Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Detroit Pistons could pursue Devin Booker!
Sarcasm aside, this is the rumor that just won’t die, one that I think I’ve written about in all of the six-plus years I’ve been covering the Pistons. The Pistons want to make a leap, Booker is from Michigan, blah blah blah, we’ve heard this a million times.
But that didn’t stop Kevin O’Connor from digging this one back up again on a recent episode of the Yahoo Sports podcast.
In his defense, this was more about the Suns than the Pistons, as both KOC and guest Legend of Winning predicted that the Suns were going to be terrible next season.
The words “mess” and “disaster” were thrown around liberally and LOW even predicted the Suns would fail to win 30 games. KOC had them as the 12th team in the Western Conference and out of the play-in race.
A quick look at their roster and I have to agree, as this team is not only bad, but makes no sense, so it wouldn’t be at all surprising if they flamed out in a loaded Western Conference that figures to have at least 12 teams fighting for playoff spots.
If the Suns are this bad, the two hosts predict Devin Booker will be back on the trade block and that the Pistons will be one of the teams lined up with a big offer, but I wouldn’t start pre-ordering those Booker jerseys just yet.
Detroit Pistons trade rumors: Devin Booker coming home
The idea of Booker coming to Detroit has been talked about so much that it seems like a forgone conclusion, but there are some serious roadblocks to this happening.
The first is that Booker just signed a lucrative two-year extension, so he is owed a truckload of money, actually more like 10 truckloads of money. Booker will make between $53-70 million per year through the 2029-2030 season, in which he’ll be 33 years old.
The Suns will be paying big bucks for the tail end of Booker’s prime, and while he may be worth it now, do you really want to be paying him $70 million when he’s 33? Booker’s efficiency numbers were way down last season even though he still averaged over 25 points per game.
We can expect this to continue as he ages, just as Jaden Ivey starts to close the gap between them. I highly doubt Ivey will ever be the scoring machine that Booker is, but if he’s a 20+ ppg scorer making less than half of what Booker makes, then he’s a far better investment.
If the Pistons have no intention of bringing Ivey back, then including him in the trade makes sense, but they still have big obstacles to getting it done, even if they did want to take on Booker’s insane deal.
They’d have to trade at least Tobias Harris, Ivey and one other player to match salaries, which would leave the team extremely thin at power forward, an issue I’ve talked a lot about recently in regard to a Tyler Herro trade that is going around.
The Pistons simply don’t have the contracts to make this move unless they get other teams involved in which case they’d likely have to grease the wheels with even more picks.
I’m only sure of one thing when it comes to Devin Booker: Rumors of him going to the Pistons are never going to die, but that doesn’t mean they make sense.