First off, pardon the crap pun in the title. With the Detroit Pistons now officially swept by Cleveland, Pistons fans are looking toward next season, as are the columnists. Chris Broussard of ESPN.com writes:
By letting Iverson and his $22 million walk along with Rasheed and his $13.7 million, Detroit will have roughly $17 million in cap space this summer.
With only a few other teams significantly under the cap and most teams trying to cut payroll rather than add it, the Pistons are in terrific position to improve their club. Impact players who are likely to be available as free agents are Carlos Boozer, Paul Millsap, Ben Gordon, Marvin Williams, Hedo Turkoglu, Charlie Villanueva and Anderson Varejao.
On top of that, several teams may be looking to trade good players merely to gain financial relief, as New Orleans attempted to do at the trade deadline with Tyson Chandler. Detroit is in position to take advantage of whatever fire sales may take place around the league.
Detroit will have a very different face in the next season. Since their championship run in 2004, it’s been quite a steady rate of decline for Rasheed Wallace and company. Their victory over the highly favored Lakers was, while admittedly not the most exciting brand of basketball, nonetheless a wonderful series to watch. Despite the obviously overpowering talent of the final year that Shaq and Kobe were together on the court, the Pistons managed to generally outplay and outshine them in all 5 games. Their victory was a great upset and a wonderful example of a team beating individual talent.
Will that same mentality exist in Detroit at the start of next season? I can only hope so. In this time when a superstar seems a necessary component to winning, the Cavaliers for example, it was quite refreshing to see fundamental and basic basketball strategies win the day over the flashier favorites.
This year’s playoffs don’t have much of a hope for something like 5 years ago happening again. The Lakers look like pretty heavy favorites (in fact the only team with a semi-shot at beating them is Lebron James and the four other guys he plays with), but with Joe Dumars still a proponent of the solid-D, pass-heavy team play of past Detroit teams, it may be a great year next time around for Pistons fans, but something of a snoozer for everybody else.
