Antonio is bad feels like another season of Wemby wasted.

In Detroit, the situation might be even bleaker. 

2021 No. 1 pick Cade Cunningham is ultra-talented (he scored 43 on Monday against Atlanta), but scoring inefficiency has plagued him throughout his first 100-plus games. Even so, Cunningham is probably last to blame for Detroit's 24-game losing streak and 42-144 record since the start of 2021-22. Finding out who is to blame is a tougher assignment. 

Head coach Monty Williams — the second-highest-paid coach in the league, making $13M a year — is in his first season with the team and has a track record of winning, including a Finals appearance with Phoenix in 2021. 

It's also hard to fully blame Williams for this mess just 27 games into his coaching tenure in Detroit, even if he is making some strange lineup moves, like barely giving second-year lottery pick Jaden Ivey any run.        

Is management to blame? Troy Weaver has made plenty of good moves as GM, like acquiring Bojan Bogdanovic from Utah, grabbing Alec Burks from the Knicks and recently picking defensive ace Ausar Thompson in the draft. 

But do his misses overshadow those moves? Does taking Killian Hayes No. 7 overall or trading for both Marvin Bagley and James Wiseman — when Detroit already has a young center to develop in Jalen Duren — cancel out the positive things Weaver has done, especially if the negatives are more glaring every game?

Or maybe this failure starts at the very top, with owner Tom Gores. Setting a precedent for winning is the responsibility of the owner. Hiring people throughout the organization — from scouts to management to coaches — who fit together to build a winning product is solely the responsibility of the people who are really in charge. 

Without consistency from ownership, there will never be positive results. We've seen this happen so many times across too many sports. When management is apathetic, building a team is near-impossible.

So, yes, this failure does start with Gores. But it continues all the way down the chain of command in Detroit. 

If Orlando and OKC are setting the blueprint for a successful rebuild, Detroit is creating the blueprint for a rebuild gone wrong.