Detroit Pistons: Is there genius to Troy Weaver’s stretch strategy?

The Detroit Pistons have had an odd offseason so far, and it’s less than a week old. Part of this is because of a bizarre trade/waive/stretch strategy.

The Detroit Pistons have had an absolutely bizarre offseason so far. Starting with trading Bruce Brown for a worse, more expensive player in Dzanan Musa, it was clear that the organization was doing business in a different way from what we’ve seen before.

New general manager Troy Weaver wasted no time making his mark. After trading Brown, the Pistons traded Luke Kennard to the LA Clippers, and a whole potential backcourt duo was laid waste. The Pistons also traded Tony Snell and Khyri Thomas to the Atlanta Hawks in exchange for Dewayne Dedmon. Ostensibly this trade was in order to make another trade with Dedmon as flotsam, although it’s certainly an odd move to make when that ultimate receiving team could simply, you know, trade for him themselves if they want him so much.

Another trade the Pistons made was to acquire Tony Bradley from the Utah Jazz in exchange for the 38th pick and future pick and cash considerations.

If you think this has all been the interesting part, you’d be wrong.

First off, the Pistons waived Dewayne Dedmon and stretched him instead of trading him. Then, on Sunday night, the Pistons traded Bradley to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for Zhaire Smith. Pistons Twitter rejoiced, for they had traded the fourth center on the roster for an athletic young wing. Perhaps the Pistons would find a new non-shooting non-scorer to replace Bruce Brown.

Nope. An hour later, the Pistons waived and stretched Smith as well.

So is this button clicking, like it seems? Or is there some kind of master plan behind it all?

For starters, let’s run through what “stretching” a contract is. It allows a team to spread (or stretch) the remaining salary owed a player over the course of twice the remaining years plus one. So if a player is owed $15 million over two years, instead of paying him $7.5 million over the next two years, you would multiply those two years by two, and add one. This means a stretched player owed $15 million over two years instead is owed $3 million over the next five years.

This is a method of manipulating cap space. If for example, your team needs to shave a couple million off in order to fit a free agent under the salary cap. And the Pistons needed to do some of that maneuvering in order to squeeze in some of their moves so far.

Is there even a point to what the Detroit Pistons are doing?

So specifically, what did the Detroit Pistons accomplish by trading Tony Snell for Dewayne Dedmon, and then trading Bradley for Smith, and waiving both?

Snell’s contract was in its final year, and it paid him $12.2 million in 2020-21. Dedmon’s contract, on the other hand, had two years left and $26.6 million remaining. His 2020-21 salary paid him $13.3 million, but his 2021-22 salary was only guaranteed for $1 million. This means Dedmon could be waived for just $14.3 million and his salary stretched for the next five years for $2.86 million each, while Snell’s stretched contract would provide a cap hit of $4.03 million over three years.

The net for this season, in particular, saves the Pistons $1.17 million.

So while the upside of stretching Dedmon’s contract for five seasons rather than stretching Snell’s for three is debatable, you can at least see that for 2020-21 and this season’s cap situation, there’s a marginal value there.

Where things get weird and a little too button-clicky is this Bradley for Smith situation. Bradley only makes $300,000 more than Smith, which means that stretching Smith only saves them $200,000 more this season relative to stretching Bradley. Does it make sense to do all these machinations just to be left where you started?

Instead of all of these convoluted maneuvers, the Detroit Pistons could have just paid Mason Plumlee $6.6 million this season and he still could have been among the highest-paid centers in the 2020 class.

Surely there’s a method to the madness, but it continues to look like a whole lot of wheel-spinning to end up more or less where they were before.