2015-16 NBA Preview: Detroit Pistons

DETROIT PISTONS

The Detroit Van Gundy’s are still in the process of remodeling, as big man Greg Monroe left for another midwest team and the roster is starting to resemble the Howard-era Magic teams. If you squint you can see it, but they have a long way to go before they seriously challenge other teams in the east.

2015 in review:

For the first part of the season, the league was witness to one of the more bizarre shooting seasons we’ve ever had. Josh Smith, bless his heart, pretended he was Carmelo Anthony for a while, and he ended up with a TS% of 41.7. It was the kind of shooting efficiency you’d see in the 1950’s, not a modern team. It didn’t last long as Stan Van Gundy curiously used the stretch provision on Smith’s large contract, ensuring they’d be paying him for years to come, and the short-term gains were huge. They pulled off a win streak and then an unleashed Brandon Jennings got injured. The circus didn’t end there. Stan Van Gundy brought in Reggie Jackson to fill the void, and he flourished in the role though the Pistons did not finish with a great record. Because there were so many stages to the season it’s tough to gauge how good they actually were with their various parts, but they’ll get a full test this season.

Rotation players in: Marcus Morris, Ersan Ilyasova, Stanley Johnson, Aron Baynes, Steve Blake.

Rotation players out: Greg Monroe, Caron Butler, D.J. Augustin, Kyle Singler, Josh Smith.

The team sorted through a few players during the season, but the main change is Greg Monroe. Monroe had a fine season, but he’s not nimble enough for the modern power forward position and Andre Drummond is the future at center. Marcus Morris was stolen from Phoenix, and perhaps one day it’ll mean Detroit will land the other Morris. Ilyasova is a stretch four and a professional James Franco impersonator. Stanely Johnson is a rookie small forward known for his strength, and he has a decent shot at becoming a quality player. In the Jodie Meeks tradition, Stan Van Gundy overpaid for a role player with Aron Baynes. While the rising cap makes it easier to digest, he’s been a fringe rotation for his career and he’s already 28 years-old. Lastly, Steve Blake will fill his duties as a third string point guard and a perfectly competent emergency option while Jennings or Jackson are dealing with injuries.

2016 Projected

Without any major additions, the Pistons are hoping they’ll get better with more complete seasons from Jennings and Jackson as well as internal improvement from some of their young guys, mainly Drummond. There’s just a reasonable fear that Reggie Jackson won’t be able to replicate his success in Detroit for a full season. The Pistons scored over 110 points per 100 possessions, an excellent rate, when he was on the court, and he scored nearly 20 points per game himself. But on-off stats are notoriously fluky and his shooting percentages in a larger role were quite poor.

Brandon Jennings had some team success without Josh Smith, but he’s coming off a tough injury and his track record is shaky. Both Jennings and Jackson are prototypical shoot-first point guards who get tagged as gunners and are below average outside shooters. They don’t mesh well together, and one wonders what the long-term plan is here. Will Jennings be the bench scorer? Will the team try dual point guard alignments? Will Stan Van Gundy have them battle it out in a thunderdome?

Expanding how a team does in a short time period to a full season — i.e. if a team goes 10-5 with a certain player, you’d assume they’d win 67% of their games next season — is invalid because there’s too much statistical noise, those stats aren’t adjusted for strength of schedule, and the safest bet would involve a heavy dose of regression to the mean. Brandon Jennings may have been on the upward trajectory, but since he’s recovering from an Achilles injury there’s less room for a narrative about how he was a sign Detroit can be a great team post-Josh Smith because he won’t even be available until December and players are typically worse after the injury.

The other major piece worth intensive consideration is Andre Drummond, who was like a wrecking ball to the league in his rookie season with raw skills and has yet to significantly develop. As was noted in the Cleveland preview, he is definitely a “rebound stealer” as Detroit actually rebounded better without him, and no advanced defensive metric sees him as a great defender. He’s added some basic low-post moves but he is not a natural low-post scorer. With his immense physical gifts, the hope is, of course, a Dwight Howard clone, at least on defense, and a better comparison might be Tyson Chandler or even DeAndre Jordan. He doesn’t need to score on the low block; you can warp defenses even more effectively if you’re a huge pick and roll threat.

With a young player, impact can lag flashy box score stats. Anthony Davis, for example, had numbers that leapt off the page and danced, but New Orleans hadn’t been much better with him on the court and they weren’t very good. Then suddenly he rocketed to the top of the plus/minus leaderboards like ESPN’s RPM. The same thing happened to Kevin Durant. It’s virtually impossible to know when it’ll happen, or if it’ll happen, but in the breadth of an instant a player will understand more of the nuances of the game and will play with teammates, instead of just with the ball, and the team will be much better even though the player’s own stats have barely moved. It could happen to Drummond this season, or it may not — no one knows.

Besides lead ballhandler Reggie Jackson and big man Drummond, the roster is stocked full with outside shooters. Caldwell-Pope is a potential 3/D shooting guard who needs work on both dimensions. Jodie Meeks is a “pure” shooter who had a slump last season but will probably shoot well enough to merit playing time this season. Marcus Morris (the lesser Morris) and Tolliver are both forwards who derive most of their value from outside shooting. Ersan Ilyasova is a sign the Pistons are definitely emulating the Van Gundy Magic teams, and it’s unclear how effective he’ll be even in the near future. He’s been declining ever since his intriguing breakout season where he combined three-point shooting with high volume rebounding. But his three-point percentage recovered last season, and in Detroit he’ll have the green light. They’re all solid but underwhelming building pieces for a future 50 plus win team.

Quick statistic/graph

For a handy guide to the tumultuous Pistons season, there’s a graph below showing rolling ten-game averages weighted by recency for the season. You can see the dreaded Josh Smith period where they were one of the worst teams in the league for a while, and then the huge peak with Jennings leading the way. There’s a trough after the Jennings injury, and then with Jackson there’s a little stability around a league average rating. That giant peak after Josh Smith was waived gave people reason to believe Detroit would have a complete breakthrough season.

Summary

Detroit has a few markings of a young and upcoming team, but they still may not have any star-level talent. Reggie Jackson could regress, Brandon Jennings may not replicate his miracle stretch before the injury, and Drummond may remain poor on critical aspects of the game, namely team defense. Most numbers point to another mediocre season below 0.500, and I don’t have sufficient evidence to doubt those stats.

PBP-Metric[2. This is the initial version of my own metric, which uses a full range of stats collected from play-by-play logs and tested extensively to avoid overfitting.]: 36.0

PT-PM: 38

Nick‘s[3. For a short description, the predictions use regression models and neural networks to apply various stats like BPM, RAPM, and Win Shares to 10,000 simulations of the season game-by-game to select the “best” result.]: 30

Nathan Walker: 39