How many players will be in Monty Williams’ rotation next season?

The Detroit Pistons (armed with Tom Gores’ checkbook) were able to lure Monty Williams away from taking a year off, giving him one of the richest deals in NBA coaching history.

Williams was fired by the Suns even though he was the one who took their franchise from the worst in the league to a perennial contender.

One of the complaints fans had about Williams was that he wasn’t able to solidify his playoff rotation and didn’t make the right adjustments. My opinion was that he just faced a much better team, but there is nothing that fans love to complain about more than “rotations,” except for maybe the nebulous “adjustments.”

This is a problem I’m hoping the Pistons have, as they haven’t made the playoffs since the 2018-19 season and haven’t won a playoff game since the 2008-9 season, the longest drought in the NBA.

So will Williams run a similar number of players in Detroit, or will the lack of clarity at certain positions force him to experiment?

Detroit Pistons rotation: Monty Williams could go deep

In his final season with the Suns, Williams mostly used a nine-man rotation, with splashes of a 10th at various parts of the year, pretty much the NBA standard.

Currently, the Detroit Pistons only have eight players who are absolute locks for the rotation next season:

• Cade Cunningham
• Jaden Ivey
• Bojan Bogdanovic
• Isaiah Stewart
• Jalen Duren
• Ausar Thompson
• Alec Burks
• Monte Morris

So if we go by Williams’ history, that leaves just one full-time spot in the rotation and one spot that will get some run, but not every game, or in shorter spurts.

There will be at least six players in Joe Harris, James Wiseman, Killian Hayes, Isaiah Livers, Marvin Bagley III and Marcus Sasser fighting for those two spots and all of them will likely get their crack at it during next season.

Williams will likely go deep into his bench at the start of the season as he gets to know his players, but as the season progresses, the rotation will tighten, leaving a lot of similarly-talented players sitting on the bench.

In other words, expect the arguments about Williams’ rotation to continue next season, especially around the Hayes/Sasser, Wiseman/MBIII and Harris/Livers battles. Having depth is a good thing, but it will be on Williams to figure out how this messy roster is going to work, especially if Troy Weaver doesn’t help him out with a few clarifying trades.