Detroit — Cade Cunningham wasn’t ready for the question any more than he was for what it meant Sunday night.
As tired as he looked, shortly after Cleveland had ended Detroit’s season with a stunning Game 7 rout in the Eastern Conference semifinals, the Pistons’ 24-year-old superstar still wasn’t ready to be done playing.
So if you’re asking him what’s next, the honest answer is he’s not really sure.
“I mean, I hadn’t been thinking about the offseason,” said Cunningham, fresh off the worst playoff performance of his young career and an abrupt end to an exhilarating season. “So my mind’s been racing now, trying to figure out what I gotta do, and what it’s going to look like.”
He’s not alone, though. And now that this playoff chase is over, the real race is just beginning for the Pistons’ hive mind, led by team president Trajan Langdon.
The wait-and-see approach that frustrated some will have to give way to more urgency now that a young team has come of age. And with big-money decisions looming this summer — most notably the one involving All-Star center Jalen Duren — it’s undoubtedly time for bigger, bolder steps that match the strides Cunningham & Co. have made on the court.
This isn’t the same as last year, when Langdon insisted he wasn’t ready to do anything “super-aggressive or crazy” and didn’t think the Pistons were “in a place to push all of our chips in and be locked in.” That made sense then. And I still argue it made sense back in February, when Langdon chose to play it relatively safe at the trade deadline, gauging a seller’s market and then giving this current roster a chance to “play some real meaningful basketball in the postseason.”
“And that’ll allow us to assess what this team is,” Langdon explained at the time, “and who we are going forward.”
Well, now they know. Or at least they know more than they did. And Langdon certainly has a better idea of the hand he’s holding, after watching this team win 60 games in the regular season — earning the No. 1 seed in a depleted East — and then come up one win shy of the franchise’s first trip to the conference finals since 2008.
A complement to Cunningham
There’s a solid foundation here, obviously. And only two years removed from a 14-win season that required another regime change from owner Tom Gores, the growth under Langdon and head coach J.B. Bickerstaff has been remarkable.
Still, you can’t watch what we all just watched for the last month and not see the shortcomings, too.
The Pistons were an elite defensive team this season, second only to Oklahoma City in the regular season. That proved true in the playoffs as well, Sunday’s Game 7 meltdown notwithstanding. But Detroit was a mid-tier team offensively this season, 10th in offensive rating and 15th in effective field-goal percentage. And no team relied on transition offense more than the Pistons.
Not surprisingly, their floor-spacing issues were magnified in the playoffs, where half-court offense is often the only offense you get. And it was the lack of a true No. 2 scoring option and playmaker next to Cunningham that made these first two rounds such a chore and ultimately doomed their chances of making a deeper run.
So how do they get better at that end of the floor? Some of the growth has to be internal, of course. But it was obvious by the end of these playoffs that veterans like Tobias Harris and Duncan Robinson are better-suited for lesser roles off the bench at this stage of their careers. Harris, who’ll be an unrestricted free agent, said Sunday night he wants to stay in Detroit, but is he willing to do it on a team-friendly deal? Robinson’s contract is only partially guaranteed for next season, but can the Pistons afford to cut loose their best shooter?
Whatever the case, Langdon has to realize the time has come to make the kind of “super-aggressive” move Orlando made last summer in adding Desmond Bane to its young core. Or like the Knicks did the summer before that in acquiring Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns.
Pulling off a blockbuster for a player like, say, Trey Murphy, a stretch-4 who’d be a perfect fit with the Pistons’ young core, won’t be easy. But that’s just one name among many out there, and Detroit could go in a variety of other directions this summer to help spread the floor and take some of the burden off Cunningham, who averaged nearly 41 minutes per game and was burdened by a 31.5 usage rate in the playoffs. They have plenty of financial flexibility with expiring contracts, a handful of future first-round picks to trade and maybe even a former lottery pick to throw in, too, as Ron Holland II couldn’t even crack the playoff rotation this spring.
Internal questions
All that is probably jumping the gun, though. Because before they go there, they really need to start here: Langdon and Bickerstaff first must decide whether they believe they can build a championship-level offense with both Duren and Ausar Thompson — two non-shooters — together in the same lineup.
If not, then they may have to pick one or the other — and sooner rather than later. Because the chances of Thompson becoming a reliable shooter from the corner next season or Duren suddenly emerging as a pick-and-pop threat aren’t great. And while Thompson becomes extension-eligible this summer, Duren is going to be a restricted free agent after failing to come to terms on a rookie-scale extension last year. That means other teams can offer Duren a four-year contract worth up to $177 million in July. The Pistons can offer him as much as $239 million on a five-year deal, or even more if he earns All-NBA honors, as many expect.
But how do they weigh his value now, with all the growth they’ve seen from a 22-year-old All-Star on one side and a humbling playoff performance on the other? After averaging 19.5 points and 10.5 rebounds in the regular season, Duren averaged just 10.2 and 8.5 in the playoffs as the pick-and-roll games with Cunningham largely dried up. A floundering Duren even was benched in favor of Paul Reed for the fourth quarter and overtime in a pivotal Game 5 loss to Cleveland.
Duren is still younger than a handful of players who are going to be selected in the first round of this summer’s NBA draft. So it’d be foolish to think he has reached any sort of ceiling as a player. But handing him something approaching a max contract requires a leap of faith Langdon and the Pistons may not be ready to take right now. So this could get interesting in the weeks ahead.
Thompson, meanwhile, has a long way to go to make himself a net-positive on offense. That’s no secret. But neither is his value as the catalyst for this team’s defense, something that left Cleveland coach Kenny Atkinson marveling after watching the first-team All-Defense wing wreak havoc on what was a top-five offense in the NBA.
“I do think the tactical adjustment we made was avoiding Thompson,” Atkinson said, shaking his head. “We were just, like, ‘If he’s near the ball, throw it to someone else.’ And I’ve never experienced that in the NBA. … I’ve never seen anything like it, where even if you have a great player with the ball and he’s on it, it’s ‘Pass it to someone else.’”
That’s a pretty good problem to have, if you’re the Pistons. But it also points to the one they couldn’t solve themselves in these playoffs. They have a great player of their own in Cunningham — an MVP candidate, in fact — but he needs someone else to pass it to. And if they truly want to be a title contender, there’s no more avoiding this reality: It’s time for Langdon to make a tactical adjustment.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
@JohnNiyo
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Niyo: Pistons showed their hand; now it’s time for Trajan Langdon to deal
Reporting by John Niyo, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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