By any measure, Trajan Langdon’s start as team president of the Detroit Pistons has been a roaring success.
The team has had a historic turnaround, and every move Langdon made last offseason has worked out positively for the Pistons.
Malik Beasley has been the unquestioned steal of the offseason, as he’s one of the best 3-point shooters in the league and has a legit case for 6th Man of the Year, all while making $6 million a year, a relative bargain in the NBA.
Beasley has almost been too good to keep, as the Pistons can’t extend him off a one-year deal and he is certainly going to have other suitors as an unrestricted free agent next summer.
Keeping him isn’t impossible, and I am sure Trajan Langdon will make it a priority, but it wouldn’t be an issue if he had just done some things differently last offseason.
Malik Beasley should have gotten Simone Fontecchio’s contract
Simone Fontecchio hasn’t been catastrophically bad this season, but I think it’s fair to say he’s been disappointing.
His shooting numbers are way down, and he has never regained the form he had in a great stretch to end last season.
It looked like the Pistons had gotten a great deal when they signed him to a 2-year contract, and I still haven’t given up on the idea that Tek could eventually win them some games. Either way, his contract isn’t a killer, but it should have gone to Malik Beasley instead.
Beasley got just a one-year deal and Fontecchio got two, something I am sure Langdon wishes he could reverse right now, as Beasley looks much more like a guy you’d like to keep for the long term.
Signing Beasley to a longer deal from the start not only would have kept the Pistons from having to worry about him this summer but also would have potentially locked him into a value contract that would pay dividends for several seasons instead of just one.
I am not trying to criticize Langdon too much here, as it’s possible Beasley wouldn’t have signed such a deal and there would have been some amount of risk involved with any multi-year deal for the Pistons.
I liked the Fontecchio signing at the time and have to stand behind my take, as it’s only in hindsight that we wish these deals were reversed and that it was Beasley locked up on a two-year deal.
To be completely fair to Langdon, no one saw this season coming from either Beasley or Fontecchio, and at the time, it looked like a smart contract that maintained financial flexibility for the Pistons, but the one-year deal for Beasley is going to complicate his return.