Pistons Are A Blueprint ...Of Doing It The Hard Way

The parallels are frightening. One title, predicated on a tremendous team effort, great defense and everyone buying into the cause. Several years of strong contention, but not quite being able to get back over the hump. A slow decline into mediocrity, with a couple of desperation moves (AI) that completely failed. And, creating a tremendous amount of cap space, then blowing on on a couple of decent-but-not-great players. Ben Gordon’s a good baller, but not at the dollars he earns, and I’m not a fan of Charlie V at all. Both deals looked dumb at the time, and that’s what they have been.

So, my biggest fear about the C’s is that we’re going to continue descending into Pistondom.

Danny doesn’t have a perfect track record, but when has he saddled the C’s with a really bad long-term contract. I think it’s perhaps his greatest strength, how he maintains flexibility and always seems to have a bunch of possible moves in the chute. So while I think it’s very possible for the next phase to be difficult – there’s a good chance we miss out in the best fa’s – I would be shocked if we ended up with contracts like Charlie V and Gordon. Danny will go all out to sign a real superstar, but he’s not going to break the bank for flawed semi-stars.

Dumars made 3 big mistakes – trading Billups for AI to get cap space (Billups was still worth the money he was making back then), and then signing Gordon and Charlie V to big contracts. So…all related to cap space. Danny is a lot of things, but he is not stupid about cap space. He was highly critical of overpaying players (like Antoine) before he got here, and he has been pretty smart about avoiding bad contracts on this team. So…yeah…I doubt we use our cap space poorly. If Detroit didn’t do that, they’d be in much better shape. If anything, I suspect we might overpay guys for very short (1-2 year) contracts, which then become assets.

but the “use our cap space wisely” strategy is as wishy-washy a statement as it gets, everyone has to do that.

It´s easy to argue this way without giving any specific ideas, something everyone who says “blow it up” is immediately asked to do.

If you could post a specific, realistic idea on how to rebuild next summer, then we could compare this to the “accumulate assets and tank for a higher pick this year” strategy, and at least weigh the ideas against each other.

Until then, this is a pretty meaningless statement in itself.

Not sure you can do that now. I thought I read with this new CBA you have to spend to a certain percentage of the cap. So Ainge will have to spend some money on someone. Of course if he can keep the contracts short term then it helps him if he’s targeting a specific offseason for certain players.