Detroit Pistons: Why the Mason Plumlee signing makes no sense

The Detroit Pistons made what will likely go down as one of the strangest signings in free agency when they signed Mason Plumlee on Friday night.

The Detroit Pistons aren’t new to getting raked over the coals in the early hours of NBA free agency. They did it when they signed Jon Leuer to a massive deal in 2016, they did it when they signed Langston Galloway to a contract that (debatably accidentally) hard-capped them.

They didn’t do it the last couple of seasons, mostly because their performance in 2016 and 2017 left them no room to do anything crazy. But now it’s 2020, and this is a year where crazy is the name of the game.

Just a couple of hours into free agency, new Pistons general manager Troy Weaver dipped his pen into the ink that would sign free agent center Mason Plumlee. You may remember him most recently as the man who lost Anthony Davis on a game-winning buzzer-beater off an inbound pass in Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals.

Plumlee signed a three-year, $25 million contract with the Pistons on Friday night. Last season, he averaged 7.2 points and 5.2 rebounds per game. He played 17.3 minutes per outing and started one of his 61 games.

The Pistons committed a cardinal sin with this signing: They signed the first center.

The market that has formed since the Pistons signed Plumlee shows the risk of paying up for a one-dimensional center. For example, Nerlens Noel signed a one-year deal worth $5 million with the New York Knicks, Willie Cauley-Stein signed a two-year deal worth $8.2 million with the Dallas Mavericks and Robin Lopez signed a cheap one-year deal.

It’s worth noting that none of these players even had double-digit salaries over the course of their deals, and it’s not likely that Mason Plumlee is actually better than all of them.

The Detroit Pistons couldn’t stay out of their own way

If there was one rule the Pistons should have observed this offseason, it would have been to not sign any contracts that couldn’t be traded at the deadline or next offseason for value. Low-cost, high-upside deals should have been the way they operated, but right out of the gate they overpaid for Plumlee.

That’s not to say his contract can’t be traded later, because if you try hard enough you can flip any deal, but a team like the Pistons shouldn’t be extending themselves in all the wrong directions so early in a rebuild. After signing Plumlee and Jerami Grant, the Pistons had to perform major contortions just to fit them both under the salary cap, conducting multiple trade-stretch-and-waives in order to free up space.

Honestly, for that matter, if the Detroit Pistons decide they need to get off Plumlee’s contract and can’t find a trade partner, it’s never too soon to break out the calculator and keep an eye on what his stretch number would be, given how they’ve operated over the past week.

What should bother you isn’t that this signing will make them too bad to be competitive, or too good to rebuild. Because this won’t be a good team at all, of that you can be certain, and it wouldn’t have been good if they signed Willie Caulie-Stein to a two-year, $8.2 million deal instead of Plumlee to a three-year, $25 million deal.

The thing that should concern you is that the Pistons are not displaying an ability to maximize their resources or utilize leverage in any situation thus far, and while there are multiple examples of this (four unprotected second-round picks to get off of Luke Kennard???), this Miles Plumlee deal illustrates the point almost too well.