The Detroit Pistons have hired their new head coach and drafted two players in the first round of the 2023 NBA Draft, so now attention will turn to the rest of the roster.
One player the Pistons have coveted in the past just got moved yesterday, as it was reported that John Collins was traded to the Utah Jazz for Rudy Gay and a second-round pick.
Can we take a second to pour one out for the John Collins’ trade rumor run, one of the longest in the sport? He was on the Mount Rushmore of trade rumors along with Bradley Beal, who was also recently traded.
If Myles Turner and Damian Lillard get traded this offseason, sports blogs will be flying their flags at half mast, wondering who in the next generation of players is going to replace the GOATS of trade rumors.
Should the Detroit Pistons have traded for John Collins?
The wild thing is how little the Hawks were able to get for him, as Collins was in a million wonky trade rumors over the last several seasons, most of them sending a fairly substantial haul back to the Hawks.
This is a direct result of the new CBA, which punishes teams more severely for being in the luxury tax, so Collins likely isn’t the last high-paid player we’ll see moved for peanuts as non-contending teams try to shed excess salary.
Earlier this past season, the Detroit Pistons traded Saddiq Bey, who ended up on these same Atlanta Hawks, in a deal that eventually landed them James Wiseman.
The question is whether they would have been better off holding out for Collins. Did the Detroit Pistons blow the Saddiq Bey trade by acting too soon?
Did the Detroit Pistons blow it with the Saddiq Bey trade?
Now that we see the “haul” the Hawks got for John Collins, it’s pretty clear the Detroit Pistons could have had him for the cost of Saddiq Bey.
Had they just waited until the end of the season to trade him, Bey could have netted them Collins straight up. Trading for James Wiseman never made sense, as his skills overlap with Marvin Bagley’s and give Detroit a logjam at center.
Troy Weaver’s idea of playing two centers who can’t shoot at the same time is not a good one in the modern game, and it was a disaster on both ends when they tried it for short runs this past season.
Collins is a much better fit with what the Pistons have as a guy who has hit near or over 40 percent from 3-point range multiple times in his career. He’s a better and more versatile defender, and would have slotted in nicely into the power forward spot and can even play some small ball center, a valuable weapon in today’s game.
It’s also very possible that Collins was just in the worst possible situation in Atlanta, where he was a complete afterthought and was never really used properly, so Detroit could have taken a flyer on a guy who still has some upside even though he is 25-years-old.
If he scores 18 a game next season while getting back to his old shooting stats, his remaining contract could end up being a bargain for Utah, who had to give up practically nothing to attain him.
So the Pistons could have had a nice player who was a better fit and already locked into a contract that covers three seasons of his prime.
But that doesn’t mean they got it wrong.
Did the Detroit Pistons blow it with the Saddiq Bey trade?
Let’s start with the fact that the offer that the Hawks just settled for likely wasn’t one they would have taken at the trade deadline before the financial details of the new CBA were implemented or understood. This was a salary dump that the Hawks didn’t feel they needed to make at the time, so Detroit wouldn’t have had this kind of leverage.
Collins may be better than Wiseman (debatable) but he should be considering he’s making twice as much money. Do you really want to pay $25 million a year for a guy who is fresh off a season when he scored 13 points per game and shot 29 percent from the 3-point line? Me neither.
Sure, he could bounce back with the right coach in the right situation, but the same could be said of Wiseman, who is still on a rookie deal. Trading for Collins would have eaten up a sizable portion of the Pistons’ cap space.
This way, they get to try Wiseman out for a season or trade him, but either way, they still have the money to pursue a free agent like Cameron Johnson, Jerami Grant, Harrison Barnes or even Dillon Brooks, all guys I’d rather have than Collins, a player Atlanta has been trying to trade since before the ink was even dry on his contract.
The Pistons made the decision that they didn’t want to pay Bey’s next contract, so why in the world would they take on Collins, who is also a player with big limitations and likely making even more than Bey will get on his next deal?
John Collins is a good player, and would have been a fit on Detroit in some ways, but was also a major risk given his lack of production and contract, and the Pistons can likely do better on the free-agent market.
The Bey trade wasn’t ideal, but it served the same purpose as the Collins trade: Getting rid of an underperforming player who either makes too much or will soon.