As Dwane Casey watched young players like Michael Porter Jr. and Gary Trent Jr. flourish in the NBA’s Orlando bubble, it felt like the Pistons were falling further and further behind.
So Tuesday’s announcement that the NBA will allow the Pistons and the seven other non-bubble teams a three-week team camp starting next month came as welcome news.
“It’s going to be great for us, just the competition,” Casey said Wednesday. “The guys have been working hard.”
The Pistons got the OK in early June to reopen their Performance Center but only for individual workouts – one player, one coach. They’ve made the most of it, but Casey had been in contact with several other non-bubble coaches and had hoped to be able to gather in one site – a second bubble was discussed – to scrimmage against other teams.
That proved too big a hurdle, but Casey and the Pistons are enthusiastically preparing to squeeze as much benefit as they can from their team camp, which runs from Sept. 14 through Oct. 6 with the first week limited to individual workouts. The Pistons must create a campus-like environment, the NBA directed, that includes rigorous testing and safety protocols. Among them, Casey said, if the Pistons choose an area hotel to house camp participants it will require them having a separate entrance and lobby area from the general population.
“There’s going to be a lot of meetings about that,” he said. “There’s so many protocols, and rightly so, we’re going to have to go through to keep everybody safe. I have all the confidence in our medical staff.”
Casey said he expects most of last season’s roster to participate, perhaps including free agents like Christian Wood. The camp is voluntary for all players as part of the NBA’s agreement with the Players Association. Veterans Blake Griffin and Derrick Rose are unlikely to participate in the camp, Casey said, though might attend.
“I haven’t talked to Christian since the announcement came out,” Casey said, (but) “he indicated he wanted to come in and go. With him being a free agent, it would be strictly his decision but he said he wanted to come in to get some work in.”
Casey said several players – including Sekou Doumbouya, Luke Kennard, Bruce Brown, Svi Mykhailiuk, Jordan Bone and Louis King – have been frequent participants in workouts at the PPC and they’ve gotten maximum benefit from their individual workouts.
“I’m impressed with our physical conditioning, what guys have been able to do individually,” Casey said. “We’ve been running hills and sprints and guys have been working their butts off. So we’re in a better place than where we were when the league first allowed us to go one on one.”
To fill out the roster enough to enable full-court, five-on-five scrimmages, Casey said the Pistons are able to sign up to five members of last season’s Grand Rapids Drive roster in addition to Bone and King, who played on two-way contracts and will be restricted free agents.
Casey has watched Orlando bubble play enviously on any number of levels, but especially for the competition driving growth in young players. The Pistons won’t be able to replicate that entirely via a team camp, but they won’t feel like they’re giving up a 50-yard head start in a 100-yard race whenever the NBA gets going for 2020-21, at least.
“We’ll take it,” Casey said of the team camp allowance. “We want to be greedy from a coaching standpoint. I would love to go against Cleveland and Chicago. We would love to have had an eight-team format or whatever, but we couldn’t get it done so we’re going to make the best of it with five on five or the 15 (players) we get in to create the best competition we can among ourselves to continue improving.”