Pistons owner willing to venture into luxury tax for this Stan Van Gundy team
Tom Gores has no problem spending to keep Detroit's core intact
By
Zach Harper
•
3 min read
The Detroit Pistons trusted Stan Van Gundy to not only be their coach but to also be their president. Van Gundy's success in Orlando and his impressive interview with Pistons owner Tom Gores was more than enough to get him the dual-role job. Van Gundy empowered Jeff Bower to be his right-hand man in the front office, which allowed Van Gundy to concentrate on the court during the regular season. And in the process, the duo has put together a roster that feels like a perennial playoff team and is just getting started in terms of building up into a team that can eventually challenge as a title contender.
Eventually though, that building process requires an extreme commitment from the owner from a financial standpoint. It's rare that a very good team doesn't have to dip into the luxury tax and end up spending more money for the contracts than the contracts themselves. Maybe if an owner isn't certain about the team that's been constructed, they'll want to avoid paying that extra money. But that's not the case with Gores in Detroit. He loves the core Van Gundy has put together and when he has to make that decision to go into the luxury tax, he says he'll absolutely pay it. From the Detroit Free Press:
Q: With a possible KCP extension, you could threaten the luxury tax line (an NBA mechanism to curtail teams' spending). Thoughts on being a luxury taxpayer?
Gores: "Look, if we weren't building a core, there's really no point in paying the luxury tax. Because we are building a core, would I do it? Yeah, absolutely. This is a tremendous team. If you go down the line, player by player, and especially our young folks, these are real players. You look at KCP as a very diverse player. He keeps working at his game and you look at his improvement and just like anybody else, he will improve in other areas. Part of Stan's coaching philosophy obviously is defense. So you say go into the luxury tax for nothing, then that would be silly because then we're putting the franchise behind. But given that we have such a good core, if that's what it took, and we feel we've made such progress this year, I wouldn't hesitate to do it because we want to keep getting better."
The team is currently about $5 million under the salary cap, and next year when they have to start thinking about an extension to Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is when the question of whether or not to pay it truly comes up.
In just a little over two years with the Pistons, Van Gundy has completely revamped the roster. Only Andre Drummond and Caldwell-Pope are still on the team that Van Gundy and Bower inherited back in 2014. They acquired Reggie Jackson and gave him big money. They decided to forego some spending flexibility this summer when they moved potential free agents Brandon Jennings and Ersan Ilyasova for Tobias Harris. They've brought in guys like Marcus Morris, Aron Baynes, Jon Leuer, Boban Marjanovic, Ish Smith and Stanley Johnson during this time to round out the core.
And according to Gores, they're a team that has great chemistry. That's the main reason he wants to keep them together. The talent is very good and improving. The chemistry makes you assume the play together on the court will only get better because the guys like each other and will want to sacrifice for each other. Hiring Van Gundy has been such a perfect marriage between what Gores wanted from his franchise and what Van Gundy wanted to do without having to look over his shoulder like he ended up doing at the end of his time with the Magic.
That's worth paying for.
