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SVG grasps the present, shifts his focus to brighter Pistons future

Stan Van Gundy doesn't go into any season thinking X number of wins. But if he had been forced to guess what the Pistons record would be one-third of the way through the season – a threshold crossed in Sunday's 110-105 loss at Brooklyn – well, it wouldn't have been anything remotely resembling 5-23.

But that's their reality. And Van Gundy isn't one who denies reality or runs from problems.

So things are about to change. It might not be as dramatic as some fans would like, but that's another reality: The Pistons have 15 players under contract and, though willing and eager to trade, aren't about to make trades just for the sake of looking busy.

One other type of trade that won't tempt them: The kind that helps the present at the expense of the future.

"The future certainly is the utmost priority at this point," he said before Sunday's game. "The goals haven't changed. We want to build a contending team. Rather than sacrifice the future to try to get to whatever number of wins is not probably the smart way to go. We're still going to try to win as many as we can, but in terms of personnel moves, everything's got to be aimed toward the future."

But addressing the future won't wait until the trade deadline, June's draft and July's opening of free agency. It will start over the next three days, when Van Gundy uses a rare four-day break in the schedule to implement changes he's been mulling for weeks.

They will include the team's three 21-year-old players: Andre Drummond, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Spencer Dinwiddie. The first two are entrenched starters and critical to the franchise's future, the latter a player Van Gundy wants to get a better look at to see if he might vault himself into the same category.

"I don't think it's all personnel moves," Van Gundy said. "It's the way we approach practice, it's what we run offensively and how we develop our younger players. All of those things come into play. There has to be a shift in thinking, a shift in focus, from a coaching standpoint, without question."

What might that entail? Throwing the ball into Drummond in the post and letting him explore his boundaries, for one. Doing similar things to push Caldwell-Pope's maturity, for another.

"I wouldn't say that's right now our best choice coming down the floor in a game," Van Gundy said of funneling the ball to Drummond. "Well, I think we've got to shift back to giving him that stuff so that he develops, so we don't have him next year at the same place he is now.

"KCP's a guy we don't run a lot of plays for. We'll run Jodie (Meeks) off screens. We haven't given KCP those opportunities. How's he going to learn? Not tanking at all, but a shift in thinking. We're trying to win within that, but you've got to develop those guys. Who do we want them to be heading into the future, not just next year but from the second third of the season to the last third of the season? Who do we want them to be?"

It remains to be seen how Van Gundy will use Dinwiddie, but it seems likely that he'll want to look at him strictly as a point guard – his natural position and the one that Van Gundy drafted him to play. Except for the three games Brandon Jennings missed with a sprained thumb, all of Dinwiddie's rare opportunities this season came at shooting guard when Meeks was out with a back injury. But if Dinwiddie enters the rotation, it might mean that Van Gundy has to choose between Jennings and D.J. Augustin exiting it.

"I do think we've got to get Spencer playing time. We cannot hit the end of the season and now know who our guys are or who we think they can be," Van Gundy said. "We could send him down (to Grand Rapids of the D-League) and have him play and we're still not going to know. We need to know who he is here. Does that mean he is going to play 30 minutes a game the rest of the year? No. But we've got to get him minutes so that we know who he is as a player, we know what needs to be developed and we can begin to plan going forward for who we think we have."

At 5-23, the Pistons are on pace to win 15 games. Van Gundy certainly expects to win more than five games in each of the next two one-thirds of the season, but the odds of the Pistons having a high lottery pick are strong. Only Philadelphia has fewer wins, with three, while Minnesota and New York are also stuck on five wins. Everybody else has at least eight.

That should give the Pistons a great chance to add another critical building block to their young core. Stan Van Gundy is going to devote a big chunk of the final 54 games making sure the ones already in place are as prepared as possible to lead a turnaround in 2014-15.