Isaiah Stewart has yet to celebrate his 23rd birthday, but he was often the oldest Pistons starter this season. Both of his NBA coaches, Dwane Casey and Monty Williams, frequently and in various ways have lauded him as the heartbeat of their locker room. He speaks as he plays, short on adornment and long on economy.
When Stewart, the longest-tenured Pistons player with four years of service time, was asked what gives him hope for a better tomorrow for the team that got sucker punched at every turn in a dizzying 2023-24 season, he said, “I trust in what we have going on here. All we can do is continue to put our heads down and work together.”
Heads down, work together. Stewart, his teammates and everyone who calls the Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center home understands it does no good to cite the many reasons their season teetered on catastrophic from the opening weeks. No matter the validity of those reasons, they come off as excuse-making and won’t change the historical record of failure.
So down at court level and upstairs where the future will be plotted, the mantra is just as Stewart enunciated it: heads down, work together.
From owner Tom Gores, barely 24 hours after the season concluded, came the announcement Monday that the Pistons would launch a search for a new front-office leader, a head of basketball operations. The urgency is warranted because of the stakes over this off-season.
“I am committed to doing whatever it takes to build a winning team,” Gores said in announcing the decision to search for a new voice to head up basketball operations. “Nothing is off the table. As tough as this season ahs been, a bright future is available to us. It’s in our power to get this right, and we will. This is a pivotal summer for the Pistons.”
It's an off-season that always figured to be the most transformative since the Pistons made the organizational decision to rebuild in February 2020 – a month before the world stopped with the COVID-19 pandemic. That, of course, complicated the 2020 draft preparation. It produced Stewart with the 16th pick. Cade Cunningham came in 2021 when the Pistons made their first pick at No. 1 overall since Bob Lanier 51 years earlier. Jaden Ivey and Jalen Duren were added in 2022 when Troy Weaver managed to corral a second lottery pick without mortgaging the future. When the Pistons had the worst possible outcome befall them in the much-anticipated 2023 lottery, falling to fifth from the No. 1 slot with Victor Wembanyama the prize, Ausar Thompson proved himself a worthy addition to a young core that still bristles with promise.
The record is what it is, but that core – Stewart, Cunningham, Ivey, Duren and Thompson – will be a major selling point as the Pistons vet the field for their next front-office chief executive. If that’s 1A, then 1B is the more than $60 million in cap space – functionally, more than any of the 29 other NBA franchises – they’ll take into July. And then there’s another top-five guaranteed draft pick.
The final dish has yet to be readied for the oven, but the ingredients for a bountiful meal are in place. To those five recent lottery picks, add three more young players worthy of rotation minutes – 2023 first-rounder Marcus Sasser and key 2024 trade-deadline additions Simone Fontecchio and Quentin Grimes. Even if the ’24 draft seems less star-studded than last year’s, there is almost assuredly a future All-Star or two to be produced.
That’s nine players, each promising the near-certainty of year-over-year improvement coming, plus open roster spots and a war chest of cap space to juice the roster. That last part will enable the single most critical ingredient for the type of surge teams that had a head start on rebuilding – Orlando and Houston, each of which had All-Stars to trade to accelerate the process – experienced this season.
A few productive veterans at the top of the roster will set off a ripple effect that streamlines roles for the young players the past four drafts have yielded. They were forced to shoulder too much, too soon when injuries wiped out practically all of the experienced veterans – not to mention the bulk of their 3-point shooting – last fall to send the season off the rails early.
The backdrop to all of it – the young talent, the cap space, the high lottery pick – is the undisputed support of ownership. Gores’ commitment is unquestioned. His investment in the Pistons has spilled over into the community, from the massive city parks project that included 60 refurbished courts to the recently approved $3 billion Future of Health development in partnership with Henry Ford Health and Michigan State University. The Pistons Performance Center, outfitted with every cutting-edge amenity, is a jewel among NBA team homes.
As Monty Williams, who came to the Pistons last June two years after taking Phoenix to the NBA Finals, said as the season wound down: “Mr. Gores has given this place every resource possible to be a successful organization. I’ve been in a lot of places and I know what it’s like to not have the resources. This is a place that has everything.”
That’s commonly known in every corner of the NBA universe. There will be no shortage of qualified, inspired candidates to fill the chair from which the critical decisions that carry the Pistons to their destiny will be launched.
Heads down, work together.