User:Brettellier/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
2007–08 Detroit Pistons season

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
(Briefly explain why you chose it, why it matters, and what your preliminary impression of it was.)

I chose this article because I am a very big fan of basketball, especially the NBA. In addition to this, I believe in recent years, basketball has grown to become one of the most widely viewed/played sports in the world and it continue to grow day by day. This article specifically covers one of the older, more established franchises within the NBA, the Detroit Pistons and their performance during the 2007-08 season. This season was one of their more successful seasons in the Pistons' recent history making this article very important to the franchise itself as well as the NBA and sport of basketball in general.

My first impression of the article is that it is for the most part, well done. The lead section is well written and contains some important details about the season without going too in-depth on the subjects. The article also contains many very important stats for the players and the team as a whole, although there could certainly be more stats added to the article. I would say most, if not all of the most important events the Pistons experienced this season are covered throughout the article but in general, I believe there could be far more specific details could be added to the article to allow readers to understand and experience some of the more nuanced events from throughout the season and off-season.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)

Lead Section:
The lead paragraph contains a few important facts that are not discussed throughout the rest of the article. Facts such as the Pistons making it to the Eastern Conference Finals for the 6th time in a row, tying the previous record from the 1986-87 Los Angeles Lakers. The lead section also mentions that the Detroit Pistons sold out all their home games during the regular season(41) and playoffs (9) at their home arena, The Palace of Auburn Hills. This is also exclusively mentioned in the lead section and not anywhere else in the article which should not be the case.

The lead section is concise at times but as previously mentioned, it also includes some unnecessary details that I believe could have been added slightly later in the article. I believe an "About" section or something along those lines would be a great addition to this article. That way these details could be moved from the lead section to the hypothetical about section. In addition to this, writers/editors could also focus more on finding and adding more details about the season to the article without worrying about overcomplicating the lead section.

Content:
The content in this article, in my opinion, is on-brand and relevant to the article subject and all the information is up-to-date. I believe this article would benefit from including more details such as the distribution of player salaries on the team, what players were lost in free-agency either from the previous or the following season, and even some more advanced stats such as the team's defensive rating. The Pistons' defensive rating in my opinion should definitely be included when we consider the fact that the team's offensive rating is already included in the article, in the lead section. In addition to this, there could certainly be a more detailed version of the transactions list including transactions such as when a certain player was waived or was sent to or recalled from the Pistons' G-League team. Beyond what I listed, I feel the article includes many good, informative details about the Pistons and their season in the NBA.

Tone and Balance:
There is very little opportunity for biases on a topic like this one since the majority of the information on this article is simply a matter of fact. That being said, I feel that more information could be presented in this article to better represent how the Pistons compared to the other teams around the league during the season. The Pistons were an extremely defensive centric team and there are very few figures/stats that demonstrate just how capable the team was defensively compared to the rest of the league. This could be better represented by simply including the teams overall defensive rating, each player on the roster's defensive rating, and where both these stats ranked in terms of all the teams/players in the NBA.

Sources and References:
There are very few sources/citations for a lot of this information. That being said, much of the information in this article can be found on the NBA website directly. Despite that, many details such as the transactions made by the Detroit Pistons have no citations associated with them which is problematic. The sources being used are all current besides one source that was cited in the article when it mentioned that the Pistons head coach at the time, Flip Saunders, was fired following the team's exit in the playoffs. For that fact, an article from a local Detroit news press was cited. This article was published very soon after the event itself, as often with sports speed/time is very much a factor for an article's success after being published. Upon checking some of the sources for this Wikipedia article, the majority of the links work but some links no longer function.

Organization and Writing Quality:
The article does not contain much writing, especially when compared to other unrelated Wikipedia articles. That being said, for the writing that is in this article, it is well written and contains very few, if any grammatical errors. The article makes great use of headers/sections throughout the article, allowing information to be much more organized and compartmentalized. This allows readers to browse the article without being bombarded by large tables full of arbitrary numbers. Instead, readers are able to read the general information and should they be interested in finding even more information about the topic, they can open drop-downs and tables.

Images and Media:
There are no images or media used throughout this article. I believe that there is certainly some images that could be added to help improve the readers understanding of the article. Something as simple as adding pictures/headshots of the players and coaching staff from that season. The NBA has hundreds of players actively participating each season and the list of players can change drastically from season to season so having a face/picture to attach to the names of these players can lead to a much more comprehensive understanding of the subject. Additionally, adding the team's logo may be a good addition as NBA and sports franchises in general often undergo team logo changes.

Talk page discussion:
This article is C-rated on Wikipedia. The article is also part of a few WikiProjects such as, National Basketball Association, Basketball, and Michigan: Detroit. With that being said, both the NBA and Michigan: Detroit WikiProjects deemed this article as "Low-importance". The Talk page for this article has barely been used. The last entry on the Talk page for this article was in June 2008. When the talk page was used, it was used to mention potential ways to improve the article such as including all players that played for the Detroit Pistons at any point during the 2007-08 season instead of just including the players that were on the team from the beginning or at the end of the season.

Overall Impressions:
Overall, I feel this article could use more writing and detailed information to help explain the team's shortcomings and strengths throughout the season. Certain information such as injuries, where the team ranks in several stats compared to other teams from that season, etc. However, as it stands, the article contains lots of fundamental information and statistics that would certainly help any reader(s) paint a pretty decent picture for how the Detroit Pistons' 2007-08 season in the NBA went and what major events they experienced. I would say this article is about 70-80% complete. As I said before, the article contains all the fundamental information you would expect an article about an NBA team's individual season to contain. I think that the article could reach 100% completeness by including more details that paint the whole picture for readers so that they can have a greater understanding of the team's capabilities beyond being 1st in their division, 2nd in their conference, and getting eliminated in the eastern conference finals.