JALEN DUREN SAT in front of a Detroit Pistons logo as a few thousand season-ticket holders gathered inside Little Caesars Arena in a late February player meet and greet.
The team was split into four groups stationed in the corners of the court, fans moving in a steady line, offering handshakes, fist bumps and quick words of encouragement. Music pulsed over the speakers while highlights from the franchise’s most successful season in two decades looped across the video board above.
For the most part, Duren, dressed in gray team sweats, a black Detroit Tigers cap and a black jacket, kept it moving. He greeted each person, occasionally spun a basketball in his hands, posed for photos and said little.
Then a man in a red Pistons cap and matching sweats stepped forward and called out a phrase that reached back to the franchise’s past.
“Bad Boys Rule!”
Duren looked up, and for a moment the line stalled. Then he and his teammates broke into laughter.
Over the past two seasons, as the Pistons have made an improbable climb from the league’s basement to the top of the standings, the team’s success has conjured memories of the club’s glory days. Meanwhile, Duren’s imprint has grown alongside them. He is the team’s center, and also, something like its center of gravity.
Point guard Cade Cunningham remains the team’s engine, leading scorer and primary playmaker. He was in the thick of the MVP conversation before a collapsed lung on March 17 sidelined him for 11 games.
But the 6-foot-10, 250-pound Duren has become equally important, the second option who punishes opponents in the paint, anchors the defense and, as much as anyone, embodies the franchise’s longstanding hardscrabble identity. He was named an All-Star for the first time this year, the reward for a breakthrough campaign in which he averaged a career-high 19.5 points — more than seven points higher than last season — on 65% shooting.
Duren’s role expanded when Cunningham was sidelined, and the Pistons kept winning, going 8-3 with the Boston Celtics in position to take advantage had they stumbled. The offense held steady in Cunningham’s absence, averaging 116.8 points, while the defense tightened, holding opponents to 107.7 points, more than two points better than before the injury.
“I’m just proud of how we just keep at it and keep fighting through adversity,” Duren says, adding that his own play is “not anything that just happened. This is months and months and years of work that I’ve been putting in and now the world is starting to see.”
Coming into the postseason, the Pistons are the Eastern Conference’s top seed, and their fate might hinge on whether he can sustain this level of play and, perhaps more importantly, how he leads.
The leadership part, of course, is often the differentiating factor for how a team goes from also-ran to contender. A Sterling K. Brown-type of come up only happens if a team figures out who it is and enacts that identify upon its opponents. Defense and physicality are what the Pistons are best at, and in last year’s postseason, they hinted at their potential, forcing the favored New York Knicks to six games.
After a 60-win regular season, when they outmuscled teams, this iteration of the Pistons came into the playoffs with a year’s worth of momentum. Whispers of a Finals run were even discussed.
Then reality swiftly put the coronation on pause as the postseason began.
Duren opened the playoffs with one of his worst games of the season, taking just four shots and finishing with eight points and seven rebounds in a dispiriting 112-101 loss to the Orlando Magic on Sunday. Duren was consistently outplayed in Game 1, struggling on both ends of the court. Most jarring was that he couldn’t rally his teammates in the ways he has all year.
“They’re going to put a bunch of bodies in the paint to try to make it difficult on him,” coach J.B. Bickerstaff says. “Our pick-and-roll game, making sure we’re executing properly there can create space for him. So, it was a good opportunity for us to see, and then we’ll go prepare for the next one.”
In Game 2, he played better, finishing with 11 points, nine rebounds and four assists as Detroit used a dominant third quarter to blow out Orlando 98-83. Duren was more active in this game, but his play still didn’t reach the level he showed throughout the year.
The test for Duren will be whether he can steady himself and meet the moment as the competition levels up. If not, their playoff run will likely end sooner than anticipated.
THROUGH DIFFERENT ERAS, the best Pistons teams have measured themselves not by flash, but by toughness. It is the same sensibility that shaped past championship squads led by Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars and Bill Laimbeer in the late 1980s and later those mid-2000s teams guided by Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton and Ben Wallace. The current Pistons team carries that lineage forward. Or at least it is trying to establish the necessary mentality to do so.
In a February win over Charlotte, he took a foul from Hornets’ center Moussa Diabaté that left him stumbling. The two quickly went forehead to forehead before Duren mushed his right palm into Diabate’s face, setting off a brief melee that resulted in four players getting ejected and multiple suspensions, including a two-game ban for Duren.
Two months later, in one of the final games of the regular season, the teams met again in another tense contest. There was more talking, a few shoves, but no fight. After the final buzzer, the victorious Pistons walked off without exchanging handshakes, a moment that Duren helped set in motion
“He’s super young, but he’s super assertive,” reserve forward Paul Reed says. “He knows what he wants. He is not scared of the moment. He’s not scared to step up and say something. He does not hesitate to bring energy to the group.”
It is this kind of spontaneous leadership that can galvanize winning teams, which the Pistons lacked during their many losing seasons. With Duren, it extends beyond the court into the locker room, where he helps keep everyone loose, and most often, the one in control of the music.
“He’s always on the aux,” says second-year forward Ronald Holland II, whose locker sits beside his. On some nights it is old school R&B. On others, rapid fire rap, or maybe some reggae. “He’s one of the most versatile people on the team when it comes to music.”
It is a small detail, but on a young team that only recently learned how to win, it helps establish a rhythm.
Duren has been able to help carry his teams since the Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania, native was a fifth grader throwing down his first dunks. To some extent his elite athleticism obscures the finer points of his game, which he has been methodically developing for years.
By the time Duren finished middle school, he had become something of a phenomenon. He was not yet consumed by the game, even as he was gaining recognition at all-star camps and on the grassroots circuit.
“I did not take it seriously and really do basketball workouts,” Duren says. “I played AAU in middle school, but I was just playing. I was just big.”
Duren was recruited to play high school ball at Roman Catholic, a respected Philadelphia school with a powerhouse team, which included some of his AAU teammates. He made an immediate impression on the coaching staff.
“He had the basics down to be a big,” says D.J. Irving, then an assistant coach at Roman Catholic, who is now an assistant at Florida Gulf Coast University. “He had really good hands at the time, which was not normal for a 14-year-old big man. He could catch lobs, and he could run. But he didn’t really have a ton of skill.”
Irving, who was a three-time all-conference guard at Boston University and went on to play professionally in Spain, would often stay after practice to play one-on-one with Duren. Afterward, he usually would drive Duren to a relative’s home in Chester, just outside Philadelphia, where his mother would pick him up after work.
“We just got close from those car rides,” Irving says. “He always had this maturity about him. His voice was as deep as it is now. Sometimes, I was like, ‘Is this kid actually 14?”‘
That season, Duren helped lead a stacked Roman Catholic squad to the 2020 Catholic League championship, and he held his own against highly touted opponents. After the season, Irving asked Duren what his workout plans were for the summer, drawing a blank look. “He said he didn’t know. He had never worked out before,” Irving says.
Irving took it on himself to craft a summer workout plan. They did footwork drills, form shots, short hook shots, touch around the basket and ballhandling. At the end, they would play a few minutes of full court one-on-one.
Irving says he does not remember Duren beating him that summer, or if he did, it happened once or twice. What stood out, he says, was Duren’s rapid improvement. And the more Duren improved, the more he wanted to work.
“I was so raw,” Duren says. “I honestly was just playing basketball because I was tall. He showed me the way and showed me what working is.”
From there, Duren began to take off, adding a short jumper to his offensive game and tightening his handle as his scoring and rebounding improved. By the next summer, the dynamic had shifted when Irving and Duren went head-to-head.
“He was so long and quick off his feet, I was having hard time getting my shot off,” Irving says. “You could see the development before your eyes. The good part was that he was excited to get better.”
In search of better competition, Duren transferred to national power Montverde Academy in central Florida for his junior year of high school, where his team included four future NBA players, including Ryan Nembhard and Jalen Hood-Schifino. The team won the GEICO High School Basketball National Championship and Duren emerged as the nation’s top recruit in his class. Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, Duren skipped his senior year of high school and went to the University of Memphis.
The Pistons were stuck in a historically brutal stretch when they acquired Duren, who was the 13th pick, via a draft night trade with the Knicks. He was 18, fresh off a one-year stop in college and stepping into what looked like a perpetual rebuild. Detroit had won just 23 games the season before and had not finished above .500 in seven seasons. The franchise cycled through two coaches and totaled only 31 wins across Duren’s first two years, a stretch that included a 28-game losing streak during the 2023-24 campaign.
Offensively, Duren was mainly a rim runner, who averaged 11.6 points and 10.3 rebounds while shooting 65.3% over his first three seasons. On the other side of the ball, he was a quick and powerful athlete, but not yet adept at the finer details of impactful defensive playmaking.
Each season he took a step forward, and this year in particular, with being named a finalist for the Most Improved Player award, the hard work is paying off.
“He’s grown in so many different ways,” Bickerstaff says after a midseason game against Oklahoma City. “His understanding of how important it is for him to dominate the paint … there are guys grabbing his chest, grabbing his jersey, pulling him down. But he understands how important it is for us to finish possessions. Offensively, his ability to attack in different ways has come a long way.”
When Duren is clicking offensively, “he’s unstoppable, and teams have to make very difficult decisions,” Bickerstaff says. “Coverages have to change, the amount of bodies they put on him has to change, and it opens it up for everybody else.”
He has become better at throwing passes from the elbow, facing up defenders and making quick dribble moves to the basket. “He’s just grown as a whole,” Cunningham says about Duren. “He’s gotten better at everything that he was doing. We have full faith in just getting him the ball in there, him going and figuring it out and getting us points.”
Duren spends hours going over film, which has allowed him to figure out ways to cut off opponents with sharper rotations and otherwise tighten his once questionable defense. His defensive rating has improved from a below average 116.2 as a rookie, to this season’s 108.2.
Duren says losing tested his mettle, even as they deepened his desire to improve. “It was tough mentally and physically,” Duren says. “Coming into the league, you want to be great. You want to come in and just get rolling. But it didn’t work like that for me. It didn’t work like that for our team.”
He believed the Pistons would eventually build a team that could win. The talent, he says, was coming together. What the group lacked was experience, confidence and the intangible knowledge of what it takes to win at the professional level.
“I never tried to soak in the fact that, ‘Oh, we’re losing,'” Duren says. “I was more like, ‘Yo, how can I get out of this cycle? I don’t want to be losing my whole career.’ So, I focused on what I could do to better myself and my teammates.”
Even as he enjoyed the money and privileges that come with the league, there were moments when it felt distant, like something happening around him rather than to him. The team got little national attention, and when it did it was for the wrong reasons. “We didn’t really feel the impact of being in the league,” Duren says. “We were like the joke of the NBA.”
On the court, he kept working. Away from it, he looked for stillness, something he continues as the Pistons have found their footing. Music is often where he settles. Much of it traces back to what his mother played around the house and during car rides, Michael Jackson, Charlie Wilson and his favorite, Erykah Badu. Other times, he drifts toward rock, such as UK artist Yungblud.
Duren describes music as a way to settle himself. It is almost always playing at home or through his headphones. He rarely makes it to concerts, though he did see Badu once. “It was the best concert I’ve ever been to,” he says, drawn to the calm and the spiritual vibe in her songs.
He also turns to meditation, another way to quiet the noise around him.
“I take that very seriously,” he says. “I like to be at peace, to settle my brain and just relax.”
These sustained efforts, working and trying different things to get better, have set Duren up for success and likely set an example for his teammates.
When the Pistons’ breakthrough finally came, it seemed to happen all at once. Detroit won 44 games last season after winning just 14 the year before, the first team in NBA history to more than triple its win total in a single year. Duren calls the transformation a combination of talent and belief. “I think confidence is the word because no matter who is out there now, we believe we can win,” he says.
The winning has returned in a way that is familiar in Detroit. The team ranked third in the league in points allowed, relying on relentless ball pressure to slow opponents. Ausar Thompson, a 6-foot-7 swingman, is one of the league’s best on-ball defenders, whose quick feet allow him to stay in front of crafty offensive players and make pick-and-rolls difficult to execute.
The team leads the league in blocked shots, even though it does not have a dominant shot blocker such as Victor Wembanyama or Chet Holmgren. The Pistons also led the league in total steals with 856.
Offensively, they are almost a throwback. They finished near the bottom of the league in 3-pointers made, relying instead on pick-and-rolls, points off turnovers and points in the paint.
Whether this style of play can succeed on the biggest stage is unknown. Defensive-led teams are in the minority in today’s NBA. Even factoring in the Thunder’s title run last year, OKC plays a different kind of defense than what the Pistons employ, and when all else fails can rely on the razor-sharp offensive execution of Shai-Gilgeous Alexander. Detroit’s heavy-handed approach allows them far less margin for error.
That said, a 60-win season offers its own answer, even if it does not silence every doubt. And for a franchise that traditionally has experienced success on its own terms, the optimism is warranted.
“I think the similarity to those other teams is sort of a coincidence,” Duren says. “We have guys who are just passionate about the game, guys who are natural aggressors, guys who are natural alphas. So it just kind of fits into the history.”
Duren credits Isaiah Stewart, the 6-foot-8, 250-pound forward known as one of the league’s most fearsome players, with indoctrinating him into the Pistons style. From their earliest workouts together four years ago, Stewart banged Duren whenever he could, bringing an edge to every possession. Over time, their competition formed a tag team built on force.
“We battle, man,” Stewart says. “We still battle every day. We push each other and when you have a stablemate like that and you are working eight months a year, you grow a bond. You grow a brotherhood.”
With the playoffs here, Duren has more immediate aspirations. He believes the Pistons can win a championship this season. He also wants to be recognized as one of the top big men in the league. Those two goals are intertwined, one only possible if the other fully manifests.
His game has come a long way, but he knows he can be even better. For his part, Duren is eager to grow.
“I’m a big believer in everything that is earned,” Duren says. “I don’t want anything handed to me. The guys who are regarded as top in my position have earned that. And I am going to do my part to earn it too.”
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