Michael Porter Jr. keeps popping up in trade conversations for a reason. He checks a lot of boxes on paper, and for a team like the Pistons, the appeal is obvious.
Detroit’s matchup with the Brooklyn Nets tonight will feature a player who has been in the rumor mill for a while now. Porter is a big forward, one of the NBA’s best 3-point shooters, and he’s on a bad team with a contract that expires after this season. That combination almost guarantees his name will keep surfacing as the February deadline gets closer.
From Detroit’s side, the fit is easy to see. Porter would be a clear upgrade over John Collins and would give the Pistons another floor spacer next to Cade Cunningham. At 6-foot-10, he shoots more than nine 3-pointers a game and hits 40 percent of them, which makes him something close to the stretch-four version of what Detroit wants Collins to be.
But that’s where the neat part ends.
The trade itself is the obstacle, and it’s a big one. Porter Jr.’s $40 million salary would be tough for the Pistons to match without sending out at least three players. Collins would almost certainly have to be part of the deal, but he can’t be moved until December 15th, and even then his salary wouldn’t get Detroit nearly far enough.
That likely leaves Ron Holland II and either Isaiah Joe or Kevin Huerter as additional outgoing pieces, and that would take a real bite out of the Pistons’ depth.
There’s also the Brooklyn side of it. Why would the Nets do this without draft picks attached? Porter is a good player, but if the return is three rotation players and a couple of picks for someone who becomes an unrestricted free agent after the season, that’s a hard sell.
And that’s the bigger issue for Detroit. If the move doesn’t work out, the Pistons would have given up a lot of future flexibility for a short-term swing.
Even if they did manage to keep him, there’s still the question of whether they’d want to be the team paying his next contract. That deal would likely be expensive, and it would carry him into the wrong side of 30.
So yes, Porter makes sense as a basketball fit. But for the Pistons, the cost, the depth hit, and the timing all make this one a tough fit to actually pull off. He also doesn’t answer their secondary creation problem, which leaves the whole idea with the same flaw it had from the start.
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