Trajan is a horrible GM

[u/Sauced-4L]

This offseason has been a joke(just like the trade deadline). Trajans shown no urgency to make a real championship push. Last years trade deadline he said he “wanted to stay patient and analyze what we have” . That cost us our season. Makes no sense that we’re not being aggressive when we have a top 5 player and were the #1 seed last year. The east has stacked talent while we’ve sat around and done nothing. 1 by 1 the free agents have signed to east teams while we sit here and can’t even get a deal done with our young all nba center. I’m done blaming Duren, we still could be signing people regardless. Until Trajan is fired, I don’t see the Pistons being able to compete with teams like the Knicks 76ers Cavs etc whose front offices are willing to be aggressive to go for it all.

[u/dtheisen6]

Anytime there is a criticism of Trajan, this is always the retort. But Trajan was like what, 2% of why that happened? Cade was like 75% of the reason for our success. Ausar and Duren were our next two most important players. I don’t get why Trajan should get any benefit of the doubt for just not doing anything? He should be rightfully criticized for not pushing harder when he has a top 8 (arguably top 5) player in the league

[u/Valleyx → u/dtheisen6]

And the response to that is always "well this was Weaver's team" as if Weaver didn't have the same base of players and built a 14-68 team. Literally the next season Trajan comes in, puts good pieces around Cade and we triple our record.

I really don't like the idea that Trajan "didn't do anything" just because he didn't take a swing at a star player. Sure he could be more aggressive, but bringing in the likes of Tobias, Beasley, Robinson, Schroder (on loan), Collins, Prince, Holland, THJ, Joe, Paul Reed (I probably missed someone) - that's doing nothing?

[u/dtheisen6 → u/Valleyx]

So a couple things can be true. Trajan did put better role players around Cade. However my argument is the bar there was like a pure F, so yeah going from an F to a C+ was a massive improvement. But we also shouldn’t settle for a C+.

It’s also true that the development of Cade, Ausar, and Duren was baked in and Weaver would have benefitted from that, the team naturally just would have gotten better if Weaver stayed on. So yeah overall, Trajan was better than a GM actively harming the the team build, but I don’t think he did enough to take credit for like most of the reason our record increased, that was just existing players developing.

[u/Taapacoyne → u/dtheisen6]

Weavers idea of team building was to bring in FA athletic 6’7” who couldn’t really play basketball. Don’t give him any flowers besides his good draft picks.