AUBURN HILLS – There’s a reason a handful of the most familiar national NBA reporters were convinced the Pistons were hot to deal and not just along the edges of their roster as Thursday’s trade deadline approached. It’s just not the reason they led you to believe.
Stan Van Gundy and Jeff Bower weren’t looking to radically recast their roster and suddenly veer from the path they started down two years ago with the 2015 deadline deal for Reggie Jackson.
But they likely were among the most active participants in calls among the roster of Bower’s peers, other NBA general managers. Because if you’ve been paying attention since Van Gundy set up shop as Pistons president of basketball operations and hired Bower as his right hand, that’s been their nature. They aggressively scout the market to know what other teams are thinking and which players might be available. They’ve made nine trades in less than three years.
“Certainly, Jeff talked to a lot of people,” Van Gundy said. “We made no secret of that. But we placed a high value on our guys, so we ended up standing pat – which is pretty much what we expected to do.”
Under Van Gundy and Bower, the Pistons scout the NBA as arduously as any team. One of the unique aspects of Van Gundy’s pitch to Pistons owner Tom Gores when Gores was deciding how to structure the organization in spring 2014 was hiring a full-time scouting staff to evaluate NBA personnel, staffing it effectively at the same levels as teams employ to evaluate college personnel. The Pistons have four full-time NBA scouts who file weekly reports on every NBA player.
The scope of their evaluation extends to their own 15-man roster. So when the Pistons engage in trade talks, they’re not throwing darts. They have hard data and long-form written evaluations of everybody in the NBA and the D-League, as well, and integrate internal and external evaluations.
“On top of all the work we do evaluating everybody else in the league and looking at deals, I’d like to think we do a pretty good job evaluating our own players and placing a proper value on them,” Van Gundy said. “So we weren’t going to just give guys away to make a deal and we weren’t going to judge guys based on just half a season here, either. We think we’ve got a pretty good overall picture of who we are. Keep moving ahead and hopefully we play better over these last 25 (games).”
For all of their conversations, Van Gundy said, there was never anything that was close to finalized – no deal where both sides liked what the other had to offer and an hour to discuss the deal to push it across the goal line was needed.
“There was nothing like that, that got close enough for us to really think about. There were things that went back and forth to where we’d say we wouldn’t do that, but what about this? A lot of talk; a lot of work. It’s tough on Jeff. I don’t think he’s gotten a lot of sleep.
“At the end of the day, we just didn’t see anything there that we thought was as good as what we had in the locker room right here.”
That last part goes back to Van Gundy’s conviction that the roster they built has more to offer than the 27-30 record the Pistons held as Thursday afternoon’s trade deadline passed – before the wild comeback from 18 points down to beat Charlotte in overtime.
“We’re not real happy with how we’ve played up to this point, but we still have a young group,” he said. “As much as you would like the progress to be steadily uphill, it’s not always. That doesn’t mean you lose faith in your guys. … What we try to do is be really aggressive in terms of looking for things that can make us better, but at the same time you don’t want to get that ‘deal fever,’ where you just want to make a deal so badly that you end up making a bad deal.”
The Pistons finished 16-9 over their last 25 games a season ago to secure the No. 8 playoff seed, then gave eventual champion Cleveland four tough games – the Pistons led in the fourth quarters of the first three and had a chance to win the fourth on a buzzer 3-pointer – in the first round of the playoffs.
No matter how many conversations Bower racked up, the bottom line was that he and Van Gundy didn’t find anything they felt improved the talent base or offered a more complementary mix for a roster they built with step-by-step logic.
“This team, I thought, made a good run last year,” Van Gundy said. “We added some good pieces that we’ve been really happy with. And for whatever reason, it hasn’t come together the way we would like this year. But part of it is saying, ‘You know what? We think we’re a little bit better than this.’ Another 25 games to the rest of the year, to play in meaningful games again and assess where we are, I think will be helpful. We’ll see what happens over the course of this and we’ll go into the summer with a better idea of where we need to go.”