The Detroit Pistons shouldn’t hire Chauncey Billups as general manager

The Detroit Pistons are soon to be on the lookout for a new general manager. Chauncey Billups’ name always comes up, but they should look elsewhere.

On Tuesday ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski reported that the Detroit Pistons were looking to begin the search to hire a general manager. Somewhat infamously, the Pistons have no general manager in title, instead senior adviser Ed Stefanski calls the shots as de facto general manager.

Per Wojnarowski’s report, Stefanski and team vice president Arn Tellem will lead the search.

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Whenever a job like this opens up, it’s entirely normal for fans to think of former players and team legends to fill the job. For starters, these are people you’ve actually heard of. To most of us, the movers and shakers of assistant general managers and other similar executives with great resumes are nameless and faceless, but former champions and Hall of Famers?

We’ve heard of them.

In the case of the Detroit Pistons, the name that always comes up among fans belongs to Chauncey Billups. A perennial All-Star in his heyday with the Pistons, a champion and Finals MVP, Billups has a top-two (or three) resume in the history of the franchise.

He began the interview process with the Cleveland Cavaliers to become their general manager in 2017 after the team parted ways with David Griffin, but withdrew his name from consideration after the Cavs lowballed him in negotiations.

Billups currently does commentary for the LA Clippers and rose to prominence with ESPN as both a studio commentator and doing in-game color commentary. He’s been one of the most respected voices in basketball for many years, and one of these days he will almost certainly make a fantastic front office executive.

That front office should not belong to the Detroit Pistons.

Learning from history

When Chauncey Billups played for the Pistons in their glory days, the organization was led by Joe Dumars as president of basketball operations. Dumars had a resume not that dissimilar from Billups’ own. He was a two-time NBA champion, had a Finals MVP under his belt and had plenty of All-Star and All-NBA accolades under his belt.

His post-playing career was almost as lustrous. He built an Eastern Conference dynasty that won an NBA championship, went to back-to-back NBA Finals and went to six straight Eastern Conference Finals.

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Without a doubt, Joe Dumars’ legacy was set in stone as a Detroit Pistons legend for life. When people thought Pistons, they would think “Joe Dumars” until basketball no longer existed.

A few bad signings, a bad draft record, a bad trade and a messy ownership situation later, Joe Dumars is persona non grata in Detroit Piston circles. Certainly no shortage of this was Dumars’s own responsibility, but within a few years of the end of the glory days of the Going to Work era, all the capital he had built up over decades was lost and likely unrecoverable.

Chauncey Billups is not Joe Dumars, but it would be foolish to pretend that history can’t repeat itself in Detroit.

Billups deserves his shot, but elsewhere

The Pistons remain in the wilderness, much like they were when Dumars was hired. Things are even trickier now considering the uncertain future the NBA faces, regarding things as widely varied as when next season will start, what the 2020-21 salary cap will be, what form the remainder of this season will take, and countless other variables that nobody has even thought of yet.

Many of these things don’t necessarily impact the Pistons, but in some ways they all will. Whoever the next general manager of the Detroit Pistons ends up being, that person will not necessarily be set up to succeed. With a relatively undesirable market to free agents, cap space to spend in the wrong season to have it and a potential high draft pick in the worst year to have one, even the most optimistic observers would be stretching it say things are looking up for this organization.

Chauncey Billups should get his shot to run a team in the NBA. Most likely, based on his track record at everything else he’s done, he will be successful. But as with many jobs, you don’t always get things right the first time. Growing pains happen, but they don’t have to be at home in front of famously reactionary fans.

Maybe down the road, there will be a perfect fit. The Detroit Red Wings and Steve Yzerman found themselves in such a situation a year ago when the homegrown legend came back to rebuild a fallen dynasty.

If such a track of the return of a legend should be followed, the path the Wings and Yzerman took is the one the Detroit Pistons should take note of. Billups should get the job at the top of an organization somewhere if he wants it, but right now, that should not take place in Detroit.