J.B. Bickerstaff is one of the strongest candidates for Coach of the Year with the way he turned things around for the Detroit Pistons. It’s a great comeback story for the franchise, but it is also a story of triumph for the coach himself.
The 46-year-old coach joined the Pistons in 2024 shortly after his four-year stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers, a tenure he believed was so bad that he thought nobody would give him another chance at coaching again.
“I didn’t think I was going to get a job,” he said in an interview with Steve Bulpett of Heavy.com.
“There weren’t jobs available at that point. So I was just sitting at home and hanging out with my family back in Cleveland trying to figure out what was next.”
Where does he think he went wrong in handling the Cavs?
“That month that I had off gave me an opportunity to evaluate myself,” he said. “The focus should always be on the process and not just the results.”
“In my last year in Cleveland, I let that get the best of me,” he said. “Results, results, results. And we skipped some of the process stuff.”
J.B. Bickerstaff’s success with Pistons
The last two years he had with the Cavs were not entirely bad — unlike the team he inherited when he joined the Pistons in 2024.
The Cavs reached the playoffs in the last two years he was at the helm. The first ended in a first-round exit. The second was an elimination in the Eastern Conference semifinals at the hands of the eventual champions, the Boston Celtics. He was abruptly fired after that.
A new window opened for him when the Pistons hired him at the start of the 2024–25 season. The team grew from a bottom-dwelling squad that suffered the worst losing streak in NBA history (28 games) into a playoff team. They exited in the first round, but they came back stronger.
The Pistons are the No. 1 team this season before the break. They were able to send two All-Stars in Los Angeles because of that.
Their current run earned Bickerstaff a coaching spot in the All-Star Game — something he said is an honor.
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