NEW YORK - Stan Van Gundy is going to keep the coaching hat affixed firmly to his head until the last possession of Wednesday's season finale at New York. But when he wakes up Thursday morning – maybe a little later than his usual bird-warbling hour, but probably not much – he'll waste not a minute swapping it out for his president of basketball operations Stetson.
The first order of business: making sure he fully understands why the Pistons will finish the season either 18 or 20 games under .500.
"We've got some cleanup stuff to do from this year," Van Gundy said. "I like to meet with my staff while everything's fresh in our minds from the year – things we need to do differently, system wise. How we operate, the way we practice, the way we travel, whatever it is."
In addition to those staff huddles, Van Gundy will meet individually with each player before they head to off-season training bases. Most players will take off two to three weeks, letting the pounding of the past seven months recede, and then get back to conditioning and skills development.
He also writes a postseason report that offers his assessment of the season, in large measure to organize his thoughts on how the process unfolded, drawing out perspective and serving as a useful guidebook for future reference. That will be shared and discussed with owner Tom Gores and his inner circle.
"Evaluating where we are and what we want going forward," he said. "That'll be the first thing."
Most of the time between the season's end and the mid-May Chicago draft combine, though, will be spent immersed in draft preparation. That includes an early-May trip with general manager Jeff Bower to Europe, where he'll presumably scout the two Europeans projected to be top-10 picks, power forward Kristaps Porzingis and small forward Mario Hezonja.
The bulk of predraft workouts will come after the combine, but Van Gundy will be poring over videotape of the top prospects as given him by assistant general manager Brian Wright, whose focus is college scouting, before that happens to give him a working knowledge of the players before meeting and seeing them perform in person. The Pistons, with Monday's loss at Cleveland, will be going into the May 19 lottery with no worse than the No. 8 position. A Pistons loss at New York on Wednesday coupled with a Denver win at Golden State would put the two teams in a tie for the No. 7 spot and lead to a Friday draw to determine the seventh and eighth positions for the lottery.
"I'll spend a lot of time watching draft guys. Even before we know where we're picking," Van Gundy said. "There'll be the top 10 guys or so. I'm going to study those guys. I'm going to want to watch their entire season, basically every play. Go on through and really study those guys."
At some point well before the draft, though, Van Gundy will start on a two-track course that also allots plenty of time for staff investigation, discourse and eventually a pecking order put in place of the summer free-agent crop.
The June 25 draft comes about a week before the start of free agency. What the Pistons do with their lottery pick likely will have a bearing on their plan of attack in free agency and could also affect decisions on some of the players on whom the Pistons hold team options. That's the case with Caron Butler, Anthony Tolliver and Shawne Williams. They also have two of their own free agents: Greg Monroe, who'll be unrestricted, and Reggie Jackson, restricted.
"You've got to study those guys and know where you want to go," Van Gundy said of the free-agent field. "A lot of it depends on Greg and Reggie and all of that when you get to free agency and who you have in the draft and what you think their timetable might be. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, but in the meantime you've got to evaluate (free agents) and have an idea."
The Pistons will go into the summer with more than $25 million in cap space, though that doesn't account for cap holds of a little more than $15 million combined for Monroe ($10.2 milliion) and Jackson ($5.5 million). If Monroe signs elsewhere, his space is freed up. If the Pistons agree to terms with Jackson, they'll let his $5.5 million hold stay on the cap until they conclude their other business, in effect allowing them room they otherwise wouldn't have if they signed Jackson first.
But Van Gundy says planning for free agency goes beyond looking at the cap space available this summer only.
"One of the things we do after the season – one of the first things – is look at our budget, salary wise, not only for the coming year but what that's going to mean going out. You've got to have some planning. If we're going to pay this guy X amount of money in year two, three four and five and then we're going to pay this guy X amount of money, what are we going to have left to build our team?
"I know Jeff (Bower, general manager) has already done a lot of work on it, but I haven't really looked at it. It's easy to say you're so much under the cap, but going out, if you're giving people raises where is it going to put you the next year? There's got to be a lot more careful planning than what we've done to this point."
Yup. He'll be up early Thursday.