Disaster or home run? Grades for the Detroit Pistons' wild trade deadline

Grade for the Detroit Pistons' trade deadline

I'll sound like a cowardly fence rider here, but my opinion on the trade deadline falls somewhere in the big gray area between the two extremes.

It's also hard to give a grade without knowing what comes next. If the Pistons re-sign Fontecchio to a team-friendly deal, great, I love that move. If Grimes helps solve some of their defensive problems on the wing and stays on long-term, also great, I love his toughness and he and former Houston teammate Marcus Sasser have shown they can win together.

If the Pistons use their huge amount of cap space to land another impact player (Tobias Harris seems most likely now) and fill out the rest of their roster with useful role players, also great, they can turn this around in one offseason and come back ready to compete.

So we can't really judge until we know if any of those things are going to happen and we currently don't.

But based on what happened over the last two days, I don't hate what the Pistons have done. Yes, it would have been nice to get more for Bogey, so feel free to rail on about Troy Weaver's asset management and market evaluation.

But in the end, this is a better fitting roster than the one they had, the Pistons didn't do anything catastrophically stupid or give up any financial flexibility.

So I am kind of happy (weird feeling) and cautiously excited about the future for the Detroit Pistons, who jettisoned a lot of dead weight and finally tried to build a roster that fits their core. It's just too bad it took them most of a wasted season to figure it out.

Grade: Somewhere in between a B- and C+