Trajan Langdon’s blueprint for last offseason was crystal clear. Add a lot of 3-point shooting, and add players who were as close to iron men as you could get. The additions of Tobias Harris, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Malik Beasley checked all of those boxes. The midseason addition of Dennis Schöder underlined those checked boxes. It was a smashing success.
Cade Cunningham was unleashed, and the Pistons went from 14 wins to 44 and the playoffs. What the plan was this offseason, I am not so sure, but the Pistons have already seen Dennis Schröder lost to a new deal with the Sacramento Kings and Malik Beasley’s future in limbo with a federal investigation tied to NBA gambling.
The Pistons will now also have to do without Hardaway Jr., who is reportedly signing a one-year deal with the Denver Nuggets. The news, as always, comes courtesy of Shams Charania of ESPN.
Going into NBA free agency, Hardaway was the veteran I was most at peace with losing. With how the offseason has played out for the Pistons, now I can’t imagine the team without him.
Hardaway delivered exactly as advertised for the Pistons. He appeared in 77 games, played 28 minutes a night, and he spaced the floor to the tune of just under six three-point attempts per game. He wasn’t deadly from 3, converting only 36.8% of his attempts, but teams had to guard him on the perimeter, and that opened up the space needed for Cunningham and other Pistons to do damage near the rim.
Hardaway joins a Denver team that has dramatically retooled itself in a quest to compete for another NBA title behind Nikola Jokic. The team got a big upgrade with Cam Johnson in deal that sent out Michael Porter Jr., made a savvy trade for Jonas Valanciunas, and signed Hardaway and Bruce Brown to one-year deals.
Hardaway looked like a candidate to return to a Pistons team suddenly in desperate need of shooting, but now that option is off the table.
The team is reportedly maneuvering to land Duncan Robinson in a sign-and-trade with the Miami Heat, but the team is still deep into a perimeter-shooting deficit compared to a year ago.
The Pistons signed Caris LeVert to a two-year deal, who sank 106 threes last season. If the Pistons were to pull off a trade for Robinson that would certainly help. He made 190 threes last year. But if the cost from Detroit is, as a hypothetical, Simone Fontecchio and Marcus Sasser, you’re barely keeping your perimeter shooting head above water.
The definitive losses of Hardaway and Schröder, the presumed loss of Beasley, and the hypothetical loss of Fontecchio and Sasser (just for argument’s sake) represent a loss of 653 threes.
The addition of LeVert and the hypothetical addition of Robinson represent a gain of 296 threes. I’m no math major, but I think that leaves the Pistons 357 treys in the whole. That’s a Malik Beasley-sized hole in your lineup (319 threes last season, a franchise record).
The Pistons are getting Jaden Ivey back. They can expect some internal shooting improvement from other players. But a team whose success was so clearly defined by being able to operate in space with some extremely dangerous outside shooters is suddenly looking at a roster without a lot of shooting threats.
