Michael A. FletcherMultiple AuthorsApr 23, 2026, 08:19 AM ET
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”