Detroit Pistons: 5 takeaways from the 2018-19 NBA season

The Detroit Pistons’ first Dwane Casey-led season is over, and it’s time to look back at what we learned in 2018-19 and how we can use it moving forward.

The Detroit Pistons‘ 2018-19 NBA season is over. They finished the regular season 41-41 before being swept out of the first round of the playoffs by the Milwaukee Bucks.

We saw a number of exciting moments, and we learned a lot about how this team will look in the future when they build around Blake Griffin with Dwane Casey pulling the strings on the sidelines. They showed times of explosiveness on offense, but could never sustain it. Luckily, they showed improvement on the defensive intensity that’s been mostly lacking for over a decade now.

Detroit finished as the 21st-best offense with the 12th-best defense this season. That defensive number is encouraging, but, when you have an offensive player of Griffin’s caliber, you have to be higher up on offense than they were. He gave Detroit a star that can work inside and out, and he could initiate the offense rather than force the action to start with the point guard. The team should look to maximize that skill-set while Griffin is still in his prime.

This will be a huge offseason for the Pistons. They should look to open up some cap space any way they can, and they need to maximize their window of opportunity without hemorrhaging their future. Let’s look back and see how we got to this point to see where the arrow is pointing in the future.