The Detroit Pistons and New Orleans Pelicans have had plenty of crossover of late.
The Pistons poached the Pels’ GM, Trajan Langdon, to be their new team president and he brought several coaches and executives with him.
Langdon has been a roaring success for the Pistons so far, more than tripling their win total from last season without disrupting the young core he inherited.
The Pelicans recently fired Langdon’s former boss David Griffin, and replaced him with Pistons’ legend Joe Dumars, who is getting another shot to build a champion after being a huge part of three titles teams in Detroit, two as a player, and one as a front-office executive.
Dumars made a controversial first hire, as it was announced yesterday that he had tagged former Pistons’ GM Troy Weaver to be his VP of basketball operations and right-hand man.
The New Orleans Pelicans have hired Troy Weaver to be their Senior Vice-President under new President of Basketball Operations Joe Dumars, a source told Andscape. The former Detroit Pistons general manager is departing the Washington Wizards where he was a senior advisor.
— Marc J. Spears (@MarcJSpears) April 23, 2025
It was a move that drew mostly confusion and laughter from Pistons fans, who watched their team struggle mightily for years under Weaver, with him taking much of the blame.
But given where the Pistons are now, were we too hard on Weaver?
Troy Weaver has an eye for talent
There is no arguing that the Pistons were astoundingly bad with Troy Weaver as GM. He had a 74-244 record with Detroit and his teams never won more than 23 games in a season.
That included last year, when they were the worst team in franchise history, won just 14 games and suffered through an NBA-record 28-game losing streak.
It’s hard to argue that Troy Weaver didn’t deserve to be fired after such futility, even though the Pistons were tanking for much of it.
But Weaver did draft most of the young core that is now leading the Pistons, including Cade Cunningham, Ausar Thompson, Jaden Ivey, Jalen Duren, Isaiah Stewart and Marcus Sasser.
The Cade pick was a no-brainer, and fans now try to act like the rest were as well, but there was plenty of debate before the Ivey, and Thompson picks, and Weaver was able to trade up to get both Duren and Stewart.
You can debate trading up for Sasser (I would classify that as a bad move), but he still found a rotation player late in the first round.
Troy Weaver was bad at the rest of the job
What Weaver was abysmal at was building a team around them, as he kept taking flyers on retreads and first-round busts, veterans who were well past their primes and guys who couldn’t stay healthy.
He never built a culture in Detroit and never did much to add players who would aid the development of the guys he was building a team around.
He made a couple of bad trades, ate tons of dead money for no reason and never made an impactful free agent signing after Jerami Grant.
I do think fans are a bit tough on Weaver at times, as he did some good things for the Pistons, and it’s possible that he and Joe Dumars will be a good duo in New Orleans, where they can pool Weaver’s eye for talent with Dumar’s ability to build a winning team.
I wish them well, but also feel for Pelicans fans, who were likely looking for more exciting names for their front office, people who weren’t recent failures for an organization that just won its first playoff game in 17 years.
After seeing what Langdon has done in one season, it’s easier to criticize Weaver’s obvious mistakes and probably makes Pelicans fans wish they had him back.