Remembering Jon Leuer’s peak with the Detroit Pistons

With the news that former Detroit Pistons big Jon Leuer has retired from the NBA, it’s time to look back at his brief but promising peak with the team.

On Sunday former Detroit Pistons big man Jon Leuer took to Instagram to announce his retirement. He’s somebody who is often looked back on with derision by Piston fans, but in the context of his whole story in Detroit, that’s not entirely fair.

By the end of his career with the Pistons, Leuer was often little more than a punchline to cruel jokes. Whether it be the size of his contract and Leuer’s ultimate lack of production relative to that gaudy dollar amount or the fact he was signed to be a stretch-4 who couldn’t stretch the floor, the wisecracks flowed freely on Twitter.

Of course, it’s hard to feel too bad for any NBA player who made $41 million to play 124 games in four seasons, but if there’s ever a case for it, Jon Leuer is that case. His is a story of a mix of a comical misestimation of abilities, being at the right place at the right time until he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

More from Hoops Habit

• 7 Players the Miami Heat might replace Herro with by the trade deadline
• Meet Cooper Flagg: The best American prospect since LeBron James
• Are the Miami Heat laying the groundwork for their next super team?
• Sophomore Jump: 5 second-year NBA players bound to breakout
• NBA Trades: The Lakers bolster their frontcourt in this deal with the Pacers

After the Pistons were vanquished in the 2016 NBA playoffs by the Cleveland Cavaliers, thanks in large part to Kevin Love eviscerating them at will from 3-point range, head coach and team president Stan Van Gundy decided he needed a stretch-4 of his own. A Kevin Love-lite, if you will.

Seemingly dropped on them from the heavens, Van Gundy found his man in free agency in Jon Leuer. In 2015-16, Leuer shot a splendid 42 of 110 from 3-point range, good for a 38.2 percent clip. This was exactly what Van Gundy wanted, and he was willing to pay what it took (and then some) to get it.

Leuer signed a four-year, $41 million contract and a new chapter of Detroit Basketball was born.

When we look back at his numbers with the Pistons, nothing stands out other than the money and menial production. However, if you glossed over that first season he played for the Pistons, you would miss a surprising peak performance, brief though it was.

A happier time for Jon Leuer and the Detroit Pistons

In the early stages of the 2016-17 season, Reggie Jackson missed the first 20 games with knee tendinitis. While he was out, performances from the rest of the roster were inconsistent and unreliable, but the two strongholds on the team were Ish Smith and Jon Leuer.

Smith started in Jackson’s place, and Leuer came off the bench behind Tobias Harris and Marcus Morris. Leuer was never the sharpshooter Van Gundy and the Detroit Pistons hoped he’d be over the first 29 games, a particularly important period for this story, shooting just 29.7 percent from 3-point but he was effective overall shooting 61.0 percent inside the arc.

He averaged 11.0 points and 6.3 rebounds per game in these early days and earned consideration with the starting lineup when that unit was wildly ineffective. Things came to a head with the starters after a particularly terrible outing against the Chicago Bulls where they got beat 113-82, and Van Gundy declared post-game that the Pistons wouldn’t be “trotting that five out there” in their next game against the Memphis Grizzlies.

A pivotal drive to practice

While Van Gundy didn’t declare what his move would be, it seemed clear that Leuer would move into the starting lineup in place of either Harris or Morris. Sure enough, the change in the starting lineup was… there was no change.

As it turns out, when Leuer was driving to practice the morning of that game against Memphis, he got into a car accident and wasn’t able to get a full practice or walkthrough in before the game. As a result, Van Gundy made the entirely reasonable decision to leave the rotation as it was with Leuer coming off the bench.

It’s worth noting that Leuer did have another excellent game that night, tying Reggie Jackson for the scoring lead with 18 points in 30 minutes of action.

From that point forward, however, he was never quite the same. He shot the ball a bit worse from everywhere, his minutes per game actually dipped as a starter and the precipitous fall from grace was in full swing. Whether it was a matter of playing against top-tier bigs rather than feasting on reserves or perhaps there were untold long-lasting effects from that accident will never be known, but Jon Leuer never recovered to those lofty heights where for almost 30 games, he was arguably the best Detroit Piston.

He’ll never be appreciated as the steadiest contributor on the team that he was, but as we look back on a now bygone era, we should never forget that that’s exactly what he was.