What are the Detroit Pistons planning with Blake Griffin?

There will be enough eulogizing of the Lob City Clippers elsewhere on the internet today. Let’s instead tackle the league-rocking Blake Griffin trade from the perspective of the Detroit Pistons, who are about to become a much more interesting — and much stranger — basketball team.

Before getting into what this will look like on the floor, though, it’s important to talk about the money. The Pistons are trading for a star player in his prime, but doing so comes at great cost. Detroit already had cap and tax concerns prior to this deal (they let Kentavious Caldwell-Pope walk over the summer in part to dodge the tax line), and those concerns will multiply now that they’ve added Griffin’s five-year, $173 million deal to their books.

Swapping out Tobias Harris, Avery Bradley, and Boban Marjanovic for Griffin, Willie Reed, and Brice Johnson adds less than $1 million to Detroit’s balance sheet this season, but because none of the three players the Pistons are sending out is signed beyond 2019, it adds a whole lot more over the course of the next four seasons. Even though neither Reed nor Johnson is guaranteed any salary beyond this season, the swap adds $81,549,892 in long-term salary to the Pistons’ ledger.

Griffin’s play when on the floor likely comes close to living up to the massive financial burden he carries, but he comes with abundant injury concerns. He’s missed an average of 28 games a year over the last three seasons, and already sat out 16 of the Clippers’ 49 games this season. Even in the unlikely event that he plays every Pistons game for the rest of the season, he’ll reach only 67 games played this year. Considering his extensive injury history, he doesn’t seem likely to suddenly get more healthy over the next few seasons. We should expect him to miss a decent chunk of games every year that he’s in Detroit.

Griffin’s salary combined with Andre Drummond’s will eat up around 50 percent of the salary cap for pretty much the entire time the two are teammates. Assuming Drummond picks up his nearly $29 million player option, the Pistons will be paying $65,562,771 to that duo alone for 2020-21 season… and they’ll still owe Griffin nearly $40 million the following year. The financial commitment here is absolutely massive.

And what will the Pistons get for that commitment? A lower-ceiling version of the Anthony Davis-DeMarcus Cousins pairing, mostly.

One would think that slotting Griffin next to an all-world athlete at center would guarantee monster rebounding numbers, but (a) the Pistons are already a pretty good rebounding team; and (b) the Clippers with Griffin and DeAndre Jordan ranked just 10th in offensive rebound rate and 28th in defensive rebound rate prior to the trade. Granted, those figures came with Griffin missing 16 games, but their rebound rates with Griffin on the floor were not that much different. Blake’s lost some explosiveness and gradually shifted his game to the perimeter over the last few seasons, and his board-work has taken a corresponding hit. He hasn’t cracked double-digit rebounds per-36 minutes since his second year in the league and he’s working on his fifth straight season with a total rebound rate south of 15 percent. He’s still a good rebounder; just not necessarily an elite one. (By comparison, Drummond has never even had an offensive rebound rate south of 15 percent.)

Still, his experience playing alongside a center that is not necessarily a threat to score outside the immediate area of the rim should help ease Griffin’s adjustment to the Motor City. If you were to pick any player in the league that most resembles Jordan in playing style, it might be Drummond — especially now that he’s posting up far less often than in previous seasons. There may be an adjustment period for Drummond as he gets used to playing next to another high-usage big man, but Griffin should be able to find his way to success in a lot of the same ways he’s done so in the past.

The additional playmaking skill Drummond has over Jordan should allow the Pistons to do more creative things than the Clippers have done over the years as well. He and Griffin will now form one of the best passing front-courts in the NBA, and Van Gundy should be able to come up with some new ways to leverage the skills of his powerful big man duo. Each player’s ability to work as an offensive fulcrum from the high or low post, as well as in pick-and-rolls, should open up new areas of the floor for the other to work. And as they get used to playing with each other and learn where the other likes to operate, they should be able to create more easy baskets near the rim.

How Drummond reacts to no longer being the best playmaking big man on the team will be interesting to watch. The Pistons have slashed his post touches this year, sure, but they’ve replaced them by directly involving him in more dribble hand-off action and asking him to run a bunch of the offense from the elbows. Griffin is better at all of that than Drummond, and he seems likely to become the primary trigger man in those type of plays. If Drummond isn’t getting the ball on the block as much and isn’t working as the top offensive playmaker in the front-court, will he buck back in some way? We’ll find out.

Playing Griffin next to Jordan is also likely to exacerbate some of the Pistons’ spacing concerns. Drummond, again, is not a threat to score outside the paint. Griffin’s 3-point shooting has progressed over the years, but it’s done so as the entire league has exploded in outside shooting prowess. Blake shooting 34 percent on nearly six attempts per game would have been above-average for a power forward a few years ago. Now, he’s merely another slightly below-average shooting four man. Individually, it adds another element that the defense has to be worried about because if he catches the ball outside the line, he can and will shoot it; but he’s not necessarily a threat that bends the defense away from a driving point guard or a posting center, for example.

The Pistons were also already low on playable talent on the wing prior to the trade, especially with Reggie Jackson out. By sending out Harris and Bradley and taking back all bigs, they’ve now depleted their perimeter talent stock even more. Bradley’s defensive reputation likely exceeded his production on that end and he struggled to finish shots inside the arc throughout this season, but he’s still a starter-quality NBA 2-guard that can also guard primary ball-handlers. Harris operated mostly at the four this season, but unlike Griffin, he was more than capable of sliding to the wing.

With those two gone, the only true wing players left in Detroit are Reggie Bullock, Stanley Johnson, Luke Kennard, and Langston Galloway. (Reggie Hearn is on the roster as well but he’s played one minute all season.) Bullock only recently began to show promise. Johnson has fallen in and out of favor and can’t shoot. Kennard can only shoot and not much more. Galloway struggles against bigger wings and with Jackson out, has to play a decent chunk of his minutes as the lead guard off the bench. The trade likely means that Anthony Tolliver will see even more time at the 3, where he already shouldn’t have been playing.

The Clippers could overcome their uninspiring wing rotation outside J.J. Redick because Redick is one of the best shooters in NBA history and they had Chris Paul to run their offense and Paul and Jordan to anchor their defense. The Pistons don’t have an elite shooter, don’t have the Point God, and don’t have a Jordan-esque back-line anchor. There will be issues on both ends.

You could say that these are single-season concerns and the Pistons can remake the roster around Griffin and Drummond in free agency this summer or over the next few years, but the cap math doesn’t work. They don’t get real room to operate until Jackson’s contract expires in 2020. After sending out their 2018 draft pick in this deal, the best assets they have left are picks three-plus drafts down the line, plus Johnson, Kennard, and Jackson.

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Johnson is no longer the top-value asset he was when drafted. Kennard is not yet much more than a curiosity. Jackson is the team’s only starting-caliber point guard and the offense has absolutely fallen apart without him: the Pistons ranked 15th in offensive efficiency prior to Jackson’s injury, per NBA.com, and are 28th since.

Griffin’s acquisition should mitigate that drop-off in the short term (it would not be a surprise if he worked as a point forward during the minutes when Ish Smith hits the bench), but most of the avenues through which the Pistons can add top-end talent around Griffin and Drummond for the long-term mostly don’t exist. As exciting as this deal sounds for Detroit on paper, it’s difficult to see how they can be more than a mid-tier playoff team over the next few seasons, given the way their books are tied up. And by the time they have real room on the cap to remake the roster, Drummond will be in position for a new contract and Griffin will be exiting his prime and owed nearly more than $75 million over the next two years.