Why the Pistons needed to move on from Joe Dumars

As a championship winning player and executive, Joe Dumars means a lot to the Pistons organization and Detroit basketball fans, and it's no surprise then that in relieving him him of his duties, the franchise did so as gently as possible, keeping him on as an advisor now that he's done as team President (We'll see how long that advisory role lasts).

But it's also no surprise that Dumars' duties as Pistons President have come to an end, as the former six-time All-Star and Executive of the Year was in the midst of one of the worst active NBA management runs we had seen in some time.

You could go all the way back to 2003, when fresh off of his E.O.Y. award win, Dumars selected Darko Milicic second overall in the NBA Draft ahead of names like Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. But the Pistons won an unlikely championship the following season after Dumars completed that sum-of-its-parts team by dealing for Rasheed Wallace at the 2004 trade deadline, and Detroit played in six consecutive Conference Finals between 2003 and 2008.

In other words, as egregious as the Milicic selection was and as much as selecting Wade, Anthony or Bosh would have helped the Pistons transition from that era of success to the next, no one was envisioning a scenario where Dumars would be out of a job at the time. In addition, plenty of others felt Darko was a realistic option anywhere in the top-five.

But even if you forget about Milicic (and Lord knows that's not easy to do), how Dumars has handled the last six years is simply inexcusable.

The downward spiral really began with an opening week blockbuster at the beginning of the 2008-09 season that saw Dumars send Chauncey Billups to Denver for Allen Iverson in a four-player deal. Detroit was 2-0 at the time, but finished the season 39-43, earning a disappointing No. 8 seed, first round playoff exit and their first losing campaign in eight years. Iverson struggled through the worst season of his career up to that point and signed with Memphis as a free agent the following summer. The Nuggets, meanwhile, won 54 games and advanced to the Western Conference Final with Billups playing a starring role alongside Anthony, something that could have been commonplace in Detroit with proper management.

Rodney Stuckey, meanwhile, whose young presence at the time was a big reason Billups was moved, has failed to deliver on the expectations Dumars and the organization had for him.

It's only gotten worse for Dumars and the Pistons since then. He gave the underwhelming combination of Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva a combined $95 million over five years in the summer of 2009, re-signed 31-year-old Tayshaun Prince to a four-year, $28 million deal and Stuckey to a three-year and $25.5 million deal in 2011, traded Gordon and a first round pick, which the Pistons have yet to part with, to Charlotte for Corey Maggette in 2012, and then put the icing on this long expired cake by signing Josh Smith to a $54 million deal and trading for Brandon Jennings in 2013.

That paragraph alone is reason enough not to let Dumars near any basketball front offices anytime soon, and yet the Pistons enabled him through it all, allowing the Hall-of-Famer to hire and fire coaches Rick Carlisle, Larry Brown, Flip Saunders, Michael Curry, John Kuester, Lawrence Frank and Mo Cheeks in his 14 seasons at the helm, with four of those hirings and firings coming in the last six seasons alone.

The Pistons have won less than 37 percent of their games in those six seasons, haven't won more than 30 games in their last five seasons and yet have never really been bad enough to bottom out for a franchise changing talent in the Draft, thanks to Dumars' reckless spending.

With Andre Drummond falling into their laps at the 2012 Draft, the Pistons may have found that talent anyway, and if they let Greg Monroe walk as a restricted free agent this summer, they should have maximum cap space to throw around again. With Drummond, some lottery luck (The Pistons will keep their pick if it falls in the top-eight), cap flexibility, and by potentially moving Smith back to his more natural power forward position, the Pistons may be able to turn things around quicker than any of us imagined.

But they'll need sound management of both talent and the salary cap to do so, and with his faith in players like Iverson, Stuckey, Gordon, Villanueva, Smith, Jennings and others over the last six years, not to mention his faith in Milicic and numerous incompetent coaches during that time, it became painfully obvious to all involved that Dumars no longer possessed such necessary management qualities.

The only question now isn't why Dumars needed to be let go, but rather why it took the Pistons so long to realize it.