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Head coach J.B. Bickerstaff of the Detroit Pistons looks on during the second half against the Houston Rockets at Toyota Center on October 24, 2025 in Houston, Texas.
J.B. Bickerstaff will be in Inglewood, California, at the Intuit Dome on Sunday, coaching in the NBA All-Star games. He won that right for leading the Detroit Pistons to the best record in the Eastern Conference.
More than a year and a half prior, however, he was thinking he might be a little more than an hour down the 405 in San Clemente, leading his kids to soccer practice.
Having been let go by the Cleveland Cavaliers in May of 2024, despite the club’s steady rise, Bickerstaff was wondering if, at age 45, his whistle could be staying in his pocket a while. Perhaps a long while.
“I didn’t think I was going to get a job,” he told Heavy Sports. “There weren’t jobs available at that point. So I was just sitting at home and hanging out with my family back in Cleveland trying to figure out what was next.
“We were going to move to San Clemente, California. There’s a soccer academy there, and we were going to go there and let the kids go to the academy and train.”
Then the phone rang. Trajan Langdon had taken over control of basketball operations in Detroit on the heels of the Pistons’ 14-68 seasons and the jettisoning of Monty Williams from the bench. Williams had said he needed a break from coaching but the Pistons in 2023 kept throwing money at him until he couldn’t say no. His one season there proved he wasn’t kidding about that break thing.
J.B. Bickerstaff Has Led a Motor City Rebirth: ‘This Is Where I’m Supposed to Be
The next season, 2024-25, with Bickerstaff and a growing base of young talent, was a Motor City rebirth. There were 44 wins and the first playoff appearance in six years. Bickerstaff finished second in Coach of the Year voting to Kenny Atkinson, the guy who replaced him with the Cavaliers.
It was a win-win for the franchises.
Though no doubt wounded by his firing in Cleveland, he is able, from the perspective now of clear conference favorite in Detroit, to see the transition as a net positive.
“Yeah. I mean, I think so,” Bickerstaff said. “You go through a lot of ups and downs, but ultimately I think you end up where you’re supposed to be.
“And I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be — with these guys, with this coaching staff. It’s like I couldn’t have been put in a better place to continue doing this job.”
Bickerstaff Took Time to ‘Reflect & to Try to Grow & Get Better’
With 40 wins already, the Pistons are in gear to leave even last season’s breakthrough drive in the dust. The roster is better, the players are individually better, and Bickerstaff thinks he’s gotten better, too. The time in limbo back in 2024 was the stage for some important inner vision.
“That month that I had off gave me an opportunity to, like, evaluate myself and think about what I was going to be at the next opportunity and just understanding that the focus should always be on the process and not just focused on the results,” he said. “In my last year in Cleveland, I let that get the best of me, where it was like results, results, results. And we skipped some of the process stuff.”
So now his summers include a conscious period of self-scouting.
“It just gives you an opportunity to do that, to reflect and to try to grow and get better,” Bickerstaff told Heavy. “That’s where my mind was back then. But it was funny, because, at that time, like I said, I didn’t know if I’d be getting another job.”
No knock on San Clemente, but Detroit winters are looking pretty damn good to J.B. Bickerstaff these days. So does an All-Star appointment this weekend in Inglewood.
Steve Bulpett has covered the NBA since 1985, the first 35 of those years as beat writer/columnist for the Boston Herald. In that time, he has gained National Top 10 honors from the APSE as a columnist, beat reporter and features writer. Since 2014, he has served as a vice president of the Professional Basketball Writers Association. More about Steve Bulpett
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