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(Editor’s note: As training camp for the 2024-25 Pistons season nears, Pistons.com looks at the compelling questions the team faces ahead of their Oct. 23 season opener. Today: Where will Isaiah Stewart line up under new coach J.B. Bickerstaff? Next: Will the Pistons be able to generate both 3-point volume and efficiency.)
Toward the end of Isaiah Stewart’s rookie season, Dwane Casey talked about a future for him as a power forward and expressed his confidence that Stewart’s 3-point shooting would evolve to facilitate the transition.
Of the 63 3-point attempts Stewart took as an NBA rookie in 68 games, 32 of them came in his final eight games. He made eight of them. Casey wasn’t ready to green light four attempts a game for Stewart to start his second season and that played out similarly. Stewart took only 46 3-point shots in 71 games in 2021-22, but 18 of them came in the final eight games and this time Stewart hit 11 of them.
Virtually every minute of Stewart’s first two seasons was spent playing center, but when they drafted Jalen Duren in 2022 – and when Duren, then 18, proved too good to keep out of the rotation – Casey, about to enter what would prove his final season as Pistons coach, felt Stewart was ready to spread his wings further. Of Stewart’s 1,414 minutes spread over 50 games of an injury-riddled 2022-23 season, nearly half came at power forward. His 3-point attempts jumped from 0.6 per game to 4.1 and Stewart shot them at 32.7 percent, about 3.4 percentage points under the NBA average.
That trend accelerated in Stewart’s fourth season when he played about three-quarters of his minutes at power forward and the rest at center. His 3-point shooting attempts dipped slightly, from 4.1 to 3.8 per game and from 5.2 to 4.4 per 36 minutes, but his effectiveness surged to above league average at 38.3 percent.
All of that suggests Stewart, now 23 and about to start the first of a four-year extension agreed to in summer 2023, has enough versatility to allow incoming coach J.B. Bickerstaff the latitude to use him at whatever spot he feels best suits team needs.
The roster as it stands today at least suggests Stewart might be ticketed for the bulk of his minutes at center in year five. The only players on the current roster – which still has room to add one standard contract and one two-way deal – who could pass as legitimate NBA centers are Duren, Stewart and Paul Reed, 25, a four-year veteran who averaged 7.3 points and 6.0 rebounds in 19 minutes a game while playing all 82 for Philadelphia a year ago. The Pistons picked him up on waivers when the 76ers, purely for cap concerns as they needed the maneuverability to add Paul George while re-signing Tyrese Maxey and filling out a roster around them, had to cut ties with Reed.
Reed is more than capable of serving as the full-time Pistons backup center, but starting Stewart next to Duren would then leave the Pistons one injury away from having to scramble. It’s not a deal-breaker, of course, and they still have the roster space to change the equation before the Oct. 23 season opener, so training camp might inform Bickerstaff’s blueprint and dictate what moves president of basketball operations Trajan Langdon makes between now and then.
The Pistons have two players in Tobias Harris and Simone Fontecchio who could fit the job description of the modern power forward, each of them adept at not only shooting from the 3-point line – Harris is a .368 career shooter from three on 3.7 attempts per game, Fontecchio a .375 career shooter on 4.4 attempts per game – but putting the ball on the floor and getting to the rim.
Bickerstaff is no stranger to two-big lineups, of course, fresh off the last three seasons as coach of a Cleveland team that started Jarrett Allen next to Evan Mobley. They combined to shoot only 65 3-point shots all of last season.
How the Pistons line up for their training camp scrimmages and preseason games doesn’t necessarily foretell what they’ll look like come January or March. How other young players like Ausar Thompson and Ron Holland II develop might factor into how the big men are employed, as well. But there will be plenty of intrigue to how Bickerstaff employs his big men – keyed by what the playbook spells out for Isaiah Stewart – when they go on public display sometime in the first few weeks of October.