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No. 11: Detroit Pistons
Last Season: 32-50
12th place in East; missed playoffs
It was just last decade when the Detroit Pistons enjoyed a remarkable run of six straight trips to the Eastern Conference finals, two conferences titles and one sparkling NBA championship trophy. Six seasons have passed since that group of high achievers inevitably declined and was subsequently busted up by former team president Joe Dumars.
Those six seasons have been as fallow as the others were triumphant -- zero playoff appearances and win totals between 25 and 32 each season. The span has now included three distinct rebuilding pushes, two by Dumars and one by his replacement, Stan Van Gundy. It's early, but there are signs the fog is finally beginning to dissipate over the Palace of Auburn Hills.
After a miserable start to the 2014-15 season, Van Gundy set about remaking the Pistons' roster in the image of his best teams in Orlando. The presence of 22-year-old center Andre Drummond made the blueprint a no-brainer. In Drummond, Van Gundy had a fair replica of a young Dwight Howard, his cornerstone player with the Magic. Getting Drummond to Howard's level is a work in progress. Building up the roster around him might be an even bigger task. The bottom line is the Pistons improved considerably as the season progressed, even while Van Gundy tinkered with the roster in some pretty major ways.
In Miami, the Heat jumped 17 games from Van Gundy's first season to his second. In Orlando, the second-year improvement was seven games. Even if Detroit splits the difference, it moves the Pistons' six-year high of 32 wins last season to 44 this year, and a certain playoff spot. Has Van Gundy positioned the Pistons to finally snap their postseason drought?
Van Gundy inherited Dumars' last ill-fitting roster, and as he tried to make the pieces align, the Pistons belly-flopped out of the gate. Detroit stood 5-23 on Dec. 22 when Van Gundy made the boldest decision of his fledgling career as a dual head-honcho executive and coach: He released starting forward Josh Smith, who had $45 million left on the contract he'd signed with Dumars only 17 months before. Per the parameters of the stretch provision of the CBA, the move essentially means the Pistons will be paying Smith roughly the equivalent of a full mid-level exception to not play for them over the next five years.
The move might have pinched Van Gundy's future cap space, but it opened things on the court. The Pistons immediately reeled off seven straight wins, with point guard Brandon Jennings especially flourishing as touches and spacing opened up with Smith's departure. Alas, Jennings went down with a season-ending Achilles injury at Milwaukee in January. Detroit hung in for a while, hovering just outside the East's top eight into February, before essentially being knocked out of postseason contention by a 10-game losing streak.
With his eye now firmly fixed on the future, Van Gundy made his second-biggest splash as an exec, dealing two second-round draft picks, D.J. Augustin and Kyle Singler in a three-team trade that brought back restricted-free-agent-to-be Reggie Jackson. That deal, which was conceived early in the aforementioned 10-game skid, didn't have the immediate effect of Smith's release. Detroit coalesced with Jackson manning the point and the Pistons went 9-7 to finish the season. All told, Detroit went 27-27 after Smith's release.
With so much upheaval during the season, it's hard to know what to make of the Pistons' season metrics. Their No. 17 finish on the offensive end was a four-year high, as was the No. 21 finish on defense, but neither improvement stirred many hearts in the Motor City. Still, with Jackson running the show during Detroit's solid 16-game finish to the season, the Pistons posted the eighth-best offensive rating in the league during that span. The shooting was much improved (No. 11 in effective field-goal percentage) and the turnovers were minimal (No. 3).
Jackson's performance late in the season was eye-popping, with averages of 19.9 points and 10.9 assists and a true shooting percentage of .558 over his last 16 games. Drummond, meanwhile, averaged 16.9 points, 14.5 rebounds and 2.3 blocks during that nice finish. Best of all, the Pistons outscored opponents by 6.3 points per 48 minutes with Jackson and Drummond on the court.
On Oct. 20, Pistons coach and team president Stan Van Gundy told Detroit reporters that Drummond has elected not to sign an extension so as to help the team create additional cap space. "Every player says I'm all about winning," Van Gundy said. "This guy is proving it." The decision suggests Drummond trusts the organization will reward him with a max deal next summer.
In the end, while 32 wins won't turn heads very often, the way it happened in Detroit offers hope for a fan base that hasn't had any for a while. Not only did the Pistons play respectable basketball for much of the last four months of the season, Van Gundy seemed to have ticked off the first to-do item on any team's rebuilding checklist: In Jackson and Drummond, he'd identified the core around which he could now build.
While Van Gundy seemed to have plucked his primary pieces from the roster-building toy box, it was not a slam dunk he would retain Jackson, a restricted free agent who has never been a starter for a full season. Jennings was still around after all, with another season left on his own deal, though the time frame for his Achilles rehab was (and remains) uncertain. Nevertheless, it was without much drama that Jackson entered into a new five-year, $80 million contract to become the Jameer Nelson to Drummond's Dwight Howard. These are not simply rhetorical comparisons, either. Whether SVG knows it, Nelson is high up on Jackson's list of statistically comparable players in SCHOENE, as Howard is for Drummond.
This all makes reading Van Gundy's moves an interesting exercise, because the blueprint he is following seems so clear. That blueprint did not include a second center to share the court full-time with Drummond, and so Greg Monroe, who'd signed Detroit's qualifying offer in a bold move before the season, followed Smith out the door. Monroe ended up in Milwaukee of all places, so Pistons fans will still get to see him at least twice a season for the next few years.
Before those transactions, Van Gundy acquired face-up power forward Ersan Ilyasova. Like Ryan Anderson before him, Ilyasova can provide floor spacing on offense and help Drummond hold down the fort on the boards. Ilyasova isn't the shooter Anderson is, nor is he the same rebounder, but there simply aren't many stretch 4s in Anderson's class, and Ilyasova is a solid option if he stays healthy.
That left Van Gundy to secure some options for small forward, where the Pistons had a gaping hole. He ended up surprising many by drafting the tough, athletic Stanley Johnson at No. 8 in June, a pick that wouldn't have generated so much debate if Duke's Justise Winslow had not still been on the board. The future fortunes of those two rookies will be inextricably tied over the next few seasons. Johnson has been dynamite during summer league and the early portion of preseason, and looks like a long-term answer to pair with the emerging Kentavious Caldwell-Pope to man the wing positions in Detroit.
Van Gundy also landed Marcus Morris from Phoenix. Morris is another potential spacer for both forward positions. He gives Van Gundy a contingency if Johnson isn't quite ready and also has the kind of contract that easily slots into the second unit. Morris, though, has to prove he can produce without twin brother Markieff around. Finally, Van Gundy signed physical center Aron Baynes to back up Drummond, which might not be as small a role as it sounds -- Drummond averaged only 28 minutes last season.
One under-the-radar move Van Gundy pulled off was to hire shooting guru Dave Hopla as an assistant. Clearly, Hopla's top priority will be to nudge Drummond's dreadful free throw shooting up and over the break-even mark, where teams looking to employ a hacking strategy might have to think twice. If Hopla can convey even one percent of the knowledge he displays with his own shooting, this was a genius ploy by Van Gundy. (Seriously, Google Hopla videos and prepare to be impressed.)
Van Gundy and the Pistons have centered their rebuild on Jackson and Drummond. The front line will be Drummond's territory alone now that Monroe has departed for Milwaukee. And Detroit showed its commitment to Jackson by signing him to a five-year, $80 million deal. The rest of the Pistons' roster, including Ilyasova, Marcus Morris, Jennings and rookie Johnson, will need to fit well around Drummond and Jackson if Detroit hopes to snap its six-season playoff drought.
"For [Jackson] to play at his highest level, for Andre to play at his highest level, those guys need to get some room on the floor. And the only way to get some room is with shooting," Van Gundy said. "So a big part of us in looking at players (in the offseason) is not just their talent level but their fit with those two guys and do they help those two guys play at a higher level? We thought all of 'em did." -- Ian Begley
Projected Real Plus-Minus for starters
Reggie Jackson, PG: +2.0
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, SG: +2.3
Marcus Morris, SF: -0.8
Ersan Ilyasova, PF: -1.9
Andre Drummond, C: +1.7
Scouting reports on every player on the Pistons
Using shot data from 2014-15 and projected starters, Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry ranks each team's offensive efficiency based on square footage.
Drummond, the league's second-leading rebounder, takes 98 percent of his shots from within 10 feet and finished fourth in the league in paint points per game (11.9) behind DeMarcus Cousins, Dwight Howard and Anthony Davis. Now about that free throw percentage...
Caldwell-Pope isn't a particularly accurate 3-point shooter (projected 33.9 percent), but he is dynamic from the right wing, shooting better than 37 percent from there.
All About The Space: 18th (415 square feet of above-average offense)
To identify players who stretch offenses the most, ESPN Stats & Information created the Kyle Korver Effect -- a metric on a 1-100 scale, factoring in 3PT%, 3-point attempt rate (percentage of total shots that come from 3-point range) and influence on teammate FG%.
Korver Effect: Stan loves his stretch-4s! Anthony Tolliver (89.1), who projects to shoot almost 36 percent from deep, is his new Rashard Lewis. Or Ryan Anderson. Or Hedo Turkoglu.
On paper, Detroit looks poised to make only nominal gains, or at least that's how SCHOENE sees it. The de facto exchange of Ilyasova for Monroe is a net loss in production and Jackson has to prove his late-season excellence can translate to a true headlining role. If he can't and Jennings comes back at his pre-injury level of play, Van Gundy would be in a quandary. He'd have a point guard with $80 million coming his way not clearly better than the one with an $8.3 million expiring contract. Given the amount of money it took to send Smith on his way and the loss of Monroe just for cap space, that would not be good.
The ability to spend smartly will again be tested by Drummond's eligibility for an extension. Owner Tom Gores has already declared his young center to be a max player and he's probably right. However, while Drummond would reportedly just as soon get his max money this fall, the Pistons are said to be interested in holding off to use the extra cap space next summer. It might not become a distraction, but it's a situation that bears watching and one that will play out quickly during the month of October.
In the meantime, Van Gundy's blueprint has to begin moving from the planning stage to the winning stage, because six years of playoff futility in a down conference has to be wearing on Gores. Drummond must prove he can be a back-to-the-basket stud. Jackson has to consolidate his playmaking improvements while improving his efficiency. The defense has to coalesce into a Van Gundy-worthy unit. And a clear pecking order needs to emerge among Caldwell-Pope and Johnson behind those two.
This should be a deeper Pistons team than and the roster will certainly be more stable than last season's. RPM projections make Detroit about a 50-50 proposition to make the postseason. That in itself would represent further progress, but it just feels as if the talent is here to do so much more.
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