Detroit Pistons: 5 takeaways from their chaotic and bizarre offseason

Haphazard and slapdash, or do the Detroit Pistons have some greater plan?

So far the Pistons have traded for Rodney McGruder’s contract in order to stretch it, and then later realized they would not have to stretch it. They have traded for Dewayne Dedmon in order to repackage him in another trade and ended up having to stretch him.

They traded Tony Bradley to the Philadelphia 76ers for Zhaire Smith and then stretched him to save $100,000 over simply stretching Bradley himself. They sold low on a 24-year-old Luke Kennard to the point where they had to give away four unprotected second-round picks to convinced the Clippers to do a deal.

They apparently didn’t even try to retain Christian Wood, opting instead to convince a player in Jerami Grant (who doesn’t need a bigger role) that he could have a bigger role in Detroit. They traded Bruce Brown for a worse player who is more expensive.

They entered the offseason with cap space that they could have used to take on assets via trades for bad contracts. Instead, they took on bad contracts for no assets and then stretched them because they suddenly needed to recreate the space they squandered through lavishly absurd spending.

Maybe there’s some kind of master plan out there that is simply too advanced for us to see. The Pistons had better hope so because otherwise, this has been an unjustifiable disaster of an offseason.

On the plus side, if Killian Hayes turns out to be the next James Harden, none of this will ever matter anyway.