The Pistons have experienced an unprecedented turnaround over the past two years, going from a franchise-worst 14 wins in the 2023/24 season to 44 victories in ’24/25 and then to 60 in ’25/26.
What makes Detroit’s meteoric rise up the Eastern Conference standings all the remarkable is the fact that the team hasn’t made a series of major free agent signings or trade acquisitions since that forgettable 14-68 season, after which J.B. Bickerstaff replaced Monty Williams as head coach.
Veteran role players like Tobias Harris, Duncan Robinson, and Caris LeVert have been added as free agents, and forward Ron Holland was selected fifth overall in the 2024 draft. But Holland’s and LeVert’s contributions have been relatively modest, and while Harris and Robinson have played key roles, starting every game they’ve played since arriving in Detroit, the primary reason the Pistons have improved so much in the last two years is that their young core has taken huge strides forward, with more than one of those players turning into All-Stars.
It starts with Cade Cunningham, 2021’s No. 1 overall pick, who has emerged as one of the game’s brightest young stars over the past two seasons. During that time, he has made his first two All-Star teams, earned All-NBA third and first team nods, and finished seventh and fifth in MVP voting. Cunningham has averaged 25.1 points and 9.5 assists per game since the start of the 2024/25 season while showing that he’s capable of being the best player on a legitimate title contender.
Big man Jalen Duren, drafted a year after Cunningham in 2022, displayed promise during his first three seasons before taking his game to a new level in 2025/26, when he averaged 19.5 points and 10.5 rebounds in just 28.2 minutes per game, finished second in Most Improved Player voting, and claimed a spot on the All-NBA third team.
Meanwhile, Ausar Thompson, a 2023 lottery pick, is already one of the NBA’s best defensive players at age 23. In just his third season, Thompson led the NBA in steals per game (2.0) and forced opposing offenses to game-plan around him. He was named to the All-Defensive first team and was a Defensive Player of the Year finalist, finishing third in votes.
While he’s slightly older than his rising star teammates and doesn’t play quite as significant a role, 25-year-old big man Isaiah Stewart, a 2020 first-round pick, also deserves to be mentioned for the role he has played in establishing the culture in Detroit. Stewart is a terrific defender and rim protector who earned Sixth Man of the Year votes this past season and whose physicality makes him the most obvious throwback on the current roster to the “Bad Boy” Pistons of the late 1980s and early ’90s.
As encouraging as the Pistons’ progress in recent years has been, it was still hard not to feel as if their 60-win season in 2025/26 ended on a bit of a sour note.
Detroit fell behind 3-1 to No. 8 Orlando in the first round of the playoffs and may not have been able to come back from that deficit if star Magic forward Franz Wagner hadn’t strained his calf in Game 4, forcing him to miss the last three games of the series. After eking past the Magic, the Pistons lost in round two to an inconsistent Cavaliers team that needed seven games to beat the Raptors in the Eastern quarterfinals and was hammered by the Knicks in a four-game sweep in the Eastern finals.
There was a sense that president of basketball operations Trajan Langdon could’ve increased Detroit’s odds of coming out of the East by adding more ball-handling and/or scoring at the February trade deadline. Instead, it was a relatively quiet deadline for the Pistons, who did add Kevin Huerter but focused more on the future by acquiring a first-round pick swap that allowed them to move up seven spots to No. 21 in this year’s draft.
If Langdon was reluctant to sacrifice long-term assets or put more pressure on his young, still-developing players before getting a better sense of what they could do on their own in the postseason, that’s defensible. But the postseason results were ultimately disappointing for a team that won 60 regular season games and claimed the conference’s top seed.
The abbreviated playoff run means Langdon may feel more urgency this summer to upgrade his roster around Cunningham at the same time that he and his front office will face major contractual decisions on two of the most valuable members of the star point guard’s supporting cast.
The Pistons’ Offseason Plans
While finding ways to improve this roster will be a goal for Langdon and the Pistons this summer, the team’s top long-term priorities involve their own players, starting with Duren, who will be eligible for restricted free agency after not agreeing to terms on a rookie scale extension in 2025.
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