Detroit Pistons: What Does Their Big Picture Look Like?

The Detroit Pistons have continued to make upgrades to their roster this offseason, but their long-term ceiling rests on the shoulders of their cornerstone players.

It’s just been a little more than a month since the start of free agency, but we’ve fully dove into the dog days of the NBA offseason.

It’s obvious that parts of the NBA landscape have changed with high impact players signing with already established teams like Kevin Durant signing with the Golden State Warriors or Al Horford signing with the Boston Celtics.

However, there were quite a few teams that took a different route this offseason and elected to sign players that may not carry star-level status, but ultimately serve a purpose and potentially could help some of the bigger weaknesses within a team’s roster.

One of the best examples of a team that operated in this way this summer are the Detroit Pistons, who continued to shape what has been a very fluid roster in recent years.

In the two-plus years since taking over as both head coach and as president of basketball operations, Stan Van Gundy has been hard at work constructing the team’s roster to his liking.

Long gone are the misfit or underachieving players that Van Gundy was stuck with when he first arrived to Detroit and being as active as they have since his arrival, only Andre Drummond and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope are the only holdovers left on the roster pre-Van Gundy.

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After their surprising season last year, where they made a 12-game swing in the win column from the previous year, the Pistons entered this offseason with plenty of room to improve a very lackluster bench.

They moved on from the aging Steve Blake and brought in guard Ish Smith on a three-year, $18 million to serve as Blake’s replacement.

Needing shooting from the backup power forward spot, they brought in a career 38 percent three-point shooter in Jon Leuer on a deal worth $42 million over four years.

Lastly, to improve their big man depth and everyone’s well being in general, the Pistons signed the one and only Boban Marjanovic to a three-year, $24 million deal.

Of course, the Pistons also improved their roster through this year’s draft by selecting Henry Ellenson with the 18th overall pick as well as Syracuse guard Michael Gbinije with the 49th overall pick. Both have a shot at carving out a role in the team’s rotation as the season progresses.

In a vacuum like an NBA offseason, those moves don’t really move the needle for the Pistons in terms of success.

But when you consider the team’s poor state of a bench last year (the Pistons ranked last in the league in bench points per game, per NBA.com/stats), those moves, on paper, are key for a team that struggled with such a big liability in their bench.

With those holes addressed, the Pistons look poised to rise even further in the Eastern Conference ranks and could continue to surprise everyone next year if everything continues to break right for them.

While these moves definitely move the Pistons forward in the short-term, the long-term is seemingly an entirely different animal.