(Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images)
It’s been a long while since the Detroit Pistons were a championship-caliber team.
To be more precise, it’s been exactly 20 years since their last NBA championship.
However, things could’ve been a lot different for that organization.
They had the No. 2 pick in the 2003 NBA Draft, a pick they used to land Darko Milicic.
They could’ve had Dwyane Wade or Chris Bosh instead, or the clear-cut second-best prospect in that class: Carmelo Anthony.
In the latest edition of his podcast, Anthony hosted Pistons legend Chauncey Billups to discuss that possibility (via NBA Central).
Chauncey Billups says the Pistons would have run LeBron out of Cleveland had Detroit drafted Carmelo Anthony.
“We win at least 3 chips.”
( @7PMinBrooklyn ) pic.twitter.com/alU08AUOsG
— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) July 23, 2024
Billups reminisced about those days and claimed that the players were celebrating because everybody thought they would get Anthony.
He stated that the Pistons would’ve won at least three championships and that LeBron James would’ve had to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers a lot earlier because there was no chance he could’ve beat them, and he might be right.
Billups added that they didn’t even get Rasheed Wallace until the trade deadline, meaning that Anthony could’ve been a starter right from the jump.
Anthony wound up going to the Denver Nuggets, and while he went down as one of the greatest scorers of all time, he could never win a ring.
Milicic is now considered to be one of the biggest busts of all time, and the fact that the Pistons passed on the only player who made scouts and executives even debate whether LeBron was the clear-cut No. 1 pick in that draft is a decision that’s still hard to explain to this day.
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