Lawrence Frank: It was clear that Mo-town needed a new direction. Not even a season into his head coaching gig in Detroit, John Kuester, had lost all connections with the Piston players and fan-base. An erratic Rip Hamilton was relegated to the bench and the rest of the team played like they might as well have joined him. Other than former-Zag Austin Daye and Jonas Jerebko taking some real steps forward, the roster was rounded out by underwhelming performances from old dogs, Ben Wallace and Chris Wilcox, banged up seasons from CV, Prince, Rodney Stuckey, and Ben Gordon, and finally, youngsters Will Bynum and Jason Maxiell all but regressing before our very eyes. With all that said, even when the team was relatively healthy, they really never looked like they wanted to play anyway. A once proud franchise that all too eerily resembles the state of the city it calls home, is in need of a pick-me-up. Enter Lawrence Frank.
In my short-time as a student of the NBA game, I've never witnessed a coach take a team's mentality from worst to first so quickly. When he received his first coaching gig in New Jersey in 2004, he took a downtrodden Nets team on winning streak of 13 games, right out of the gate. The only thing I recall changing in the Net style of play was that Vince Carter became more of a basketball player than a one-dimensional highlight reel. VC has since gone to the opposite extreme and become just an absolute bomber of ill-advised shots. (There's got to be a better way to phrase that, but the mention of Vince Carter's game causes me to lose control of the use of my linguistics.) Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
It should be noted that five years later, Frank was issued walking papers after his Nets squad started out the season inauspiciously with an 0 and 16 record that stretched beyond his tenure (go Sixers), so to an extent you're only as good as the players around you.
But that's just it, nobody knows how good the players around him are. I mean, I'm not advocating for this too hard, the glass of the Detroit Pistons is most certainly half empty, but with a team about as motivated to win as a shark is to eat celery, and dysfunctional enough to abandon professionalism entirely and not show up for practice as some sort of silent, yet all too public, form of protest, I'm surprised the glass has any liquid in it at all. Ridiculous.
Time will tell if Charlie and Ben were worth their price tags, T-Mac worth the injury risk, Teyshaun will ever be back, Rip will ever play again, and Joe Dumars will have a job at all under these new owners, but Lawrence Frank may well be the guy in the short-term to get this team back on the assembly line. (Reaching for a car reference.)
Detroit needs a true point guard. Not a star, per se, but anyone who can share the ball half as well as Chauncey did. At this point, it's clear it's not Stuckey. Maybe shopping some of those 2s is on the horizon. Frank won't lead them into the future, but he could be the perfect guy to get the attitude of winning and respect back in Detroit. Frank's a buffer coach, but likely the mechanic the Pistons need to get their motor running again. (Okay, that was the last one, I promise.)
Dwayne Casey- Much like the aforementioned Kevin McHale, Casey looks to rebound from an '05 coaching stint in Minnesota that didn't go too well. Since that time Casey has picked up some jewelry, as he was an assistant coach for last year's champs, the Mavs. Any championship experience helps, but the likelihood of the Raptors being successful is slim. You'll forgive my lack of knowledge on the subject, but I'm not even really sure how Casey would run the team, and the pieces there seem limited. DeRozan is someone worth building around to an extent, and Bargnani has a nice little game, but overall I see more of the same in Toronto and I have little doubt that they will spend at least one more season as "Chris Bosh's former team". The Raptors have some picks from overseas that they hope will eventually turn things around, but honestly, your guess is as good as mine. I'll see the results when you do and as a biased Mavs fan, I sure do wish him the best.
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