Detroit Pistons don’t have the roster to execute their game plan

The Detroit Pistons are an underachieving team with an ill-equipped roster. What does it look like, and what should it look like?

The Detroit Pistons have struggled as the 2018-19 NBA season has worn on. Much of their struggles have been due to lacking the correct roster to perform the offense that head coach Dwane Casey has been trying to implement.

Under former head coach Stan Van Gundy, they operated his classic four-out system. When they changed coaches, they weren’t able to completely overhaul the roster over the offseason, which has led to a lot of the struggles seen thus far.

Casey’s system relies much more on 3-point shooting than that of Van Gundy, seeing as the Pistons ranked just 16th in 3-point attempts last season, whereas Casey’s Toronto Raptors ranked third. This season, Casey tried to remedy that lack of efficiency by having the team bomb away from deep far more often, as they rank seventh in attempts this season. Despite this high volume, their accuracy isn’t nearly good enough to validate that number of attempts.

They rank dead last in the NBA right now with a 33.2 percent mark from 3-point range. The league average is resting at 35.5 percent. Among rotation players, the Pistons have just three players clearing that mark. The Pistons are toiling in the middle of the Eastern Conference. If it weren’t for the heroics of Blake Griffin, they wouldn’t even be sniffing a playoff spot because their roster isn’t outfitted to do so.

Casey’s system isn’t going anywhere, and he isn’t either. The key to the team’s success in the future with Casey is to outfit this roster to fit his requirements. They need to get better at the guard spots, and they need to add shooters outside of the ones they have. One tool the team has for improving the roster is to get aggressive at the deadline to trade away negative pieces that don’t fit to add players that do.

Reggie Bullock‘s contract pays him just $2.5 million for the remainder of the season, which is a bargain compared to what most players with his skill-set are being paid on the open market. This offseason, it’s very likely that Bullock is going to walk in free agency because the Pistons won’t have the cap space to bring him back. They would be wise to move him now while his value is high, rather than to wait for this offseason and lose him for nothing.

Second-year shooting guard Luke Kennard has started hitting his stride as of late, and he is a definite fit for the team’s future with his long range shooting. However, there isn’t much else on this team that does fit that style. If the team is keeping Blake Griffin in the fold (although some have floated the idea of trading him while his value is high to add more future assets), it needs to focus on him and Kennard as the building blocks of the future.

It took Casey a few years to develop the Raptors into the team they were, and the same will happen in Detroit. This team isn’t constructed to be a contender in the modern NBA, and it doesn’t help that they don’t have the roster to fit their system.

Between free agency and the draft, they need to focus on adding shooters to fit around Griffin. If they don’t do that this offseason and before the trade deadline, they’ll continue to toil in NBA purgatory as they have for the last decade.