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new team president Trajan Langdon had a simple goal: No more playing patsy. Yet for a team coming off a 14-68 record last season that set a new mark for futility — and for a franchise with a league-worst .367 winning percentage since 2008 — he knew that would be no easy task.
“When teams look at their schedule early on and see the Pistons going into the season, they’re like, ‘Oh, circle that as a win.’ Langdon recalled. “And I (told) our guys, I wanted other teams to understand by Game 20 or 25, ‘No, that’s not just gonna happen.’”
And as it happens, he was right.
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“I take this job as a challenge, but I do it to try to put everybody else in positions to be successful, honestly,” said Langdon, who’d been a finalist for top front-office jobs in Washington and Charlotte the previous two offseasons. “So from that point, it’s validation, just because that’s what I want our organization to be about. I want myself and our staff to be about making everybody here better and creating an environment where they feel like they can be the best versions of themselves …
… “I mean, he’s very principled, he’s very secure, and he cares about the people that are around him,” Bickerstaff said of Langdon. “And when you work with somebody like that, it makes your job easier and it gives you the want and the belief to buy in. And that’s what he has created, is a place where you know the environment is awesome and you know his leadership is amazing. You buy into whatever direction he wants to go, and then he allows you to be yourself while you do it.”
That’s the sort of leader Gores had spent more than a decade looking for
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As for himself, he balks at the term “validation” despite all his immediate success in Detroit, including a 30-win improvement from last season that makes Langdon a leading candidate to win NBA Executive of the Year, along with J.B. Bickerstaff for Coach of the Year.