The Detroit Pistons are already dealing with the downside of a summer that stretched too long around Jalen Duren.
Detroit announced on Sunday that Duren will be re-evaluated in two weeks after he exited Friday’s win over the Heat in the second quarter with a hamstring injury. It came in the second regular-season game, and because it’s a soft-tissue issue, the offseason situation around the center is hard to ignore.
On the latest episode of the "Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective" podcast, Windhorst pointed to that unusual summer when discussing the injury.
"I don't know anything about this. Let's just say that when a player who doesn't have a standard summer has a soft-tissue injury...
I don't know. I'm just saying that when I saw that, I actually got a text from a scout saying you had to expect something like that."
There’s no way to say with certainty that the offseason is the reason Duren is sidelined now, but his restricted free-agent situation dragged all the way to Oct. 1. He also did not join team workouts during the summer while the contract situation played out.
Duren was still working out, but he was doing it without the normal rhythm of a full offseason. That mattered, because he was unsigned and carrying a $9.6 million qualifying offer, which meant an injury during the negotiation standoff could have wiped out his shot at a major payday.
The injury profile itself fits the concern. Cleveland Clinic wrote that "sudden movements with a lot of force or repetitive movements with normal force cause muscle strains." That lines up with the way Duren was playing early in the season.
He appeared in only two preseason games, averaging 17.5 minutes, then logged 28 minutes in Detroit’s season-opening win over Boston - the same average he posted per game in 70 games last season. Against the Celtics, he looked quicker than he did a year ago and played with the kind of force Detroit wants from him on both ends.
That same force may have come with a cost if he pushed too hard too soon.
Even when Duren is cleared in two weeks, that does not guarantee an immediate return. Soft-tissue injuries can come back, so once he’s available again, the Pistons will need to be deliberate about easing him back into action.
That’s especially true for a team that just beat Philadelphia on Sunday despite missing Duren and Ausar Thompson, who was out with a right ankle sprain. The Sixers were without Joel Embiid and VJ Edgecombe, but Detroit still found a way to get the win.
Paul Reed helped carry some of that load, though Detroit does not want to lean on him that heavily over the long haul. That’s part of why the Pistons gave Duren a fully guaranteed $200 million.
Injuries happen, and some are impossible to stop. But Detroit still has a responsibility to keep its players as prepared as possible, and in Duren’s case, the path to that point was messier than it should have been. He looked physically ready entering training camp, but getting back to game speed after a summer like that is no small ask.
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It is still early enough for all of that to change, and the standings will look different soon enough. Still, the Pistons are doing more than surviving a rough patch. They are forcing the Easts heavyweights to confront a simple problem they would rather not address: if Detroit can keep stacking wins while short-handed, how comfortable should anyone else be assuming the usual order will hold? [Read more 🡒]