The Detroit Pistons have found themselves in a Jalen Duren mess. They still haven’t been able to come to an agreement on a contract extension with the young center. It’s similar to the situation that went down with Jonathan Kumigna and the Golden State Warriors last summer. They couldn’t come to an agreement last summer until very late in the year, and even then, the relationship wasn’t in a great place.
Obviously, there was more that went into the Kuminga situation. He wanted more minutes in Golden State. Duren plays plenty of minutes in Detroit. But still, the Kuminga situation is proof that contract disputes can become ugly. And people rarely forget. That’s what’s happening with Duren and the Pistons right now.
And if the Pistons’ situation gets anywhere close to how the Kuminga situation ended up, it would be a complete and utter disaster.
Jalen Duren situation is similar to Jonathan Kuminga's
For years, Kuminga’s relationship with the Warriors was spiraling downward. It was messy before the contract dispute last offseason, but those negotiations made things a lot worse.
The biggest problem was that the entire situation got very public. A few different people ended up speaking out on the situation, and it just became a very public ordeal.
By the end of the summer, Kuminga inked a two-year deal with the Warriors, but it had a team option in the second year. And he never actually finished the contract in Golden State, because he got traded.
At the trade deadline, the Warriors shipped him to the Atlanta Hawks – alongside Buddy Hield – in exchange for Kristaps Porzingis. And now, Kuminga is jobless, as the Hawks declined his team option and have yet to re-sign him.
If the Duren situation follows that pathway even a little bit, it would be a terrible situation for the Pistons. They need Duren. They need him to play big minutes for them.
But right now, he and the Pistons can’t even come to an agreement on a contract. There’s evidently a huge gap in how much the Pistons want to pay Duren and how much he believes he’s worth.
That’s not a great place to be in with your starting center. Because even if the two sides come together on a deal, Duren’s still going to know in the back of his head that the Pistons didn’t want to pay him.
Contract disputes are ugly, ugly situations. And a lot of the time, they can contribute to a break-up. That’s what happened with Kuminga. And if the Pistons aren’t careful, that’s what could happen with Duren.
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