Driving to the Basket: A Detroit Pistons Podcast - Episode 245: Farewell, Isaiah

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

This episode discusses Isaiah Stewart, front office activity, and the draft. 

Welcome back, everybody. You are listening to another episode of Drive into the Basket. I'm Mike, and I hope you guys are doing great. So I felt compelled to, well, let me rephrase that. I'm just going to say, wow, recording this very shortly after the Isaiah Stewart trade. And something I'm not surprised to have seen happen. I don't remember if I talked about this in the last episode, but as much as I love Stu and he was tied with him.

Kate, favorite player on the team, and those of you listen to the podcast for a while, just have heard all the great things I've had to say about Stu over the years. I mean, I think he's, you know, 100 percentile teammate, 100 percentile hard worker, just really a model sportsman and being willing to do whatever is necessary for his team to win and is literally never taking a playoff. I mean, I don't think we've ever seen that guy go out there and give anything less than maximum efforts, you know, in any play that maybe wasn't garbage time. I don't know. even garbage time. I'm not sure if I've ever seen him take a playoff. But I think, yeah, Paul Reid impressed in the playoffs. And more to the point, I think Stewart was injured again for the

second playoff year in a row. The guy's missed a lot of time. He has this combination of playing very hard. And also, it seems being a little bit injury prone in general, it started early. And in just my sense, watching him, I don't believe that he was healthy in the postseason. It almost feels like just a complete pretense, one that I'm not sure why he in the front office are holding, because after game four, when his knee got plowed into, against Orlando, the guy couldn't jump. You know, he went from having eight blocks and I think 19 minutes in Orlando, you know, being his kind of peak, very elite defensive self to being useless for the rest of playoffs. And just the mobility wasn't there.

And just my sense after that was that his health was just trending in the wrong direction and that, you know, as a fan was like the only scenario in which I was like, all right, you know, we can't hold on to, it's not that you can't hold on to three centers. It's just you've got a guy waiting in the wings and Paul Reed who really leveled up his game in a very surprising way last season. Because Paul Reed was, I mean, just like Isaiah, he's pretty groundbound, is not above the rim player, he's not a strong role man. and it used to be that he was just kind of a straight line gridded out score.

And he really improved on offense. I mean, who knows if the shot will come along, but in the interior, just his handle, his touch around the rim, and so on. So you had him waiting in the wings there. Do I think he's necessarily better than a healthy Isaiah shooting threes under a coach who was willing to let him shoot threes at center? Because he averaged like one per 100 possessions. I don't remember what it was.

He averaged very few at center this year again, which is kind of irritating to me. It shot the vast majority of them in power forward in the minutes he played there early in the season, largely early in the season. So do I think he's better than, you know, an healthy Isaiah Stewart who can play elite defense and stretch the floor has his limitations

in terms of not having the greatest touch around the rim and, you know, being a bad role man. just legit bad outside of his ability to set highway screens. No, I don't think he's better than that version of Isaiah. But as they say, I don't remember who said this, or if anybody did say this, but I agree with it. The first and most fundamental ability is availability. It doesn't matter how good you are.

If you can't stay on the court, you know, looking at you, Zion Williamson, for example. Yeah, I mean, obviously Stu is not on Zion's level, but the same principle applies if you cannot be relied upon to stay healthy and be on the court, especially when it matters most in the postseason, because at this point, Isaiah Stewart, out of a potential 20 playoff games, has been on the court and healthy just under four of them. It's, what are you going to do in that situation? And I feel like with Isaiah, with how hard he plays in the regular season, I would imagine he wears down. And so he's even less likely to be healthy by the playoffs. So how am I feeling which obviously is it I said that as if anybody any of you had actually asked me that and maybe you're

wondering but I'm just going to let me to talk about it anyway I'm feeling a little bit stunned even though I knew it might be coming even though we heard the news and even though just the health stuff and again I just feel like the health is definitively had it in the wrong direction makes me sad I mean Isaiah I feel like was I mean obviously never even close to the best player on team, but kind of embodied the identity of the team and was clearly kind of the heart of the team in a way. I know they used to say, that was probably Mike Breen or someone like that, that Dremont was the heartbeat of the Warriors. And I'm not sure if Isaiah was quite that, you know, quite that, that much. And this was said about Dremon like 10 years ago. But,

I feel like that's kind of what Isaiah was for the Pistons. And, yeah, but he was just the embodiment of what they want to be out in the court, aside from getting himself to run out of games. So, yeah, I'm sad. It's going to, I'm going to be sad watching him, watching the Pistons go out there and knowing he's not there. I'm going to be sad watching them go up against him. I'm going to be kind of wondering what could have been if he could have stayed healthy and was just in the right situation.

Because as, I mean, there was no space for him to be the starting center for this team. Like, unless we had a situation in which a SAR could shoot. I know I've spoken to that is kind of like my fantasy scenario for this core was Asar learns to shoot, and then he can be a role man. He can do probably a pretty good job of it. And then Stewart can just shoot a bunch of threes. And, yeah, he'll have the issue of not been able to bully anybody off the dribble, but you've got five shooters and two all defensive.

caliber. Calibber players out there, a buzzsaw defensive lineup. There's a spit a sara beat, kind of the role man that Duren was, or Dern is rather no, but it was a fun scenario to think of. But yeah, if you have a stew who can start and shoot three is a good percentage and play the necessary minutes, I mean, this is an all-defensive caliber center there, without a doubt. He never played enough minutes. He never played in, you know, and also, you know, who knows if he'd ever be able to. I think he did clear the games played requirement last year, but just didn't play enough minutes. And yeah, with the Morris starting caliber center, who's fit for Cade, because again, Kade just whips in the pick and roll. And you want to give him that role, man. It was still ever

going to start on this team unlikely. And though I didn't think it at the time, it was pretty stupid when Weaver decided to start Stu in Kade's rookie season rather than just kind of keeping Mason Plumley and having it a quality role man for his rookie guard who lived in the pick and roll. But yeah, I mean, you shouldn't understate what Stu is, you know, in addition to the force multiplier that is his work ethic, in addition to the, you know, the other intangibles he brings. Yeah, the guy's pretty damn good defender. You know, I get to talk about this one last time because let me know, no reason for me to talk about any of this ever again.

But if you'd ever been healthy in the playoffs, then, you know, it's a very valuable guy. And we saw some of that in the early stages of the Orlando series. A guy who is elite in drop and switch is very rare. I get to call him a zero variance defender for the last time, a coin, you know, a term that I worthlessly coined. Yay for me. I think I saw somebody steal it on Twitter. So I guess that's what came out of that. Anyway, I just like that term.

Just a guy who's equally elite and drop and switch and in between as well, like a true, what you could call three-level defender. I'm going to miss teams try to switch fast cards onto them and see these guys try to juke him out and just have them dribble back and forth and back and forth and then just come in and take a bad shot and just laugh at how worthless it was for the opposing coach to even try it. I missed the blocks, just miss the hustle plays. Always, you know, remember him getting thrown out against Minnesota last year and, you know, playing his hand across the jersey and, say, in Detroit.

So, yeah, there's a lot I'm going to miss. There are a lot of good memories. I wish he'd been able to be here for more success. I wish he was a guy who could have played here for his entire career. So he will be missed. Farewell, Isaiah. I'll be honest, typically when a player for the Pistons gets traded to another team, I tend to not really pull for him.

I don't know if that's true, but it often is because it's like you're on another team now. Maybe you'll say, well, I want you to succeed as a player, but at the end of the day, I want the Pistons to beat your team. So maybe that came out sounding a little bit harsher than it was, but I think Isaiah, whatever the case, will be an exception of that. I hope he has a really good career. I fear he's going to have a very injured career. And that's why, though I'm sad, I think this is the right move for the Pistons.

So farewell, Isaiah, and, yeah, I mean, I think I've said everything, everything, that I can say and I'm now feeling very sad, so I'm going to stop. So in any case, what the implications are and what this could be leading to, we heard something very interesting today, which was that the Lakers really sealed things with Austin Reeves on a max deal, well, four years, I think, at the max, because they were concerned that the Pistons were coming. And that's very surprising. It was my belief that the Pistons would operate as an above-the-cap team

and just try to improve the team by trade at some point in the few, future. And that's clearly not the case. You know, this is the last season, the Pistons are going to have cap space for a while, have the cap space option for a while after Duren's an almost inevitable extension. Though, who knows at this point, you know, knowing they're going to the cap space, probably going the cap space route. It just, it shows me that more as possible in terms of audacity from this front office than I had thought. This was always going to be the offseason in which we saw what Langham was made of, probably. And that was pretty audacious, like becoming a legit threat to sign Austin Reeves away to high salary, because that would have required quite a bit of

maneuvering. Now, the Pistons, if I remember correctly, actually let me consult my sheet here. So the Pistons have, before this, they had $109.5 million in guaranteed salaries against 165 million dollar cap. First round pick with a Corey, whom I'll talk about in a little bit, cuts into that by about $5 million. So call it $1.15 in salaries. And this brings, it brings you, and that doesn't include Duncan Robinson's, the $14 million of his that is non-guaranteed. So at this point, that brings you back down to $100 million and committed salaries at this point against a almost certain salary cap of about 165 million. Now, there's more that goes into that. That doesn't mean the Pistons automatically have $65 million in cap space because that's

not true. So right now, you have Paul Reed under non-guaranteed contract for $5.6 million next season. Obviously, I think that's overwhelmingly likely that stays. So that gets you to around rounds, yeah, $105 million in guaranteed salaries. You have Jalen Dern's cap hold. So cap holds are there to basically prevent teams from their placeholder cap hits, basically for unrenounced free agents. You renounce a free agent means that you have renounced their cap. You've basically renounced your rights to them, including bird rights,

which allow you to exceed the cap to resign them, which isn't relevant in caps-based scenario, but et cetera, et cetera. Basically, they're there to be sure that, to ensure that teams can't just spend a bunch of money in free agency and then use bird rights to resign their players because that would be kind of silly. You know, especially in the pre-second apron days and, you know, before luxury tax penalties are made worse back in the days when Golden State was willing to pay the total of something like $70 million in total between tax and salary for Kelly Ubre. It was like $15 million salary. So teams, just richer teams would be, just parity. would be much more difficult for any owner who is willing to spend an obscene amount of money. They also prevent you from signing your players and then using the full non-tax bare mid-level exception.

Those liby cap holds as well. So in any case, assuming J.Lenduron isn't renounced, which is overwhelmingly unlikely, I would say, you can take about another 19.5 million out of that. So that gets you to All right, I'm missing something here Because that gets you to about Where was it? 105, yeah, 125 million.

So about 40 million in Cavspace And No, that's right, yeah. But again, you're losing Duncan Robinson in that situation. You're announcing Tobias Harris because you're waving Duncan Robinson's $14 million in non-guaranteed salary. You're losing Dennis Jenkins in that scenario as well.

So unless I'm completely botching the math, yeah. So that gets you to about, yeah, $125 million. So that's your maximum possible salary cap space. You're announcing Tobias. You'd have to bring him back on a minimum contract or what's called the Rim Midwebel, which is about $9.5 million. Or bring back Dunkin with that. but yeah unless I'm completely botching my calculations and I don't think that I am then that's

that's that's where you stand in terms of cap space maximum possible cap space so now is there anybody for the Pistons worth going out and spending like 40 million dollars on no it's also worth noting that the Pistons could still operate above the cap and turn this into a sign-in trade and as somebody on Twitter pointed this out you could send out Isaiah St. Stewart's salary and pay like Norman Powell, for example, in a sign and trade, the maximum of $100, excuse me, of around $25 million by making it a three-team deal. Like the Pistons trade Isaiah Stewart to the Grizzlies, the heat, sign and trade Norman Powell to the pistons, and then just the heat and the grizzlies would need to interact in some way in that trade.

also the pistons and the heat there would need to be you know it's either cash a draft pick uh a play you know there wouldn't be a player involved presumably or rights to you know draft rights to a player or a pick swap in any case so that's a possibility it'd just be interesting i mean they've set themselves up to potentially be players in free agency now you want to think about depth of course uh if you know if you lose duncan robinson you'd be better we bring him. I mean, I would not like to see them lose Duncan Robinson. I mean, I think you want to add more shooting to this team in addition to O'Cori rather than take away your dude who's one of the best in the business. It's like hopefully you can find somebody else

with the starting line. I would just bring him off the bench. And then you just hope that Tobias could come back. Unless you can find a power forward somewhere, unless you can sign like Brewy Hachimura and Duncan Robinson. Excuse me. And, uh, and say, Norman Powell. And you get quite of a shooting back in that scenario, and then you still have your 9.5 million room mid-level. Don't quote me on the cap number. I'm fairly certain. It's accurate. But I really don't want to finish up this episode and go back and find out that I was completely wrong. Though, again, I think the math is accurate. So, in any event, again, he lose Dennis in that situation. He was Tolu, which nobody cares about. He was, this was just always, he was signed to a two-way

deal so that you could play possibly be so you'd be eligible to play in the postseason. Obviously, you'd be renouncing Kevin Herder in that situation. You would be renouncing Malik Beasley's leftover cap hole, which would allow the business if they were operating above the cap to offer him a salary contract starting at $7.2 million. No progress on the Beasley fronts. It was, I despise, like, false insiders on Twitter. And it was funny to see just guys who act like they have sources or just, you know,

basically go 99% of the way toward pronouncing their opinions as facts. There was one of them who said one day that Trajan and Beasley had been in contact. We've been in contact with his agent. And on that same day, Trajan Langdon gave a press conference and somebody asked him and he said, no, we're not. It was pretty great. That was just, I was happy to see that. But, you know, those who are listening and are on Pistons Discord server, or the Pistons Discord server I help moderate, are Discord.G.G.

slash Pistons, check it out. We've got an awesome community. It's almost kind of, I think, a running joke there, how much I detest bad sources. So, you know, whatever. I'm not going to tell people to stick to good sources. just for anybody who is not aware of this yet. Yeah, it's like the likes of Evan Sittery and Brett Siegel and Jake Weinbeck and even guys to a degree like Mike Scotto and plenty of others are just people have incentives

to say things for clicks. So you want to get your news from the right, you know, from reliable sources, then, you know, Shams, Sam Amick, not Amico, Sam Amick's head insider for the athletic, local beatwriters. Mark Stein, don't mix them up with Jake Fisher. I like Mark Stein's model. He seems to be aware in that he's very aware, it seems that he needs to maintain himself as a credible source of truth.

So he has articles that he writes only himself and not with Jake Fisher, in which he gives out, you know, honest tidbits. I mean, my old Jake Fisher, who's the ultimate rumor monger, gets his own column, or it's made very clear that, you know, Mark Stein says, oh, Jake Fisher says this. Anyway, that aside, you're not here to listen. Presumably, maybe it's helpful, but to me opine about bad sources on Twitter.

Like I said, I hate Twitter. I should probably just not be paying any attention. Or better yet, I should not be letting myself get irritated at bad sources. So as far as what this team could do, I mean, I don't have half a clue. I mean, I tend to not speculate on these things because there's just a known knowing who wants what amount of money, what these players, motivation of these players is. I do know with the likes of Norman Powell, who's still a pretty solid player at 33. that the heat are now going to have trouble being able to retain him. So, I believe they're capped at the first apron at this point,

because I think they took in more salary than they sent out in the Janus trade. I haven't looked into that. But, yeah, I mean, the word we have out there is that he's very likely outbound. So he's an option. C.J. McCollum, I believe, was never an option. Man, that lineup that Atlanta was able to trot out, he and Dice and Daniels and Alexander Walker, Jalen Johnson, and Anyaku a Kangwu, and props to a Kongwu.

That dude became really like the first true traditional center to become a reliable volume with three-point shooter. You could kind of say to Bam did it, but Bam was always a skilled offense in my opinion. And the Kongwu was not any shot, like 38% on upwards of five opportunities last year from remembering correctly. Anyway, that lineup was hot. by lineups I think with like more than 300 minutes they were the second best in the league

they were really good Atlanta who just by means of getting off that Trey young deal and good grief was that deal from the Wizards bad like wow it's kind of hard to see the downside for the pistons but it's like damn that was a horrible deal have just a ton of flexibility and would gladly have overpaid to keep CJ so uh in any case Yeah, Powell is an option. You know, maybe you have a look at Brewey as well. If you can somehow play it off. I mean, he's a decent enough defender and he's a good shooter, though I hope you can keep Tobias.

Anyway, basically, my takeaway is that things could get interesting, much more interesting than I thought. This front office is willing to take risks, it seems, in a way that I didn't anticipate. Just hearing that news about Reeves was like, wow. Wow, I did not see that coming. that the Pistons were really planning on clearing the space to make an offer or make an offer somehow. Maybe it would have been by sign and trade, but if you're the Lakers, you have to facilitate that. You have to say, okay, sure, we'll play ball. So it's very possible. It would have been with cap space, which would have required a lot of cap space, you know,

upwards of $40 million of it, to be exact. So I don't know. We don't know the details, but it should be interesting. I'm intrigued. I'm a little bit anxious, just hoping that this doesn't go awry. but I'm intrigued. I had the idea that this could be very boring offseason in terms of free agency, and maybe it won't be.

I thought it was very possible that you would just see the pistons run it back and just to rate of salary to make a big trade, you know, when the right opportunity came along. And that may still happen, you know. But I think the potential breadth of options that the front office is willing to consider is plainly wider than I had thought it was. All right. So there's that. Let's talk about the draft. So this draft was this class. I mean, it was great that the Pistons got that swap in the Ivy Trade. It was kind of infuriating the draft range a little bit because, and again, I can't remember if I said this in the last episode. But typically, I mean, I felt like this team really needed just to go with the safe pick, just a guy would provide some shooting and decent defense. And that's sort of asking for a lot at 21. But typically,

you've got like some decent, safe, reasonable floor bench players available in that range. And this draft did not. And part of that was probably NIL cutting into the end of the depth because you got guys at the tail end of the first round just staying in the NCAA. And plenty of guys in the second round staying in the NCAA. But I think I didn't do as much draft research and I hate quoting people. But I think I think it was said that that there was kind of a real fall off at around 25. or later.

Though I think I'm quoting John Hollinger on that, so screw that. Forget I said anything. I'm not quoting John Hollinger. Whatever the case, NIL, you know, for those you don't know, name, image and likeness basically would allow NCAA players to get paid is because there are really good opportunities there to make money now if you're a pretty good player. Like, there's keeping players in the NCAA for longer, you know, so if you can go at the end of the first rounds and you might get paid more in NIL.

or I mean you might declare for the draft and not get drafted in the first round like Isaiah Evans. So you're giving up some opportunities. So there are less guys coming in than there were before. It just made sense to, you know, if you thought you were going to get drafted at the end of the first round to declare for the drafts, because you might make more money in college now than you make in the NCAA than your first contract. Well, just, I mean, to start, of course, because you're not, well, you know, nobody is going to get four additional years in college after the first year. if they were playing, unless my rules are very behind in the NCAA,

whatever the case. So basically what the Pistons had available in their range was bad shooters, prospects, and midget point guards. And all of those come with substantial risk, the bad shooters and the projects for obvious reasons. And the midget point guards, because things are very, very, very different than they were even five years ago for small point guards.

Because now they come with a substantial defensive cost. And again, I'd just like to reiterate that it's not just about what you can do. It's if it makes sense to field you versus fielding somebody else who's better. And as a midget point card, like 6-1-6-2, you're a midget point card these days. And basically, you're losing defensive value by default because the league is getting bigger and bigger, and teams are exploiting mismatches accordingly.

And it's just much more of a weakness than it used to be. So you got to find your value on offense. I mean, you want to be as good as you can be on defense, too. You want to be the minimal liability you can be, but it's like, sorry, if you're Marcus Sasser, it's just an example I can use, and we've seen it. Marcus Sasser and Josh Giddy was five inches taller than you, and it has you in wingspan as well, I'm pretty sure. It drives on you.

He's going to score, and it hurts that much more if you're Marcus Sasser because you can't really jump very high. you don't have like one of those four qualities that makes you able to mitigate the damage to the maximum extent that you can those qualities being like really good defensive acumen length strength like a marcus smart for example uh or really good athleticism so marcus has was kind of an extreme example where midget blind guards are concerned uh bennett sturtz will be in the same category uh then you yeah i mean you you don't even have a way to mitigate it so So, yeah, so with Sasser, it's like if Josh Gittie is barren down and you're screwed. Sorry, you just got to hope he misses. There's very little you can do. Most small point guards, most small guards are going to be more athletic than that. And I keep saying point guards because the fact is that if you're not, like a primary handler as a small guard, you are probably out of the league.

You need to be able to generate offense off the dribble as a small guard in the vast majority of situations. You got guys like Alvarado who don't really do that as much, but they're pretty rare. For the most part, if you're a small guard, you are very good on offense. I mean, there's a reason why small guards are disproportionately, like just a disproportionate number of them, very disproportionate number of them are very good offensively, because you kind of have to be. It's very important.

You don't have to be a Jalen Brunson or whatever. You don't have to be that good. But you've got to be good because you're costing by default on defense, both in being short and not being able to feel a better defender than you. Like your value on an NBA court is the value you provide minus the opportunity cost to fielding you instead of somebody else who might be better than you or not have your weaknesses or have better strengths. So yeah, those things.

So basically I didn't want a midget point guard because that's an inherent risk. Also, I did not want to give up the size advantage that the Pistons enjoyed last season by just having a big rotation. I mean, Jaden Ivy was the shortest rotation player, and he didn't really play too much. Dennis Jenkins was second. He just kind of ended up in there. He's 6-4, well, 6-3 in like a quarter of an inch in shoes. One of his issues is just that he's very, very light and just bounces off guys when he tries to actually get to the rim.

But basically, you had a starting lineup in which either Cater Assar were the shortest player. We don't know because, though we know that Asar is, I think 6-6. a half. We don't know exactly how Talcate is because that was before players were required to submit to the combine and the best players just generally wouldn't. Now everybody gets measured. So, and everybody has to give medicals as well, of course. That's a good rule. So I think that's a rule at least. I think that's a new rule from a few years ago. Am I wrong? I'm not sure, but I think I think so. But I mean, anyway, I digress. It's basically Cade. We don't know exactly. We also don't know exactly how tall Duran is because he was in the same boat. He just, he didn't show up for the,

the anthropometrics for the combine. So in any case, Kade or a Sarr, one of the two of them, was the shortest player in the starting lineup. And that's an advantage. I mean, it means that somebody, either Cade or the shooting guard or somebody, somebody out there is going to have a size advantage, though with the Sarr out there, it matters less. It also means on defense you're very long. And, I mean, the inches matter. That's what she said. of course, I have to put that in there for fans of the office. But, you know, in the NBA, I mean, this is a spectacularly talented league and it is a game of inches and the inches really, really do matter. So in any case, kind of camera and car was the guy I was looking at going in

because, you know, you could use a reliable shooter at least. And, you know, with some maybe creation upside and whatever. Basically, I just wanted a guy who was going to be able to shoot. it would have been him or Isaiah Evans. It's like at least they can come in and they can shoot and they've got a decent chance of developing it more than that. And Carr ended up dropping well past where I thought he would. But in any case, the Pistons traded three second round picks to the Grizzlies to move up for a Corey in, you know, just one, like three minutes after the Grizzlies

had taken two second round picks from the Thunder to move down one pick. So that's amazing for the draft. that might be like the greatest second round pick efficiency ever, you know, five second round picks in like less than five minutes, you know, it's pretty good. Ironically, you know, Pistons got three second round picks back from, from Isaiah, you know, for Isaiah Stewart. I don't think they were the same ones. Also, you know, at the risk of going back to feeling sad that I was done with this,

yeah, a little surprised and I think that must reflect the injury concerns, the health concern for Stewart that he only garnered three second round picks. Though clearly the Pistons also wanted to dump some. salary and that comes with a premium of its own, not taking any back, to a degree. That comes with a premium, but in this case, probably not a great deal of one. But in any case, so yeah, the Pistons traded up to get a Corey. There have been a lot of smoke about a Corey in the front office being really interested in him. So there's a guy that clearly wanted, and I'm ambivalent. In the first place, losing the size advantage kind of sucks for me. That was like the dream, not sucks for me.

I mean, it's something I'm not happy about. I think that's a big loss. And, you know, back when K was drafted, I mean, that was kind of the dream from the beginning. It's like you've got a jumbo point guard. You surround him with guys who are similarly large, similarly large, and you've just got a size advantage by default, and that's really good. And do I expect, I'm not, am I saying that a Corey's going to start next to him? No, I mean, if he's good enough to do that, right?

But you want him to be able to play alongside Kade, like minutes alongside Kade and the regular season and the postseason, and you do lose the advantage that way. Like I'd say, if he is not good enough to, you know, to play, like, maybe close to 20 minutes, which means some minutes with Cade, then just get a little bit of a disappointment of pick, even if it's number 17, though less so in a draft in which he didn't necessarily have any safe picks at that point, arguably. So, yeah, so I'll just start with that. Beyond that, again, he's got to hit offensively. That's, like, the really important thing here. His defensive ceiling, he's got to improve a little bit on defense as well would be good. He's got strides to make there, but his defensive ceiling is by default,

not high. He's not going to be able to provide a ton of defensive value at his size. So, not like he's short-armed, thankfully. He's got about a 6'8 wing span. I wish he could have gotten up there under Roger Jackson length. Reggie Jackson has what I remember, some sort of draft the evaluator, putting it well a preposterous seven-foot wingspan at probably very close to the same height. So, yeah, he's, he's, anyway, exactly Sasser's height. He's about three-quarters of an inch longer in terms of wingspan. Just turned 19, so he's not similar to Sasser. I've seen concerns that he's similar to Sasser. They're very, very different players. Sasser was a weird pick because he was basically a midget shooting specialist. And that was at a time when this, this wasn't really

anything new that as a small guard you had to have, you know, stuff you could do on offense on the ball. Sasser struggled at that as a fourth-year senior against NCAA defenders and NCAA defenses, you know, far, far worse than he would see in the NBA. And at that age, and with his pretty poor athleticism, the chances of him developing into a handler were very slim. And it's like, if you can't do that, then sorry, you're just not a useful NBA player unless you were incredibly special as a shooter. So, or you just bring a lot of intent. tangible some other sort. I don't know, but he doesn't. So they're about four years apart, like three and a half years apart, I think, in age at the time of the draft. Cori is much more athletic, you know,

shiftier. His biggest strength is his ability to get into the pain and gets the rim, which Sasser just has always been terrible at and just can't break down defenses as a result. Like, remember when Dennis Schroeder came in, Sasser had been, after Ivy's injury, like the secondary, the handler for when Kate was off the floor. And Schroeder was not good in the regular season for the Bistons at all. Like, legit. Like, bad from the field. And nonetheless, he was a big up rate on Sasser because he could actually handle the ball.

And Sasser couldn't. So, Corey is much more capable at the age of 19 than Sasser is at the age of almost 26. As a handler, he's much more athletic. Like, he specializes in penetration. Yes, insert sex joke here. And yeah, I mean, he's more versatile score or two. He's actually better than his three-point percentage would indicate because he had a few really bad games and it was much better. You know, it had a really high percentage and the rest of them versus, for example, a guy like Dennis who had a few really good games and them was pretty bad in the rest of them, which is the case for him during the regular season.

Basically, his three-point percentage doesn't lie in this case. it actually kind of underrates him a little bit. So he said that, I mean, that's useful. Just that handling in the first place is something the Pistons were very short on. Could they have grabbed some of it in free agency or by trade? Sure. One underrated aspect of keeping this pick is that for a team that's about to get pretty expensive, even if they had just operated above the cap,

and you, you know, you return Duran and you give Fassar his extension, whatever that is. This is a guy who's under, who's on a very affordable deal for the next four years. So that's valuable, just the handling aspect, the fact that he is a shooter. And I haven't really watched as much in the way of highlights as I would have liked. He did remind me a little bit in terms of how he moved his body of Reggie Jackson, like pre-injury Reggie Jackson, which I like. Pre-injury, Reggie Jackson, you know, in terms of his abilities was good, in terms of his mindset was not so great.

But in any case, Yeah, I mean, he's a good NBA athlete. Like I said, he's great at getting into the paint. He's a solid shooter. And, like, yeah, he's just, he profiles as a guy who can break down defenses, which is a valuable skill. And it's one in which the pistons, you know, have not exactly had to surf it in some time in a very long time as well.

In the NCAA, he was great at drawing foul. Is that going to translate to the NBA? Who knows? and yeah, there's that, you know, that's where it is on offense. And, you know, he's an effort player, too. I mean, Trajan Langdon is not going to draft non-effort players. I mean, we've seen that already. And he's, you know, he's young with the ceiling, you know, excuse me, with upside,

with everybody's ceiling, of course, but he's young with upside. And he, and so there's room for growth there. Unfortunately, not the sort of vertical growth that we would like. growth is a player. So it's not like a sasser who's coming in and is probably much closer to a ceiling. So, yeah, definite offensive upside there. Shooting that the pistons could certainly use. Penetration that the pistons could certainly use. And just, you know, the ability to break down defenses and all of it in a package that's maybe a little bit shorter than we would like, but it's also by MDA standards, very inexpensive. So where does he need to improve? Just in no particular order, scoring at the

rim. I think he was at like 52% on half-court layups in the NCAA. Granted, Stanford had a pretty crappy offense. He was asked to do a great deal, and he was one of the most productive players in NCAA basketball. So you might have an easier time in the NBA. I mean, maybe not on a team with spacing like the pistons, but nonetheless, he needs to improve as a finisher at the room. He's good at getting there. He's not necessarily great at scoring there, and that's going to be harder in the NBA with all the length and the higher caliber of talents. He got to, he got to, he got to I mean, he got bailed out a lot by free throws in the NCAA that he might not get in the NBA. So he's got to improve there.

As a passer, again, he was playing in not the greatest situation, but one assist for 10 minutes. I'm not really going to cut it. So he needs to improve in terms of his ability to make those reads, make the right pass, don't force shots. Yeah, he has improvement that he needs to make on defense. And again, just the ceiling as a defender is not high because of his high. So can he be a plus defender at the NBA level? Probably not. You just hope that he is not a liability and that his offense and that his offense outweighs

what he's going to cost on defense. So, and then just the in-between game doesn't exist at the moment. And for most players, you're going to need that to some degree. Not like mid-range pull-up game, as I've harped on eight billion times. A vast majority of guys can't be efficient doing that. But, you know, hit a floater at 48%. you know, if you're forced into that, otherwise guys are just going to back off on you. So, yeah, so those are your areas of emphasis.

Probably haven't necessarily told you anything you don't know if you, you know, read basic draft profile. But, yeah, basically that's where it is. That's as I see it from the 52% figure I got from Sam Vassini, who brought up a pretty extensive draft profile on the guy. Vasini, if you don't want to do your own draft research, is a pretty good guy doing that. That would be fully transparent.

I did not extensively research this draft. I didn't extensively research last year's draft, obviously, either. My really looking into the draft years were 2021 through 2024, the Pistons not picking last year and then picking relatively late this year. It's just when there's that, when you're picking 21, which is where the Pistons originally were. There's just so much that can happen. So in any case, you know, wait and see it.

It will make Summer League. more interesting, that much I can say, as opposed to a guy like Cameron Carr who's not really nearly as on the ball. I mean, Corey's going to be the undisputed primary handler there. You're going to get a lot of burn. It's going to be exciting to watch. And I'd say that they expect him to play

a rotation roll next season. He would be shocked, and he typically will not trade up four spots to take a guy for the sake of his handling, his ability to get into the paint, and then not play him. So I don't have a high opinion of Dennis Jenkins.

just to go over his fault very briefly. Like, yay, the guy is a super hard worker, and when he's on, he looks good. The trouble is he's on maybe 25% of the time, and the rest of the time ranges from poor to bad. I mean, when you're a guy like him who is a deeply, you know, in no particular order, a deeply unreliable three-point shooter, when you absolutely suck at getting into the, you know, into the restricted area and scoring at the rim,

and your interior shot profile is both pretty bad, and you're incredibly inefficient on it. I mean, unless you get hot with a jumper, you're going to struggle. We saw that in the playoffs. And he had terrible efficiency in the playoffs. He had like four good games that were not coincidentally when he was shooting well from three. And I'm like 10 bad ones. Good story.

Good third string point guard to have. Not a guy. I think the front office should by any means, especially knowing what they know. And finally, you know, ideally. by this and maybe in free agency or whatever, giving Cade more handling help after just choosing not to do it in Cade's first two years for the most part.

Levert, I think, was kind of like a gesture in that direction, though. Leverd is, you know, when he's cast as a primary handler, it's not, like, he's done it. It's just not really like his ideal role. And Tid just took a dump this year for reasons that were never really made clear to us. Because he used to be able to, I mean,

this thing was getting downhill. But nonetheless, I mean, like the best, the best handlers Cade has had alongside him are like six games of Dennis Schroeder on the playoffs when Schroeder was shooting like 47% from three. And I think probably Corey Joseph in Cade's rookie year. This is how little handling Cade has really had around him, unless you count Ivy's like 20-something games in the injury season. So I don't think the front office. office was willing to depend upon Dennis Jenkins, just really need to roll the dice and say, okay, Dennis is going to be our backup point guard next year. They could see what we saw. So will he be the primary handler off the bench? I'd say there's a fair shot of it. I think you'll

want to have him on the floor with another guy who can handle. But I think they will also want to add another guy who can handle, and ideally in the starting lineup. So that's where we stand. And I think that'll end the episode, actually. So yeah, I hope you're all doing great. It was certainly sort of the end of an era in a way, just seeing Isaiah Stewart move on, not like the end of a substantive era, but certainly a turning of the page in a way, more of a sentimental way than anything, but a way nonetheless. So I hope you're all doing great. Catch you in the next episode.