A look through the Pistons roster tells you where they are — not quite good, not quite bad, definitely in The Medium Place.
The Detroit Pistons are not great, but being in the Eastern Conference, they don’t have to be. They merely have to be decent enough to make the playoffs for this season to be considered a success. The team has banked on Blake Griffin and Andre Drummond in a very big way and it’s currently unclear how wise of a bet that was.
The Pistons are hamstrung by a number of questionable contracts that have limited their flexibility — they’ll be paying over $196 million over the next two seasons to Griffin, Drummond, Reggie Jackson, Jon Leuer, Langston Galloway, and Josh Smith, who doesn’t even play for the team anymore — meaning this is the core they’ll be forced to play with for at least the next two seasons.
The team’s new coach, Dwane Casey, will be tasked with figuring out how to make this mess of a roster into the best team it can be, how the pieces can fit together most efficiently. The Pistons have not been good in the 2010s, only making the playoffs once in the last nine seasons and even though the team fired their coach last season, this year still feels like a season of reckoning, though it’s not entirely clear what it would look like to try to tear things down at this point. On the plus side, they have two All-Star caliber players, which puts them ahead of many of their peers. On the other hand, it’s not quite clear how they complement each other and the rest of the roster is, well, you’ll see.