It was just 20 months ago that Dwane Casey sat on a dais inside Little Caesars Arena alongside Pistons owner Tom Gores and the team’s top personnel executive, Ed Stefanski, and made plain his ambitions for the team he was inheriting as Detroit’s new head coach.
“Our time is now,” he insisted back in June 2018. ”I’m telling the guys now, ‘We’re not developing, we’re not two or three years away. We want to win right now.’”