During the 2023 NBA offseason, the Detroit Pistons made Monty Williams the richest head coach in the league. A year later, the team decided to make a change on the sidelines.
According to NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, the Detroit Pistons are firing Monty Williams after one season on the job. They will be absorbing an exorbitant amount of money, as he was still owed $65 million.
The move to fire Monty Williams is shocking when it comes to how much money and the length of the contract that he signed last offseason. He was also having regular meetings with the new president of basketball operations Trajan Langdon about the direction of the team.
Alas, ownership believed the time was right to make a move, fully cleaning house and bringing in new leadership. This was a move that came down from Tom Gores, not Langdon and the front office, per Wojnarowski. Along with Gores, vice chairman Arn Tellem was for firing Monty Williams.
From a basketball perspective, it is hard to argue with their decision to fire Williams. His one season with the franchise was disastrous. They tied an NBA record losing 28 games in a row during the 2023-24 season and finished with the worst record in the league at 14-68.
Monty Williams has shown that he is a coach capable of turning a franchise around. He did it with the New Orleans Pelicans and Phoenix Suns previously. But, things got ugly so fast with the Detroit Pistons that ownership wanted to make a change.
Langdon will now have the impossible job of building a candidate list and executing interviews while also focusing on the 2024 NBA Draft and free agency looming. Selling free agents on Detroit was going to be hard enough; without a head coach, it is another obstacle they will have to overcome.
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