Tom Gores got to Trajan Langdon’s Beverly Hills home at 2 a.m. on a May morning in 2024 and asked him a question that cut straight to the job: did he have the stomach for it, because it was not going to be easy. Langdon did, and the Pistons are now the East’s top seed, set to host the winner of tonight’s play-in game between the Orlando Magic and Charlotte Hornets in a first-round playoff matchup that starts Sunday.
That scene now reads like the hinge point of Detroit’s turnaround. The Pistons had just finished back-to-back seasons with the NBA’s worst record, capped by a franchise-low 14 wins and a league-record 28-game losing streak in the prior campaign. Langdon, who became president of basketball operations in 2024, said he was told, “You’re going to a team that just won 14 games and didn’t win a game for two months.”
Gores said Langdon did not flinch. “He didn’t blink. He was all in,” the owner said, adding later, “Now, I didn’t expect things to turn around as fast as they did, but I’m not surprised.” Langdon said the pitch did not scare him off. “But I knew it was for me,” he said.
The results were immediate. In Year 1 under Langdon and head coach J.B. Bickerstaff, Detroit won 44 games, Cade Cunningham became a first-time All-Star, and the Pistons pushed the New York Knicks to six games in the first round last season while making their first playoff appearance since 2019. This season, the climb became a leap: Detroit finished with an East-best 60 wins, Cunningham and Jalen Duren were All-Stars, and Bickerstaff emerged as an NBA Coach of the Year candidate.
The backdrop is what makes the pace of the rise stand out. Detroit had not won a playoff game since 2008, and the franchise spent the previous two seasons near the bottom of the league before Langdon arrived. That is the burden of the pistons schedule now, too: not just reaching the postseason, but proving the leap was no one-year burst. Sunday’s opener will show whether the top seed is the start of something durable or simply the rare season that made an old team look new.
