The Detroit Pistons had an active offseason, but was it the type of offseason they needed to take a step forward?
After the playoffs last season, the Minnesota Timberwolves showed that they weren’t going to wait for their championship window to just open up. Instead, the T-Wolves planned to usher in a title-winning window through their own offseason activity by surrounding superstar Anthony Edwards with LaMelo Ball.
On the surface, adding Ball to a squad that already made the Western Conference Semifinals last year right when Ant is entering his prime could be considered an important win-now move over the offseason. Ball can both score and distribute on the perimeter, and his offensive gravity will draw defenders away from Edwards at the same time. Ball’s playmaking should bring out the best in Ant, and Edwards’ scoring touch should elevate the team’s creation ability as a whole.
Now, the Timberwolves had to give up a fair amount of assets to get the deal done since they parted ways with Naz Reid, a first-round unprotected draft pick and three more first-round swaps, but from a larger standpoint Minnesota as a franchise announced to the league that their time has come in a way that the Detroit Pistons have not.
Dating back to the most recent trade deadline, the Pistons were chided for their reluctance to make a home run swing to bring a secondary scorer into the Motor City. That general trepidation and pragmatism reared its head during the offseason as well since Pistons President of Basketball Operations Trajan Langdon made a series of moves on the margin to stock Detroit with more three-point shooters.
To be fair, the Pistons pulled off several trades to land John Collins, Isaiah Joe, Taurean Prince and Gary Harris— four players who all connected on triples at a 40% rate last season. Given that marksmanship from beyond the arc, Detroit made multiple tactical moves to help the team from a floor spacing perspective, which plagued the group last year.
But despite those moves, the Pistons appear content to rely on internal growth to do the majority of their heavy lifting since Cade Cunningham, Jalen Duren and Ausar Thompson are all younger than 25-years old. Now, that could potentially be viewed as an issue since neither Duren nor Thompson are positive factors in terms of floor spacing, and Cunningham is only an above-average three-point shooter himself. Because those three players are the franchise pillars of the Pistons, the team needs to have a rolodex of perimeter scorers to offset that roster construction.
In any event, the time for the Pistons to plan for has arrived. Cunningham, Duren and Thompson can all realistically be viewed as players entering their prime, and the group already dominated the regular season en route to securing the top seed in the East last year. So, the Pistons have proven that they can be successful through 82 games, but they need another element for that winning basketball to translate to the playoffs. The Timberwolves went out in the summer and landed the player who they felt could help them take the next step, but it will be intriguing to learn if the Pistons did the same.
