The Pistons Have the NBA's Best Defense and No Jalen Duren — the Next Two Weeks Will Tell Us What That's Really Worth

Detroit is 5-1, tied with Boston for the second-best record in the East behind a 6-1 Philadelphia team, and the Pistons got there by beating the Celtics, Heat and 76ers on the way out of the gate. They were the last undefeated team in the conference until New York — the defending champion, winless at the time — handed them a 111-97 loss at Madison Square Garden.

That's the tidy version of the story. The messier, more interesting one is that Detroit has done all of this while missing its All-NBA center.

Jalen Duren strained his right hamstring in the Oct. 23 win over Miami, a game in which he played only ten minutes, and the team announced he'd be re-evaluated in two weeks. He's the guy who averaged 19.5 points and 10.5 rebounds on 65 percent shooting across 70 games last season. Losing that, on top of absences for Ausar Thompson and Isaiah Joe, should have cracked the foundation of a team whose entire identity is built on the interior.

Instead, the defense got better.

The numbers don't look like a hot streak

Detroit allows 101.8 points per game and owns a 104.3 defensive rating, the best mark in the league — nearly four points clear of second-place Toronto. The net rating sits at 8.2 (seventh overall), the point differential is plus-8.0, and the recent form reads 5-1 with four wins in the last five. This isn't a team winning shootouts and hoping. It's a team grinding games into the mud and finishing them.

The individual substitutions explain it. Paul Reed has slid into the middle and given Detroit 13.8 points, 7.0 rebounds and 0.7 blocks on 63.4 percent shooting — a different kind of center than Duren, one who plays more like a perimeter-in big than a rim-runner. Ausar Thompson's minutes have crept up and so has his confidence; he's at 8.8 points, 7.4 rebounds and 5.2 assists with 1.2 steals, functioning as a connective piece rather than a project. Cade Cunningham is steady at 22.2 points, 7.2 assists and 5.5 rebounds on 46.5 percent shooting, though his 4.0 turnovers a night are the kind of tax that gets heavier in close games.

The part that should worry Detroit

The offense is where the Duren absence bites. Detroit scores 109.8 per game and shoots 36.3 percent from three as a team — respectable, not dangerous. With Duren out, Duncan Robinson has become the second option at 16.8 points per game, and that's a role he's being asked to fill by volume rather than by design. A team whose number two scorer is a movement shooter is a team that has to win the possession battle every night.

And the schedule isn't going to cooperate. Detroit heads to Charlotte on Nov. 2 to face a 3-4 Hornets team that gives up 106.4 points a night but also scores just 98.3 — a matchup that should favor the Pistons' defense. Then Philadelphia, 6-1 and the best record in the East, comes to Detroit on Nov. 4. That's a measuring-stick game, and it may land right around Duren's re-evaluation window.

There's also the broader validation angle. One points-based power rating has Detroit at No. 1 with an 11.9-point neutral-field rating, up from 8.9 a season ago, against a schedule rated 2.5 points above average. That's the model saying the 5-1 start isn't smoke. The market, per that same rating, hasn't fully bought in — which is a reflection of how the Pistons were treated all offseason, not a verdict on what they've actually done.

Detroit spent last season proving the No. 1 seed wasn't a fluke, and the front office committed to Duren with an extension rather than chasing a star. The next two weeks are the first real test of whether that bet was right: can a defense-first team survive without the defensive anchor, or does the whole thing tilt the moment the schedule stiffens?