Dwane Casey had a tough season with the Detroit Pistons, but despite a miserable 20-46 record, it wasn’t all bad. We’ll look at three goals for next season.
The 2019-20 season wasn’t what Dwane Casey or the Detroit Pistons expected. They struggled out of the gate with Blake Griffin and Reggie Jackson out of the lineup and the injuries simply piled up as time went on and it became clear the team wouldn’t compete for a playoff spot.
Possible development time was cut short when the NBA’s season was suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic in mid-March, and that final month of play was meagerly replaced by a week of in-market training camp recently.
We’ll take a look at the three biggest goals for Dwane Casey going into next season.
Figure out how to utilize Derrick Rose and Blake Griffin
Dwane Casey has an interesting challenge. His two best players, Derrick Rose and Blake Griffin, are injury-prone, will likely need to be on significant minutes restrictions throughout the season, probably can’t play back-to-backs (if those exist next season), and are probably best utilized when they don’t play together.
What the heck do you do with that?
That’s going to be something Casey needs to figure out before next season begins, and it will probably require creative solutions. Whether it be a matter of stretching them out and testing their minutes limits in the hopes that they can handle it (this is inadvisable, given what happened to both players last season), staggering them in games to such a degree that they plot out games off to line up with when the other can play, or some other fashion, this is job number one for Dwane Casey.