The Detroit Pistons should be a more dangerous team from the perimeter during the 2026-27 season
After the Detroit Pistons were bounced from the Eastern Conference Semifinals by the Cleveland Cavaliers last year, the only choice the team had was to learn from their downfall before the 2026-27 campaign opened up. For Jalen Duren, that meant addressing why the 22-year old All-Star had such difficulty scoring in the low post after a dominant regular season.
But for Pistons President of Basketball Operations Trajan Langdon in the front office, that meant making an evaluation on whether the team’s roster construction was conducive to title-winning basketball. Based on last season’s results, the outcome was certainly not in Detroit’s favor, so Langdon set out to make the proper adjustments during the summer.
The biggest change for the Pistons will come on the perimeter after Langdon dealt away several key veterans for added firepower from three-point range. After struggling from the outside to the tune of a 17th-ranked long-range efficiency in the regular season, the Pistons added Isaiah Joe, John Collins, Taurean Prince and Gary Harris in the summer— four players who surpassed the 40% threshold on downtown attempts last year.
In terms of those new arrivals, Collins is pencilled in to start at the four after Tobias Harris signed with the San Antonio Spurs in free agency, but Joe has an outside chance to compete for a starting role with the Pistons as well. Though Duncan Robinson is expected to start at the two early on, both players offer elite outside shooting and rank among the NBA’s top marksmen over the last half decade.
Both Robinson and Joe are credentialed shooting guards who have been a thorn in the side of opposing defenses from distance, and they function with top-flight efficiency from similar play types. But when zeroing in on their most successful moments, both Robinson and Joe have relatively thin competition when it comes to catch-and-shoot triples on the move.
With relocation threes increasing in frequency over the years, Joe ranks No. 6 in the NBA with a 42% hit rate on 631 attempts during that timeframe. Robinson, on the other hand, was the eighth-best catch-and-shoot movement scorer with a 38.4% conversion rate on his 675 attempts. Most often, these relocation triples arise from savvy off-ball movement that develops during the course of a play. Both Robinson and Joe are instinctual enough to read the defense and predict where their open pockets will appear, and they’ve shown an ability and readiness to knock down those relocation triples when they arise.
With Cade Cunningham running the show as an All-NBA playmaker, the Pistons should be able to design sets that put both players in a position to sink shots from outside. Joe is particularly adept at three-pointers from the corner, so that’s another avenue to explore when Cunningham drives to the paint in search of an outlet. But with that dynamic shooting duo patrolling the outside line in the Motor City, the Pistons should have much more balance after finishing top five in the NBA for points in the paint for the 2025-26 campaign. Don’t expect Detroit to completely abandon their proclivity for scoring down low, but the Pistons should have a more dynamic element to their offense for the upcoming season thanks to the movement shooting prowess of players like Robinson and Joe.
