With more than three-quarters of the season in their rear-view mirror, the Pistons are going to play out the final 19 games with one eye firmly fixed on next season and beyond. That they have no less than two-thirds of a full roster – and the heart of their core – under contract for next season makes it an especially meaningful five-plus weeks of experimentation.
The first order of business is sorting out the frontcourt with last month’s trade for James Wiseman giving them four big men 23 or younger. Can they play two at a time and fashion competent units on both ends of the floor? Can they do so freely among all possible combinations? Can one of them other than Isaiah Stewart – Wiseman, Marvin Bagley III or Jalen Duren – show enough to make a case to be next in line at power forward and all that it entails at both ends?
There’s a balancing act to navigate, though. The Pistons would love to test Wiseman’s versatility to see how his athleticism manifests itself on the perimeter, but they’re mindful of his limited exposure to date – missing all of last season due to injury and having his opportunities curtailed by Golden State’s sense of urgency to compete for titles – and don’t want to throw too much at him at once.
“Just keep it simple,” Dwane Casey said Friday. “Eventually, we’ll do that. Got to go through the process – elementary, middle school, high school – and eventually he’ll get there. He will eventually get there at some point at both ends of the floor.”
If the Pistons get satisfactory answers to some of the questions along their frontcourt, it will be a successful final quarter of the season. They won’t have a chance to similarly sort out their backcourt. Cade Cunningham’s absence prevents that. But they can use the last 19 games to speed Jaden Ivey’s progress so he’s a snug fit next to Cunningham and to get Killian Hayes on track for a complementary role to both Cunningham and Ivey.
The Pistons have 10 players under contract for next season, including the four big men and three guards, with Bagley the oldest of the bunch. He’ll be 24 later this month. Of those 10, only Bojan Bogdanovic and Isaiah Livers aren’t either a big man or a guard. Alec Burks, for whom the Pistons own a team option for 2023-24, rounds out the 10-player list.
So if you’re wondering where Troy Weaver looks when he targets roster additions for next season, start there. Landing the most talented player regardless of position almost surely will still be his guiding light on draft night. The unquestioned two top prospects are 7-foot-5 Victor Wembanyama and point guard Scoot Henderson and – despite the dearth of wings under contract for next season – it would be an upset if the Pistons pass on either should they land a top-two pick. And, by the way, there’s still only a 27.4 percent chance that happens even if the Pistons finish with the best possible lottery odds by finishing with a bottom-three record.
In free agency or trade, though, the Pistons surely will be prioritizing players in the 6-foot-6 to 6-foot-9 range who can guard on the perimeter and, preferably, represent a 3-point threat. Those players are the holy grail for NBA teams, so the price – either in personnel via trade or money via free agency – will be somewhere north of “bargain.”
The good news is the Pistons will have the resources to fill their needs. In Bogdanovic and Livers, they have two nice building blocks. They’ll want to add at least two more. One of their pending free agents, Hamidou Diallo – lacking ideal size but making it up for it with elite athleticism – is a candidate to fill one spot. Diallo found a tepid market two years ago when he was a free agent, but his improvement over the course of this season could intrigue a few more suitors this time around.
R.J. Hampton, picked up on waivers last week, will try to make enough of an impression to put him in consideration for a roster spot. But those are finite resources and if the Pistons are going to prioritize bigger wings, as the roster would seem to dictate, he’ll need to stand out. Rodney McGruder and Cory Joseph are valued for their ability to step into the void under any circumstance and Weaver and Casey have been clear about the critical need they see in having a veteran presence in a locker room stuffed with youth, so they might get priority for the last spot or two.
The Pistons will have somewhere around $30 million to spend in free agency. More teams will have cap space this summer than the past few and that might factor into Weaver’s calculation ahead of free agency. It’s possible he uses the cap space in trade to help teams closer to a title but with a more dire cap sheet move off a reasonable contract for a good player, a la the Burks trade with New York last season.
But the first domino will be the draft and how that goes could well dictate the second and third moves of the off-season. The abiding task for the final quarter of this season: Learning as much about the 10 young players under contract for next season – those four big men and how they play off each other, foremost – to help bring the most critical off-season decisions ahead into sharper focus.