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When he was hired last spring to rescue a floundering franchise coming off its worst-ever season, how realistic did he think it was that the Pistons would find themselves in the thick of the playoff chase come February?
“It didn’t even enter my thought process, to be honest with you,” Langdon said, chuckling. “Back last summer, it wasn’t even something I thought about at all.”“These guys have put themselves in a position where they believe that they can be a playoff team, which is exciting,” Langdon said. “And at this point, we know that that’s important to them. So doing something that can add to that and give them the best possible chance this season was important to us as well.”
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“These guys have put themselves in a position where they believe that they can be a playoff team, which is exciting,” Langdon said. “And at this point, we know that that’s important to them. So doing something that can add to that and give them the best possible chance this season was important to us as well.”
…And it’s something the veteran players Langdon brought in last summer to provide some stability — along with some viability as trade bait, perhaps — were practically begging for leading up to the deadline.
None more so than Malik Beasley, the charismatic 28-year-old shooting guard who’s thriving in Detroit after signing a bargain-bin deal (one year, $6 million) in free agency last July.
“Yeah, he came to me a couple weeks ago and he said, ‘Please don’t trade me. I want to be here,’” Langdon said, smiling. “Which means a lot. In the summer, when we talked about players that we were going after, we wanted guys that want to be here. And he’s a guy that has said from Day 1 that he wants to be in Detroit, and has continued to echo that. And I think with his actions and his play, he has shown that.”
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this group has developed a strong chemistry that “is hard to find,” Langdon said.
“I don’t take that lightly,” he added. “You don’t see that often.”
So while Langdon might’ve been tempted to make a bigger splash at the deadline, and he and his staff certainly gamed out some of those scenarios, he says, “I don’t think anything got close enough where we had to have a discussion with another team that went that direction where it was pushing the chips in.”
Instead, the Pistons’ president doubled down on his promise not to “skip any steps” as he tried to build a winner in Detroit. And he probably strengthened his relationship with Cunningham in the process. A couple of weeks ago, when the two talked about the looming deadline, Langdon told the Pistons’ 23-year-old star he liked what this group had done thus far, “and I don’t want to shake that up too much.”
But Langdon made no promises, either, and says Cunningham’s response was, “Look, I trust your vision.”