Blake Griffin probably can’t save the Pistons and that’s too bad for everyone involved

Sitting in the corner stall of the road locker room in the Air Canada Center following a blowout loss to the Toronto Raptors, Blake Griffin’s head hangs between his elbows. The Pistons stumbled out of the All Star break, incurring three straight losses. He looks tired. With a horde of cameras and reporters crowding him, he picks up his travel kit, and ambles over to the showers. The question, one that has come to define his career, looms:

I wonder how long we’ll have to wait for him?

Worlds once parted when Blake Griffin, the rookie phenomenon, thumped the ball against the hardwood. The 21-year old Griffin averaged 22 points and 12 rebounds per game as a rookie, summoning nightmares when he exploded into the lane. His poster dunks became so gregarious, and so routine, that some veterans literally accused him of disrespect.

And maybe they were right. Griffin was showing out on a nightly basis, turning the Clippers into the best show on League Pass. He was an athletic oddity with evident basketball IQ, summoning farfetched comparisons to LeBron James. He became so potent a vessel of hope that he lured Chris Paul to be the first marquee star that ever batted his eyelashes at the other L.A. team.

At the zenith of the Blake Show, he jumped over a KIA and stole the the 2011 Slam Dunk contest from JaVale McGee. It was a moment that, even then, felt like a lame signifier for such an explosive season.

These days, after putting the potential-laden Point Blake on hold to try to fit in with Paul, Griffin is toiling away on a Detroit Pistons team that grossly overpaid for him, and his five-year, $178 million contract. They traded Avery Bradley, Tobias Harris, Boban Marjanovic, a 2019 first-round pick and a 2019 second-round pick to the Clippers.

The Pistons were teetering on the edge of the playoffs and hoping Griffin’s addition would vault them back into a top-8 seed. It was read by many as a short-term gambit by Stan Van Gundy, the team’s GM and head coach, to save his job. After losing five of their last six games, they’re now five games back of the eighth seed and face a tough road schedule ahead.

Defenders of the trade suggest that a small-market, Midwestern franchise like the Pistons had to overpay for a star of Griffin’s caliber because that was the only way they could land one. And faced with decrepit attendance at their new downtown arena, the Pistons badly needed to inject new life into the franchise. But since the trade, attendance at Little Caesars Arena has remained stagnant.

Somewhere along the way, Blake Griffin stopped being a show.

That doesn’t mean Griffin has stopped producing. In an overtime loss to the Orlando Magic, Griffin fell just one assist short of a triple-double. He scored 31 points and racked up six assists in a loss to the eighth-seed Heat that was likely the final nail in the coffin for Detroit’s playoff hopes. In Monday’s 22-point loss to the Cavaliers, Griffin scored 25 points, grabbed eight boards, and dished out five assists.

Since the All Star break, Andre Drummond has averaged 15 points, 15 rebounds, with two steals and a block per game alongside Griffin. But without injured point guard Reggie Jackson, the Pistons have such paltry production out of the rest of their roster.

When Griffin first arrived, there was -- and still is -- hope that he could connect with Drummond for alley-oops and easy buckets the way he did with former teammate DeAndre Jordan. Griffin and Jordan spent years sharing a frontcourt, however, and they were surrounded by more 3-point shooters than Detroit currently can offer. Jackson’s backup at point guard, Ish Smith, is a non-threat from beyond the arc. Bradley and Harris, the centerpieces of the trade, were the Pistons most frequent 3-point shooters. Reggie Bullock, who has been inserted into the starting lineup, is the only reprieve.

So it is that Griffin, a nascent 3-point shooter, is flinging five and a half 3-pointers a game at a 32 percent clip since being traded.

To make matters worse, the Pistons spent most of their training camp this season redesigning the offense to get Drummond conducting the offense from the high post instead of running pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll. Prior to the trade, Drummond averaged four assists per game en route to an All-Star appearance. But after spending a giant portion of the season learning to operate the way Griffin historically has, Drummond has been stymied by his arrival, plopped right back into the restricted area that saps the creativity out of his game. Since the trade, Drummond has averaged merely 1.5 assists per game.

All this underscores the peril of giving a head coach a powerful managerial position as well. The argument for Van Gundy in the dual role as coach and general manager is to achieve organizational synergy. The front office and coaching staff can’t help but be on the same page when they’re run by the same person.

But the point of organizational synergy, an en vogue concept thanks to the long-tenured success of teams like the Spurs, Heat, and most recently, the Warriors, is not merely to agree on everything. The point is to agree on the larger vision, but continually work through disagreements on how to get there until they land on a refined approach to achieve that vision, all while sharing enough mutual respect to not undermine each other after disputes. Checks and balances are a vital part of the process. The alignment of the head coaching and GM position eliminates them.

The Griffin deal represents the worst-case-scenario of this arrangement: a coach on the outs, making a hail-mary play in an attempt to improve only in the short-term, while selling a great deal of the team’s future.

At this point, it still doesn’t make much sense to fire him with just a year left on his contract. If Van Gundy is open to continue as the coach while stepping down as GM, that is a discussion worth having, but no blanket solution is going to fix Detroit’s lack of flexibility. Besides, the coaching market is thin, and the Pistons will hardly be any marquee coach’s No. 1 choice.

Prior to the All Star break, Van Gundy said he’d parse through game tape to construct offensive sets that would be more palatable to Griffin’s game. But the Pistons have been short on practices, having recently played five games in seven nights, and they’re heading on a gruelling Western Conference road trip next week.

With the right ingredients around them, a core of Drummond and Griffin could work in the long-term. They’re both dynamic players with unconventional ball-handling and playmaking abilities. Opponents who can handle their gigantic frames inside the paint generally can’t stay in front of them in the open court, and vice versa. Though their skill-sets overlap in uncomfortable ways, there should be a way to leverage their combined ability into an efficient offense.

You can see the contours of what this team could look like, especially when they can get out in transition. After grabbing a defensive rebound, the post-trade score the 12th-most points per possession in the league, thanks in large part to Griffin and Drummond’s ability to dribble it up the floor. It harkens back the too-brief portion of the Clippers’ season when Griffin was tasked with nothing more than being himself, running the point forward with DeAndre Jordan setting picks and Patrick Beverley and Danilo Gallinari spotted up for threes.

If SVG had some sort of vision in mind when he traded for Griffin, Detroit may as well give him time to implement it. By trading for him, Van Gundy put all his eggs in one basket. No coach will ever be as invested in unlocking the full measure of Griffin’s game. The alternatives aren’t much better, especially for Griffin, who will be 33 years old when his contract expires.

The short-term, for the Pistons, is nearing irrelevancy. In the coming year, they’ll be tasked with answering a difficult question.

Did Griffin, despite all the potential he carried when he entered the league, show up too late to the party?