Banners fly forever. When you win a championship, every bad move that came along the way is wiped clean off the slate. It’s why Joe Dumars has largely gotten a pass from Detroit Pistons fans and the wider NBA world for drafting Darko Miličić over Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade. It led to a title. When we measure Dumars’ legacy as a general manager decades from now, that championship is in the first sentence.
Dumars, as it was reported Tuesday, is set to take over his first lead executive position since leaving the Pistons more than a decade ago. He is going to be the new president of basketball operations for the New Orleans Pelicans.
As he moves into the new role, it’s worth asking … have the Pelicans bothered looking at everything Dumars did after winning that championship? Because that title came all the way back in 2004, and the 21 years that have passed since Dumars has hoisted the Larry O’Brien Trophy haven’t been nearly as kind to him as the years leading up to it. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single, unquestionably successful move of his in the two decades and change since that championship.
So please, join me on this deep dive into Dumars’ later work as we attempt to explain why the Pelicans make one of the strangest front-office hires in recent NBA history, and, more importantly, why that hire looks like such a bad idea on paper.
Dumars’ post-2004 draft history
Joe Dumars made eight first-round picks for the Pistons after winning the 2004 championship. Let’s go through each of them and evaluate not just what they got out of each player, but what they could have had at those draft slots.
- 2005: Jason Maxiell at No. 26 overall was a decent enough pick. He turned into a solid NBA role player. But four picks later, at Maxiell’s position of power forward, the New York Knicks got a future All-Star in David Lee.
- 2007: Rodney Stuckey at No. 15 was another reasonable if underwhelming choice. He played in the NBA for a decade, averaged 16.6 points per game at his peak, but never grew into an All-Star or even a good starter on a winning team. There were no obvious alternatives available on the draft board.
- 2007: Arron Afflalo at No. 27. Solid pick. A good 3-and-D role player at the end of the first round is solid value. We’ll get to where this went wrong in a little bit.
- 2009: Austin Daye at No. 15 is where the regrets start to set in. Daye didn’t do much as a professional, but do you want to know who did? Jrue Holiday at No. 17 overall and even Jeff Teague at No. 19 overall. Either would have been entirely plausible picks considering the Pistons had just traded team legend Chauncey BIllups less than a year earlier and needed to replenish the backcourt. Instead, they land on a forward who spent most of his career abroad.
- 2010: Greg Monroe at No. 7 overall was a reasonable pick at the time, but it was one that Dumars didn’t yet realize was starting to become outdated. Monroe was a post-up scorer in a league that was shifting away from post-up scoring. Two picks later, the Utah Jazz nabbed Gordon Hayward. One pick after that, the Indiana Pacers got Paul George. Those sorts of versatile wings were where the league was headed, and the Pistons missed out on both. Sure, Monroe would go on to get a max contract as a 2015 free agent… but it was with the Milwaukee Bucks.
- 2011: Brandon Knight at No. 8 is the heartbreaker. Knight was a fine player. But one pick later, at the same position, the Charlotte Bobcats took Kemba Walker, who would become an All-Star. Two picks after that, the Golden State Warriors took another star guard: Klay Thompson. The dagger? At No. 15, the San Antonio Spurs took Kawhi Leonard. All three would have been plausible Detroit picks. All three went on to far greater careers than Knight, who would go on to hurt the Pistons in another significant way a few years later (again, we’ll get to that).
- 2012: Andre Drummond at No. 9 overall is *probably* the best decision Dumars made after the 2004 championship. He made an All-Star Team, at least. But his teams never won more than 44 games, and perhaps more importantly, he directly clashed stylistically with Monroe. They were both traditional, non-shooting big men in a league that was increasingly moving toward lineups in which only one such player could survive on the floor at a time. This was another example of Dumars failing to forecast where the league was going. Ultimately, the Pistons lost Monroe for nothing because he wasn’t interested in continuing to play power forward next to Drummond.
- 2013: Kentavious Caldwell-Pope at No. 8 overall proved to be a good, winning player, but he was yet another high draft pick the Pistons lost for nothing in free agency at the first available moment, so the team didn’t exactly extract much value out of the choice. They likely would have gotten more out of C.J. McCollum, who went No. 10. They certainly would have gotten more out of Giannis Antetokounmpo, who went No. 15. Now, you might argue that Antetokounmpo would have been an outside-the-box pick that high, and that argument is valid. However, take a look at these eight players. Notice a trend? All eight of them were products of the American college system. That might be a coincidence. It might also suggest that Dumars missing on Miličić scared him off of riskier international prospects. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
There are some good players on this list, but among them, only Drummond can be said to have had a remotely decorated career as a Piston, and even he never won a playoff game for Detroit. To fail to land a single, long-term difference maker over a decade’s worth of drafts is pretty indefensible. In fairness, though, we only covered first-round picks here. The best player Dumars drafted in this stretch actually came in the second round, and he did go on to become a reliable All-Star for a consistent contender, which segues us into Dumars’ record on trades.
Dumars’ post-2004 trading history
In July of 2013, the Pistons and Bucks swapped point guards who had been drafted in the lottery. The Pistons got Brandon Jennings, the No. 10 pick in 2009. The Bucks got Brandon Knight, who went No. 8 in 2011. Jennings was more proven at that point, but as a restricted free agent, he also needed to be paid. Knight still had two years left on his rookie deal. At the time, a one-for-one swap seemed roughly fair, but Milwaukee convinced Detroit to throw in two under-the-radar prospects to seal the deal. Viacheslav Kravstov didn’t accomplish much in the NBA. But the No. 39 pick in the 2012 NBA Draft wound up accomplishing quite a bit. That was Khris Middleton.
This was a frustrating tendency of late-Detroit-era Dumars. He’d find good prospects only to give them away before they could develop. A similar, albeit far less painful move came in 2009, when he traded a then-22-year-old Amir Johnson to the Toronto Raptors for a 34-year-old Fabricio Oberto, whom they would immediately waive. Johnson went on to become a key role player for the Raptors during the early Kyle Lowry-and-DeMar DeRozan era. Arron Afflalo started 17 games in his first two seasons, was traded to Denver for a second-round pick in that same 2009 offseason, and immediately became a full-time starter and strong 3-and-D role player.
These were meaningful misses, but they began as moves on the margins. It’s important to hit on the margins, especially as a small market, but executive tenures are defined by the big moves. The biggest post-2004 trade that Dumars made came early in the 2008-09 season. Coming off of a trip to the Eastern Conference finals, Dumars flipped Chauncey Billups to the Denver Nuggets for Allen Iverson. The move worked out wonderfully for the Nuggets. Billups took them within two games of the NBA Finals.
But for Detroit? Not so much. The Pistons fell to 39-43. Iverson steadily lost playing time to Stuckey, who at the time looked like Detroit’s possible point guard of the future. The real damage from that trade, though, came over the summer. Part of the motivation for trading Billups was to clear out cap space so the Pistons could become free-agent players. At the time, the organization had a strong reputation within the league. There were rumors that they might even try to get into the famed free-agent derby of 2010 and pursue LeBron James or some of those players they missed out on in 2003, Bosh and Wade. Let’s look at whom they signed…
Dumars’ post-2004 free agency history
Dumars didn’t wait until 2010 to spend his newfound cap space. He instead chose to splurge in the underwhelming 2009 market, signing Ben Gordon to a five-year deal worth between $55 and $60 million and Charlie Villanueva to a five-year, $40 million pact. Those raw numbers look small, but remember, the cap is roughly 2.4 times higher today than it was back then. In 2024-25 dollars, that Gordon contract would have been worth between $134 and 146 million while the Villanueva deal would have come in at around $97 million.
How’d those deals work out? Well, Gordon averaged 12.4 points across three Detroit seasons. He was then cap dumped on the then-Charlotte Bobcats for Corey Maggette. Detroit convinced Charlotte to take Gordon by dangling a 2014 first-round pick in the deal. That pick wound up coming in at No. 8 overall, a pretty hefty price for what amounted to one year of savings. Villanueva, meanwhile, started 27 games across five seasons with the Pistons. He never averaged 12 points per game in Detroit.
Amazingly, neither of these deals would be the worst Dumars signed in his later Pistons tenure. With the money saved dumping Gordon in 2012, Dumars signed Josh Smith to a four-year, $54 million deal in 2013. That contract proved so disastrous that Dumars’ replacement, Stan Van Gundy, used the waive-and-stretch provision to dump Smith early in his second season as a Piston. That decision saved them money in the short term, but resulted in them paying out the remainder of his contract in installments until 2020.
Those were some of the bad deals Dumars decided to give out, yet it’s also worth remembering one of the ones that he didn’t. In 2006, fresh off of a loss in the Eastern Conference finals, the Pistons elected to let Ben Wallace walk as a free agent to sign a four-year, $60 million contract with the Chicago Bulls. On paper, this decision made sense. Wallace was starting to decline, and 2006 proved to be his final All-Star and Defensive Player of the Year season. The deal ultimately proved to be an overpay.
However, the Pistons were still trying to contend in 2006. They made it all the way to the 2007 Eastern Conference finals, where they lost to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. In the now-historic, series-altering Game 5 of that series, James scored Cleveland’s final 25 points to seal the victory. Would that have happened with Wallace protecting the rim? It’s hard to say, but it’s possible that this decision cost Detroit another trip to the NBA Finals and perhaps even a second Dumars-era championship.
To replace Wallace, the Pistons gave Nazr Mohammed the full mid-level exception, five years and $30 million. They wound up trading him midway through his second season on the deal. They reached the Eastern Conference finals again in 2008, but this is where the decline began in earnest. With it came a string of coaching changes.
Dumars’ post-2004 coaching hires
Losing Larry Brown in 2005 stung, but it was pretty predictable. Larry Brown never stays in one place for long. Hiring Flip Saunders as his replacement mostly worked. He went 176-70 in three seasons and reached the Eastern Conference finals in each of them. Had Detroit retained Wallace, he might have made the Finals in 2007. Nonetheless, he was fired after that third consecutive Eastern Conference finals loss in 2008. This is where things went off the rails.
Michael Curry was promoted off of Saunders’ bench to replace him as head coach. He went 39-43 thanks to the disastrous Iverson trade and got fired after one year. John Kuester, a journeyman assistant who worked on Brown’s bench in 2004, was brought in to replace him. He went 57-107 across two years, but that doesn’t quite do his tenure justice.
Right before the All-Star break in 2011, several Pistons players reportedly planned a boycott of a shootaround as a sort of mutiny against Kuester. They called off that boycott, allegedly, because they were informed Kuester would be laid off during the All-Star Break… except he wasn’t, so later in February, they boycotted a different shootaround. When Kuester was ejected that night, Pistons players were seen laughing from the bench.
The Kuester era ended soon after, but things didn’t improve. Lawrence Frank went 54-94 across two seasons. Mo Cheeks got just 50 games after replacing him, going 21-29 before getting dismissed himself. Dumars resigned at the end of that year, the 2013-14 season. In the 10 seasons that followed the 2004 championship, the Pistons went 409-395, just a hair above .500. He has not been an NBA general manager since then.
Dumars post-Detroit
Thus far, we have focused solely on the facts of Dumars’ stewardship of the Pistons. From here forward, we’re dealing with reporting and speculation. Dumars did not accept an official role with another team immediately after leaving the Pistons, but reports heavily linked him to… the New Orleans Pelicans.
In 2014, Dumars was attended several New Orleans Saints games with Mickey Loomis, their chief football decision-maker, according to Fletcher Mackel of WDSU. Both the Saints and Pelicans were then and still are owned by the Benson family, and until 2019, Loomis was technically the head of basketball operations for the Pelicans as well, though he largely delegated day-to-day duties to his general manager. On May 5, 2015, Grantland’s Zach Lowe reported that Dumars could be brought in for a supervisory role above then-general manager Dell Demps. No official title materialized. A week later, though, CBS Sports’ Ken Berger reported that Dumars, “a Louisiana native, has been providing input with the team and has a close relationship with Loomis and owner Tom Benson.”
The exact nature of Dumars’ influence in New Orleans has never fully been clarified, and the rumors gained and lost steam as time passed. In April of 2016, John Reid of the Times-Picayune reported there had been no discussions between Dumars and the Pelicans about a formal job offer. A year later, Steve Kyler of Basketball Insiders hinted that the Pelicans could make sweeping changes, and mentioned that the Pelicans had long been linked to Dumars. It was a simmering rumor for several years that never officially boiled over.
Here’s what we do know: the New Orleans front office at that time was officially led by Dell Demps. It was largely unsuccessful. Between the 2014-15 and 2018-19 seasons, which span Dumars’ exit from Detroit and his next official job, the Pelicans made the playoffs twice and only won a single playoff series. This era ended with Anthony Davis forcing a trade. In this entire period, the Pelicans pushed desperately to try to win right away with Davis. They made only a single first-round pick between 2014 and 2018: Buddy Hield, who was traded in the blockbuster for DeMarcus Cousins.
In February, 2019, the Pelicans fired Demps. Danny Ferry, not Dumars, was named interim general manager. In April of that year, the Pelicans hired David Griffin. Two months after that, in June, Dumars accepted his first official position with another front office, joining the Sacramento Kings.
Little needs to be said of Dumars’ time with the Kings because, as was the case in New Orleans, how much influence he had is unknowable. He stayed in Sacramento under two different lead basketball executives, Vlade Divac and Monte McNair. He held multiple titles across three years, from 2019 through 2022. Sacramento never made the playoffs in that span, and their only very notable moves were drafting and then trading Tyrese Haliburton.
While we can’t speculate on how much influence Dumars held in Sacramento, we can at least acknowledge that the Kings would be an unusual team to rebuild a career with. Notable figures in basketball often join winning organizations after getting fired to help rehabilitate their image and learn from the most successful minds in the sport. That Kings certainly don’t have that reputation. When his time in Sacramento ended, he joined the league office as its head of basketball operations.
So… what are the Pelicans thinking?
We’ve covered almost 3,000 words worth of negatives here. In the interest of fairness, we should at least acknowledge the positives. Early Dumars, before and leading up to that 2004 championship, was a genuinely great general manager. The manner in which he built that title team, a historically significant one given its lack of a true superstar, was fairly unorthodox.
The bulk of that 2004 Pistons core was built simply by Dumars identifying winning players in losing circumstances. Chauncey Billups is a perfect example of this. He was the No. 5 pick in the 1997 NBA Draft, so he was clearly talented. But Rick Pitino traded him 50 games into his rookie season, and he wound up playing for four teams in his first five seasons. Point guards take time to develop, and stability helps quite a bit. The league had mostly given up on Billups. Dumars saw an opportunity and grabbed it.
Rip Hamilton broke out in his second season in the NBA, but in his third, he was forced to share the floor with Michael Jordan in Washington. He handled it well, but it took the spotlight off of him and perhaps hid how valuable he was becoming. Jerry Stackhouse, meanwhile, was a two-time All-Star and a former scoring champion, but Dumars saw he was declining. He flipped the more proven player for the ascending one. Stackhouse never made another All-Star team. Hamilton became an essential Piston.
Ben Wallace was acquired opportunistically. When Grant Hill became a free agent in 2000, he could have signed with another team outright, leaving Detroit with nothing. Instead, he agreed to a sign-and-trade that sent Wallace back to the Pistons. Had Hill gone elsewhere, or if the Magic would have just come up with a contract structure in which he didn’t need to be signed-and-traded, Wallace would have stayed in Orlando. This was quick and creative work on Dumars’ part. He turned what could have been nothing into a whole lot of something.
Even the decision to draft Miličić, as poorly as it wound up going, was a high-upside swing based on league-wide trends at the time. Dirk Nowitzki and Pau Gasol were recent home run lottery picks out of Europe who did not develop in the American college system. There was a belief at the time, one that has proven true, that they were the beginning of a new wave of foreign stars. Dumars tried to ride that wave. He crashed because the player ultimately wasn’t good enough. But this was an example of the more creative, nimble Dumars of those early years. He was willing and able to adapt with the times.
But right around that 2004 championship, that changed. The Pistons got stale. Between 2008 and 2014, the Pistons never ranked higher than 22nd in 3-point attempts. They drafted multiple big men who needed the ball near the basket and forced them to play together even as the league was shifting away from the post. When other teams hoarded cap space to chase stars, the Pistons used theirs on middling role players. Spotty drafting was ignorable in the early years because of how successfully Dumars traded. With time, that core aged out. Dumars didn’t keep finding similar diamonds in the rough, and suddenly, his shaky draft history became more of a problem.
This sort of thing happens in every sport. The more we learn about them, the faster they change, there has been a concerted effort throughout most of the 21st century to use data and experimentation to discover what really leads to winning in just about every major, competitive endeavor. This tends to lead to turnover among unsuccessful executives clinging to strategies that no longer work. Brad Pitt said it best as Billy Beane in the Moneyball movie: “adapt or die.”
But this is ultimately a human enterprise. Decisions are made by human beings. And when the human being making those decisions is in a position to do so because of their wallet rather than their history in the sport, they can be swayed by success in the old world even if it may not be compatible with the new one. Dumars has won a championship ring as a general manager. The Pelicans could go out and interview a dozen of the smartest, up-and-coming minds in basketball and the one thing most of them would have in common is that they haven’t.
We’ve seen versions of this story play out in other sports. It generally ends badly. Jon Gruden was a great coach in the late 90s and early 2000s. The end of his tenure with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went badly, and he then spent a decade out of coaching. The Raiders brought him back in 2018 and gave him full control over personnel. He went 22-31. He was ultimately fired for off-field conduct, but his coaching and roster decisions were frequently panned. The Chicago White Sox took a similar approach in 2021 when they hired Tony La Russa as their manager 10 years after his retirement from the St. Louis Cardinals. They won at roughly the same rate as they had before his hire in his first season, and then played .500 baseball in his second. The general consensus at the time was that the game had passed him by, and he received blowback for criticizing one of his own players for hitting a home run on a 3-0 count.
These situations are all unique, but what they have in common is that they were somewhat relationship-driven. Mark Davis hired Gruden to coach the Raiders because his father, Al Davis, employed him almost two decades earlier. Jerry Reinsdorf hired La Russa in 2015 because he believed his greatest regret was firing him in 1986. Human beings are not always rational. A desire to fix an old mistake can be strong enough to lead to a new one.
We don’t know the specifics of the relationship between Dumars and the Pelicans prior the Monday’s news. The reporting has suggested that there was one. The timing of Dumars taking the Kings job, two months after Griffin got hired by the Pelicans but a full five years after he left the Pistons, is certainly curious. Perhaps he was quietly a candidate for the job then. Perhaps, after all of those years of rumors, the Pelicans feel some measure of regret for not considering him more seriously during the process that led to Griffin’s hiring.
That is, of course, speculation. So is trying to predict how well a general manager will perform in a new job, which is ultimately what a team is doing when it hires one. But that hire is so important that it’s worth evaluating the criteria that they are seemingly using to do so. While we can’t say anything definitively about the influence Dumars may or may not have had with the Pelicans last decade, we can point to his underwhelming more recent track record, and more importantly, suggest that anyone’s track record becomes less meaningful the less recent it gets.
There is a big difference between hiring a recent champion and a distant champion. The Pelicans are hiring a general manager for 2025 and beyond. Joe Dumars really hasn’t been an effective general manager since 2004 and before. Is it possible that he’s learned the lessons of his mistakes in Detroit and will be better the second time around? Sure.
But there’s a reason no other team for the past 11 years has made that bet. There’s a reason hires like this just don’t really happen anymore. There’s an understanding in the modern NBA that having built a great team two decades ago is not necessarily a qualification for doing so today. We now live in a world in which a general manager can get fired two years after a title, after all. What does it say about a general manager when he hasn’t found success for more than 20?