| The Detroit News
It’s Troy Weaver’s team now.
That much is obvious after a whirlwind NBA Draft night that saw the Pistons’ new general manager — five months to the day after he signed on the dotted line here — start hammering away on his new rebuilding project. Or “restoration” project, as he calls it.
This isn’t about changing the drapes or applying a fresh coat of paint in the living room or installing some new appliances. This is more than that. A lot more.
“I mean, we’re building a whole new thing,” said Killian Hayes, the Florida-born, French-reared teenager Weaver tapped as his point guard of the future Wednesday night.
And that move — Hayes to the Pistons with the No. 7 overall pick — was about the only one that wasn’t a surprise on a night that was both long overdue and nearly impossible to keep up with, as Weaver rolled up his sleeves and went to work.
The Pistons turned three trades into four draft picks and one dramatically-altered vision for the future of this franchise. That’s the succinct way of explaining everything that transpired over the course of three or four hours Wednesday, from a pre-draft swap with the Houston Rockets to a stunning three-way trade that sent Luke Kennard to the Los Angeles Clippers and put the Pistons back on the clock for a third time in the first 20 picks.
Weaver wasn’t able to talk about most of that effort when he finally met with media just before midnight. The draft was still wrapping up, and trades weren’t yet official with the league office.
Attack mode
But the GM was able to explain himself, and the approach he took, one that most diehard Pistons fans — and that’s all that’s left, isn’t it? — no doubt appreciated.
“We just wanted to be aggressive and attack the draft,” Weaver said. “That’s always going to be our way of doing business. … We were gonna attack the draft, we’re gonna attack free agency, we’re gonna attack everything.
“I said coming in this was gonna be a restoring. The two iterations of the great Pistons teams, that was their mentality. They were aggressive, they were on the attack. And we want to follow suit. That’s the mantra and we’ll hopefully continue to be aggressive. But we wanted to set the tone.”
More: NBA Draft recap: Crazy night for Pistons; Michigan State stars fall
Somebody had to, right? Because we’ve fallen for too many head-fakes here in Detroit recently. And the results have been exactly what you’d expect from a franchise that couldn’t decide which way it was headed.
Now we’ve got a better idea, and maybe they’ve got a more sensible plan, one that owner Tom Gores and his front office had at least hinted at last winter when they dumped Andre Drummond and Reggie Jackson and severed most of the ties from the Stan Van Gundy era.
Almost all of them, in fact, because a quick check of the current roster shows the longest-tenured Piston is now … Blake Griffin? Yep, that tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it?
But this is how it’s supposed to happen in professional sports, or at least in the NBA, where the Pistons have spent the last decade or so idling on a dead-end road.
Weaver signaled he wasn’t messing around earlier this week when he sent third-year guard Bruce Brown — an overvalued fan favorite here — to Brooklyn for a 2021 second-round pick and a player (Dzanan Musa) that won’t ring many bells.
Then the Pistons’ GM did what he’d said he might do a couple weeks ago, when he talked openly about “leveraging cap space to get assets.” On Wednesday, that meant helping the cap-strapped Rockets offload Trevor Ariza’s contract in exchange for the 16th pick in this draft. (Houston also gets a heavily-protected future pick from Detroit that might not be conveyed for years.)
But the real stunner came after Weaver had already made his first two picks in Hayes and Washington center Isaiah Stewart. That’s when the news broke that the Pistons had jumped in a three-team deal with the Nets and the Clippers and parted company with Kennard, who was a nice player but also nasty reminder of the failures (Donovan Mitchell, anyone?) of the past regime.
Weaver’s new wave
There was one more move after that — with Utah, no less — to add another second-round pick in this draft. And when the dust had settled, there was an incoming rookie class that certainly looks the part, given Weaver’s track record in Oklahoma City.
The three first-round picks are all high-character, hard-nosed competitors. But they’ve also got some unique traits, whether it’s Saddiq Bey’s shooting at his size or Stewart’s strength in the paint or Hayes’s crafty playmaking ability at the point. (Weaver compares him to a “bigger” Goran Dragic.) Look, I don’t know if Dwane Casey is fully on board with a youth movement quite like this at this stage of his career, but these are the kind of players he can work with, no questions asked.
Same goes for the veterans who are sticking around, at least for now — Griffin, Derrick Rose and what’s left of the rest. Training camp starts in a couple weeks, and they’ll all need nametags, I’m guessing. But they won’t need motivation.
And in Hayes, the Pistons really do feel as if they’ve found a cornerstone piece of their future. Others do, too, for what it’s worth.
“I think his size, his passing ability, his craft in the paint are all things that really stand out,” ESPN draft analyst Mike Schmitz said, noting that the 19-year-old Hayes was probably scouted more than any international player in this draft.
He played in the Jordan Brand Classic as a 15-year-old, was MVP of the U16 European Championships later that summer and spent his high school years playing in a men’s professional league, first in France and then in Germany this past season where he became the starting point guard for a new coaching staff in Ulm.
“He was in a situation where they put the ball in his hands and they said, ‘You’re young, but we’re gonna try to build around you and let you play through mistakes,’” Schmitz said. “And I think you kind of saw him reap the benefits of that.
“So I think he’s an interesting long-term play. I’m not sure he’s gonna come in right away and save your franchise. But if you kind of surround him with good pieces and you’re patient with him and he continues to get better as a perimeter shooter, then you really, really might have something.”
The Pistons really might, too. And if first impressions mean anything, Weaver’s tone-setting should resonate.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @JohnNiyo