Jalen Duren is staring at a decision that gets tougher the longer it drags on.
The Detroit Pistons center has until Oct. 1 to accept his $9.6 million qualifying offer unless the team agrees to move the deadline, and there’s been no sign that’s coming. If he chooses that path, betting on a bigger payday elsewhere next summer, the numbers and the history both work against him.
ESPN reported Tuesday that none of the 43 players who have accepted a qualifying offer since 1999 have gone on to make an All-NBA or All-Star team. Duren would be the first.
That’s the gamble in front of him: leave behind a $200 million, fully guaranteed offer from Detroit, play next season for under $10 million, and hope that he can land a four-year, $189 million max deal next summer. Even then, that contract would pay slightly less than what he could have locked in by staying with the Pistons. And that assumes a max is even there for him.
For all the tension around this process - including Duren’s frustration with Detroit’s stance on things like weight stipulations - it still feels difficult to picture him passing up guaranteed money of that size.
The players who accepted qualifying offers before him were not weighing nearly this much.
And that’s what makes this situation so striking on Sept. 29.
The offseason is over, media day has already passed, practice is starting, and Duren has already taken this all the way to the edge. At this point, it would not be surprising if he simply decided to take the qualifying offer anyway, even if that would mean his holdout ends with him back in Detroit.
There’s also the obvious downside to playing a full season on $9.6 million: one injury, one rough year, and his market could shrink fast. In that scenario, he could look back and regret not taking the Pistons’ $200 million offer. That risk is very real.
Simple math says as much. If those 43 players had had a $200 million deal waiting for them, they would not be part of that group. Duren is more established than most of them after the season he just had, and he’s still young, but that only makes Detroit’s offer look even more like the kind of security a player should be happy to grab.
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