What's next for Pistons? Detroit's questions around Cade Cunningham include pressing one about Jalen Duren

The Pistons were the No. 1 seed in the East and had a wonderful regular season, but their flaws were exposed in the playoffs

Sam Quinn

May 17, 2026

11:03 pm ET

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14 min read

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In an NBA that's always changing, the Detroit Pistons have basically spent 40 years building the same team. They've made the conference finals 11 times since 1987. Their defense, according to Basketball Reference, never ranked lower than seventh in any of those seasons. Their offense ranked 10th or lower in five of them and, sure enough, the 2026 team fell into the same bucket.

The names may change, but the style stays the same. They're all just different iterations of the Bad Boys.

That probably wasn't the guiding principle behind Detroit's roster construction this season. Trajan Langdon, the team's president of basketball operations, had no prior ties to the Pistons before taking the job two years ago, and his core was inherited from the previous regime. If you're looking for a parallel here, it's probably the 2023-24 Oklahoma City Thunder, who eschewed major available roster upgrades so they could, in the words of lead executive Sam Presti, "finish our breakfast before we start acting like we're on the cusp of something."

The Thunder wanted to take their young, organically grown core into a single postseason as a top seed and see how it fared before it started making drastic changes. That model worked out quite well for them. So the Pistons emulated it, and now we see where it took them. Were it not for a Franz Wagner injury, they would have become the seventh No. 1 seed ever to lose a first-round series to a No. 8 seed. Wagner's absence granted them a reprieve. They wasted it -- and a 2-0 second-round lead -- and were eliminated from the postseason by the Cleveland Cavaliers in a blowout Game 7 loss on Sunday.

Pistons failed to address obvious offensive flaws at deadline

In the grand scheme of things, this outcome isn't all that different from what happened to the Thunder in the 2024 playoffs. Oklahoma City faced Dallas, saw its flaws exposed, addressed them, and is now the defending champion. The Pistons saw their own flaws exposed as well. They too are free to fix them. Their best players are in their early 20s, much like Oklahoma City's were. They have picks to trade and financial flexibility to operate with, much like the Thunder did.

But Oklahoma City's loss revealed only minor, immediately solvable problems. Detroit's raised far more serious questions about the philosophy on which this team was perhaps not built, but certainly passively maintained. It's not 2004. You can't win championships without scoring anymore.

None of this is new information. Cleaning the Glass has been tracking half-court offensive efficiency since, ironically, Detroit's 2003-04 championship season. Since then, only four teams have reached the Finals while ranking in the bottom half of half-court points per play, as the Pistons did this season:

- The 2005 Pistons, who needed Ron Artest to get suspended for the season and Dwyane Wade to get hurt in the Eastern Conference finals

- The 2023 Miami Heat, who needed Giannis Antetokounmpo to get hurt in the first round and Jayson Tatum to twist his ankle in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals

- Two teams (the 2020 Lakers and 2007 Cavaliers) that employed prime LeBron James

History was pretty straightforward about this: you win titles by making shots in the slower, grind-it-out half-court setting that the playoffs create.

Troy Weaver, the general manager who Langdon succeeded, allowed this current core to win only 14 games in 2024 because he refused to add any veteran shooters. Langdon has at least addressed the offense minimally. Tobias Harris, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Malik Beasley went a long way in getting this team back to the playoffs last season. Duncan Robinson and Caris LeVert replaced Hardaway and Beasley this season. But the Pistons still had the NBA's second-lowest 3-point attempt rate. Their offense dipped by more than nine points per 100 possessions whenever Cade Cunningham sat.

The need for shooting and creation was evident. Langdon elected not to add much of it. In fact, he was the rare general manager of a 60-win team to actually add draft capital at the trade deadline rather than spend it, jumping seven slots in June's draft through a swap with Minnesota. The Pistons added Kevin Huerter, but he'd struggled in previous postseasons and barely played in this one.

What exactly was available at the time, we can't know. Michael Porter Jr. certainly seemed gettable and would have addressed both of Detroit's offensive needs. Whether bigger ticket items like Trey Murphy III or Lauri Markkanen were obtainable is unclear, but lower-level scorers like Anfernee Simons ultimately did move. If nothing else, we can put Detroit on the long list of teams t