{"id":209,"date":"2026-07-25T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/pistons-young-core-arrives\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T18:26:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T18:26:45","slug":"pistons-young-core-arrives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/pistons-young-core-arrives\/","title":{"rendered":"Detroit&#8217;s young core has stopped being a project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A 45-win season two years after the rebuild bottomed out, built on a point guard playing at an All-NBA level.<\/p><p>The margin for error at this stage of the season is razor thin, and both benches knew it. Every possession in the fourth quarter was contested like a playoff closeout, with coaches burning timeouts early to stop runs before they became avalanches.<\/p><p>The advanced numbers tell the same story from a different angle. Since the calendar turned, the lineup&#8217;s net rating has climbed into the league&#8217;s top five, driven almost entirely by transition defense and a sharp cut in turnovers.<\/p><p>Scouts who have tracked this draft class since last summer keep coming back to the same word: physicality. The lottery names carry NBA frames already, and the workout circuit is only sharpening the separation at the top of the board.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A 45-win season two years after the rebuild bottomed out, built on a point guard playing at an All-NBA level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-league-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions\/300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stepfoxthemes.com\/courtside\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}