NBA Halloween: Playing trick-or-treat with each team’s early season trend

Detroit Pistons

Contract Year Andre Drummond will continue all year: Trick

The Detroit Pistons are showing all the signs of being an underwhelming playoff team in the Eastern Conference again: a banged up best player. A sub-.500 record. Derrick Rose posting big numbers. Andre Drummond leading the charge. It all sounds just about right.

The thing is, though, that Drummond is in a contract year, and boy is he playing like it. Through five games, the big man is averaging an impressive 21.0 points, 17.4 rebounds, 2.0 blocks, 1.8 assists and 1.4 steals per game. He’s shooting 59.7 percent from the floor and has even made a decent (for him) 61.3 percent of his free throws.

However, we can’t just ignore that he’s posted a point differential of -6.2 (worse than everyone but Tony Snell and Markieff Morris), or that his team is 2-3, or that Detroit is missing its real best player in Blake Griffin. With Rose dominating the rock and Griffin set to return in November, it’d be a surprise if Drummond’s gaudy production continues, and even if it did, it’d probably signal something bad happened to Griffin and the Pistons fell short of expectations again.