The Pistons have spent the past year reshaping the roster, including moving on from some former first-round picks. But the harder lesson sits with the players who never became anything close to what Detroit hoped: Killian Hayes and Isaiah Livers.
Hayes, taken No. 7 overall in 2020, and Livers, selected No. 42 in 2021, both arrived with draft capital that mattered. Neither is on an NBA roster now, even though both are still in what should be the prime of their athletic careers.
No recent Pistons pick has worn the label “bust” more heavily than Hayes. Plenty of Detroit draft choices have fallen short, but Hayes drew a different kind of frustration from fans. That anger only grew when he opened the franchise-worst 2023-24 season in the starting lineup ahead of players many viewed as more deserving.
Detroit eventually waived him in the middle of that season after he had already started earlier in the year. His reluctance to attack the basket or score aggressively made him close to unplayable at the NBA level. Over the last two years, his only chances came with the Nets and Kings, two of the league’s worst teams.
His presence also came at a cost to the players Detroit actually wanted to build around. Keeping Hayes in the rotation for so long slowed the development of prospects like Cade Cunningham, and there’s a real case that Cunningham could be further along now if he hadn’t been asked to play alongside such a negative early in his career. Once Hayes was gone, the Pistons finally started to find their footing, and that timing was no accident.
Livers is a softer version of the same problem, though he was only a second-round pick. Detroit brought him in with the idea that he could become a 3-and-D wing, the sort of piece the roster still needs.
Instead, his two-way impact never got there. By his final season with the Pistons, also the ugly 2023-24 campaign, he was defending poorly and shooting just 29% from three.
Detroit’s margin for error is thin now. The team does not have many trade chips that other clubs value highly, in part because the Pistons’ players are built for a system that does not always translate cleanly elsewhere. And because Detroit is expected to win plenty of regular-season games, its future picks are not likely to be premium ones.
That leaves the draft as one of the few real paths to cheap talent. Even later picks have to hit. That is tougher in the NIL era, with more accomplished upperclassmen staying in college longer before entering the draft.
Still, the Pistons do not have many alternatives. If they want to keep upgrading the roster, they have to do better with the picks they make. And they cannot afford more misses like Hayes and Livers.
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Ausar Thompsons recent long-term commitment gives the team one clear piece to build around, which only sharpens the focus on the rest of the frontcourt picture. Duren remains the more complicated part of the equation, and with his future now hanging over the roster, Detroit has a decision to make that could affect both its defensive backbone and the way the lineup comes together around Cunningham. [Read more 🡒]
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What makes this stretch uneasy is how much of the present and future still seems tied to Jalen Duren. His contract situation remains unresolved heading into training camp, and for a team that has already lost several rotation pieces, that is not a small detail. Detroit has built something real, but the longer this hangs around, the harder it is to ignore the possibility that one of the biggest questions is still waiting to be answered. [Read more 🡒]