For the second year in a row the Detroit Pistons will have the 5th pick in the NBA Draft.
Last year they were able to land Jaden Ivey, who improved over the course of the season and looks like one of the top players from his draft.
Troy Weaver is known as an astute evaluator of talent, but it’s not hard to find it when you are choosing in the top-5 of the draft. The Pistons should again be able to find a good player with the 5th pick, but hitting in the top-5 isn’t the only way to add talent.
The best teams find talent later and even outside of the draft, as we’ve seen in the NBA Playoffs, where guys like Duncan Robinson (undrafted), Austin Reaves (undrafted) and most recently Christian Braun (21st pick) have had big games for their respective teams.
The talent pool for the NBA is larger than ever, so there are always going to be players that slip through the cracks, and teams like the Heat and Nuggets regularly find them, which is one of the reasons they’re always competitive even though they rarely have high draft picks.
Finding players later in the draft or outside of it allows teams to have productive players on league-minimum contracts, a valuable commodity in a league whose new CBA is going to make it more difficult to keep multiple max players.
It’s an area where the Detroit Pistons need to improve.
Detroit Pistons: Find the gems
The Pistons did draft Isaiah Livers in the second round, a player who looks to have the right talent and fit for their roster, though injuries have slowed his progress so far.
Other than that, Detroit hasn’t gotten anything out of the second round, undrafted free agency, their two-way contracts or G-League affiliate.
They basically wasted their two-way deals this past season, a failure in player development considering they were a young and bad team with a lot of injuries and minutes to fill. We’ve seen playoff teams getting production out of two-way players while the 17-win Pistons weren’t able to identify a player worthy of minutes on their roster.
Eugene Omoruyi had a few nice moments, but he’s 26-years-old and wouldn’t have been in the rotation of the worst team in the NBA had it not been for injuries.
Getting the star players in place is always the first order of business for a GM, and hopefully Troy Weaver has already done that, but now the Pistons need to work on developing less-expensive contributors, starting with the 31st pick in the 2023 NBA Draft.
Eventually Cade Cunningham, Jaden Ivey and Jalen Duren are going to on much bigger annual salaries and the Pistons will have to find low cost talent to complement them.