Pistons restricted free agent center Jalen Duren will sign a five-year, $200MM contract to stay in Detroit, agent Chafie Fields tells Shams Charania of ESPN (Twitter link).
Duren’s new contract is fully guaranteed, Charania adds.
It’s a straight five-year deal, a source tells Sam Amick of The Athletic (Twitter link), with no options or incentives.
Duren waited until the last minute to accept Detroit’s guaranteed $200MM proposal, which Charania says had been on the table for the past two weeks (Twitter link). The Pistons reportedly included weight-related incentives in previous offers, which ranged between $170-190MM over five years, per Charania.
Duren had until 11:59 pm ET to decide whether to accept his one-year, $9.6MM qualifying offer to hit unrestricted free agency next year or sign the five-year, $200MM deal. His new contract is worth a little more than what his projected salary ($198.8MM) would have been over the next five years had signed the QO and then signed a four-year max deal with a rival team next summer.
According to Charania, Duren was mulling his options all the way up to the deadline and had been hoping for possible sign-and-trade scenarios to emerge, but the Pistons showed no interest in entertaining those concepts throughout the offseason and held firm on their final offer.
Ultimately, Duren decided that potentially risking $190MM to take his chances as an unrestricted free agent next year wasn’t worth it. The consensus among both rival team executives and other agents is that Duren arrived at the “sensible decision,” tweets Jake Fischer of The Stein Line and Bleacher Report.
The 22-year-old big man is coming off a fourth season in which he averaged 19.5 points, 10.5 rebounds and 2.0 assists while shooting 65.0% from the field and 74.7% from the foul line in 70 regular season contests (28.2 minutes per game). Duren was named to his first All-Star game and earned a spot on the All-NBA third team, which made him eligible for a five-year, $287MM contract from Detroit (as opposed to the 25% max of $239.2MM over five years).
As productive as he was during the regular season, Duren’s disappointing 2026 playoff showing clouded his outlook to some extent. He averaged 10.2 PPG, 8.5 RPG and 2.1 APG while shooting 51.4% from the floor and 67.4% from the line in 14 postseason outings (30.1 MPG). The top-seeded Pistons were eliminated in the second round by Cleveland.
More to come…
