This is a list of seasons completed by the
Detroit Pistons
The Detroit Pistons are an American professional basketball team based in Detroit. The Pistons compete in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as a member of the league's Eastern Conference Central Division and play their home games at L ...
of the
National Basketball Association
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America. The league is composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada) and is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United St ...
. The franchise was founded in 1941 as the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons in the
National Basketball League and as the Fort Wayne Pistons joined the
Basketball Association of America, which was the precursor to the NBA. However, the games won and lost in the NBL are not included in the franchise total.
The Pistons have had three main periods of success. In the early years of the NBA the team reached the NBA Finals twice in consecutive years before falling to the Lakers and then to the St. Louis Hawks. Following an extended era of mediocrity the Pistons, led by the Hall of Fame backcourt of
Isiah Thomas and
Joe Dumars and nicknamed the "Bad Boys" for their intimidating defence, posted winning records every seasons from 1983–84 to 1991–92, and after narrowly losing in 1988, ended the Lakers dynasty of the 1980s the following season and repeated the following year. The Pistons’ third period of success, with former on-court star Dumars serving as general manager and building a top team from other franchises’ discards, occurred between 2001–02 and 2007–08 when the team won fifty games or more during every season, including a third NBA title in 2003–04 and a franchise record total of wins two seasons later.
The Pistons have experienced two major periods of failure. Between 1956–57 and 1982–83, the Pistons had just three winning seasons and overall had a winning percentage of , culminating in a combined record of 37–127 (win percent ) in the 1979–80 and 1980–81 seasons, after which the drafting of Isiah Thomas completely revitalized the franchise. Since 2009–10, the Pistons have only once finished out of the bottom two in their division or had a winning record.
Seasons
All-time records
NBA records
NBL records
Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons
at ''Basketball Reference
Sports Reference, LLC, is an American company which operates several sports-related websites, including Sports-Reference.com, Baseball-Reference.com for baseball, Basketball-Reference.com for basketball, Hockey-Reference.com for ice hockey, Pro ...
''
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:List Of Detroit Pistons Seasons
seasons
A season is a division of the year based on changes in weather, ecology, and the number of daylight hours in a given region. On Earth, seasons are the result of the axial parallelism of Earth's tilted orbit around the Sun. In temperate and po ...