No deal is official, and the type of deal would impact what the Pistons are able to pull off to fill out the rest of its roster
Two weeks ago, Dennis Schroder was spotlighted as the top priority in free agency for the Sacramento Kings. One week ago, shortly after free agency began, news broke that Schroder was leaving the Detroit Pistons for the Sacramento Kings.
In the ensuing week, no deal has been officially announced. That includes the past 24+ hours when the league could officially finalize, sign, and announce all the moves that were only agreed to in principle starting on July 1.
It hasn’t been crickets, exactly. From the beginning, there has been a sense that the Kings were most interested in executing a sign-and-trade deal with the Pistons. The only issue is what the Pistons would take back.
Still reeling from the fallout of the Malik Beasley news, there were indications that the Pistons might be amenable to taking Malik Monk off of Sacramento’s hands. The 6-foot-3 guard seems to have fallen out of favor in Sactown with Schröder and Zach LaVine soaking up all the guard minutes.
Monk has had extremely successful years from deep and some frigidly cold ones, but he has blossomed into a dangerous scorer and willing passer in the years since he finally broke out in Charlotte.
The problem from Detroit’s end seems to be the length of Monk’s contract. Monk is owed $60 million over the next three seasons, and Pistons president Trajan Langdon seems intent on keeping the books clean beyond the 2026-27 season. Caris LeVert, who signed as a free agent this offseason, has a deal that only runs two years. The contract the Pistons planned on offering Beasley reportedly had a team option after the second season. The Duncan Robinson sign-and-trade has an escape hatch each season following the first.
There is also consideration of how much Monk might overlap with those already on the roster, including Jaden Ivey, who is similar in size and pegged for a similar role as Monk would play with the Pistons.
There has also been speculation that perhaps the Pistons were working diligently to reroute Monk to a third team and get a different player at a position of need — most likely a power forward.
In the interim, the Kings traded Jonas Valiancunias for Dario Saric in an effort to trim salary and more easily add Shröder. Then Valiancunias surprised everyone by exploring options to play in Europe instead of the NBA, a move the Nuggets don’t seem inclined to allow.
It seems like everything is in flux and nothing is finalized. What we THINK we know is that there is no reason the Schröder deal won’t be a sing-and-trade at this point.
The sign-and-trade would allow the Pistons to take back as much as $21 million in salary. Heck, they could even have the Hawks involved as the third team as a way to facilitate LeVert to Detroit via trade so the Pistons could retain access to their full mid-level exception. That would require finding players worth signing in free agency, of course.
If the Pistons truly don’t want Monk, and they can’t find a third team to reroute Monk to, they could simply take back a traded player exception worth $14.3 million. That would give the Pistons a calendar year to use the exception in a trade. It might amount to nothing, but it could be a valuable tool as the trade deadline approaches.
There have been off-again, on-again signs lately, mostly through sources of varying quality and mostly connected to Kings coverage, about the sign-and-trade deal being off the table. That is also technically possible, and it wouldn’t impact Detroit’s ability to sign Caris LeVert. But there is no indication the deal won’t ultimately be of the sign-and-trade variety for Detroit.
As clear as that final point might sound, there is no such clarity on when this deal will finally be made official. We are playing the waiting game, and will learn who, if any, is joining the Pistons as part of any Schröder deal.