The Detroit Pistons made a deeper playoff run this season, but the team still has improvements to make before challenging for a title
Now that the 2025-26 campaign is complete in its entirety for the Detroit Pistons– although perhaps a bit shorter than many predicted after an early-season surge– the challenge for the organization shifts into a patch-filling approach.
After obtaining the top position in the Eastern Conference from early November onward, the Pistons proved that they have the firepower to contend with any team on their side of the bracket. Detroit is a young squad with a nucleus that continues to improve in Cade Cunningham, Jalen Duren and Ausar Thompson. That unit propelled the Pistons to one of the tougher defenses in the NBA, and it’s the basis for what the team plans to build around for the future.
While it is true that Detroit ran into trouble during the playoffs when teams packed the paint more, which served to hamper Duren while also exposing the Pistons’ lack of perimeter shooting, the team has some distinct bright spots to lean into. But in doing so, Pistons President of Basketball Operations Trajan Langdon will have a busy offseason filled with crucial decisions on how to round out a squad that secured the top seed in the conference but flamed out in the playoffs after a tough second round loss to the Cleveland Cavs.
”We’ll do a deep dive into what we feel made us successful and why we feel it came up a little bit short,” Langdon said during his end of season press conference. “A lot of people are looking at one game. I think if we would have won one game, you can’t say oh, we’re going to play into just one game of success either. That’s not always the answer either, right? So one game winning or one game losing I don’t think can define how you move forward. So, we’ll take a holistic view of the roster. We’re still super young. All of our guys are going to iterate better. They’re going to all be better players than they were this year, just like we saw from last year to this season. So, we’ll take a deep dive. We’ll figure out what we need to add, and we’ll step out, we’ll look at the 35,000 feet and we won’t look at us as the one seed. We’ll look at us as how do we get better?”
That 35,000-foot look will likely center around adding outside shooters to the Pistons so that opposing defenses will be less incentivized to park the bus down low and obfuscate the paint, a strategy that not only limited Duren but made it more difficult for Cunningham to hit his usual array of mid-range shots.
”We’re going to evaluate that,” Langdon said. “We’ll evaluate everything. We’ll figure out what we feel is the right move for us at this time. I think it's a lot of options, but there’s a lot of factors that go into making that move. Is it the player? Is it the time? The salary we have coming back, how many assets we have to give to get said player or players. There’s a lot of things that come into the decisions we’re going to make and the decisions we’re going to need to make to get better.”
During the offseason, Langdon expressed that the Pistons intend to bring Duren back, so reaching an agreement with the big man will naturally expend a good deal of resources, but the squad has flexibility. Tobias Harris and Kevin Huerter are both entering unrestricted free agency, and while the team has been fond of both players’ contributions in the Motor City, the reality is that this flexibility must be considered when Langdon embarks on adding the final pieces to a team that believes it can compete for an NBA Championship.
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