Change (and Trades) Coming in Detroit

by Marcel Mutoni

Lost in the all-too expected firing of Flip Saunders yesterday, was Pistons GM Joe Dumars’s seething anger at the team he painstakingly put together. A team that, granted, did win a title, but has always left everyone with a feeling that they could’ve done so much more.

At the press conference announcing Saunders’s sudden unemployment, Dumars sounded like a man determined to bring about change in Motown (read: get rid of at least one of his starters.)

“Make no mistake, everybody is in play right now,” said Joe Dumars, the Pistons’ president of basketball operations. “There are no sacred cows here. You lose that sacred cow status when you lose three straight years.”

“I’ll make a significant trade,” Dumars declared. “… We have a core group of guys here that for the first time in six years I’m letting teams in the league know I’ll do a deal. … I’m open for business.”

Hear that, Rasheed, Chauncey, Tay, and Rip? Better pack your bags, just in case. Joe D is some kind of mad, and quite honestly, it’s mostly your fault.