The Diminishing Palace Fan Experience

I was reading Grantlant's NBA Shootaround yesterday, where they get different writers to chip in clips, gifs, and other input from watching the previous day's games. To my utter surprise, there was a section at the end on the Knicks at the Pistons. A writer called "netw3rk" who writes on the Knicks from time to time had this to say, among other things:

The Pistons arena staff continuously shelled the fans with T-shirt cannons, even during play, a thing Mike Breen says he has never seen before. And he's a big Jethro Tull fan.

Ok, first off - that's pretty funny. Secondly, it's also kind of sad. I started going to Pistons games on a semi-regular basis back in 2002, when I moved to Detroit for school. That team made the conference finals, the following team would go on to the NBA finals & win the thing. Good times for DEEE-TROIT BAAAASKETBALL! 

I can't remember which year it was they broke out the "great and powerful Oz" flame spurts for the pre-game intro, but it was either '03-'04 or '04-'05. They had the video intro, hype music, and all the other crazy stuff, and I remember thinking "wow, that was a little over the top"... But it was for a championship level team! The Pistons have been a lottery-level team for the last 4 years. 

I'm pretty sure they've taken away the flame spurts (a GOOD thing), but they still had them a year or 2 ago, and I basically spent the entire intro rolling my eyes and remembering the good times. 

This was the beginning of the end. The Pistons made their last Eastern Conference Finals that year, then Dumars dealt Billups & McDyess for Iverson. The next year we picked up Ben Gordon & Charlie V for too much money and traded Arron Afflalo for a 2nd round pick. Pumping out flame spurts at that point was like putting lipstick on a pig.

Now a Pistons game is more hype than substance. Giveaways or dance routines at every timeout, t-shirt launchings at every break in play, and sometimes DURING play. I went to a Pistons-Heat game last year & they had to actually stop play because one of the orange balls they sometimes shoot out of the t-shirt cannons had been blown back onto the court by the air conditioning. 

This is stupid. Give people time to talk to each other. I'm not going to more games on the off chance I might catch a shirt or get a free pizza or something. Someone is going to get killed some day by one of these t-shirt cannons.