Detroit Pistons center Isaiah Stewart is out with a left calf strain, and head coach J.B. Bickerstaff says there’s no timeline for when the key reserve will rejoin the East-leading Pistons.
Stewart had played 20 minutes in Detroit’s 126-110 win over the Memphis Grizzlies on Friday — his seventh game back after missing the previous seven while suspended for his role in a Feb. 9 fight between the Pistons and Charlotte Hornets — chipping in 10 points, 4 rebounds (3 offensive), 1 assist and 1 block. But Bickerstaff didn’t like the way his typically energetic backup center was moving.
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“It’s something that he’s been dealing with,” Bickerstaff said before Sunday’s 119-108 loss to the Toronto Raptors, according to Omari Sankofa II of the Detroit Free Press. “It just had been kinda getting worse. He gutted it out last game and you could see he was favoring it and he was hobbling around a little bit late in his minutes.”
With All-Star center Jalen Duren manning the middle in the starting five and third-string big man Paul Reed eminently capable of stepping into a larger role, the Pistons have fared well without Stewart this season. They’ve gone 9-3 with him out of the lineup, outscoring opponents by a stellar 11.8 points per 100 possessions with him off the floor — numbers that instill confidence that the Pistons, who enter Monday’s action with a four-game lead over the Boston Celtics for first place in the East, should be able to keep a firm grasp on their spot atop the conference with Stewart sidelined.
Even so: A Detroit team that has been a bit wobbly of late — five losses in the last eight games, including defeats to the Western power Spurs and potential Eastern playoff opponents Miami, Cleveland and Toronto — could miss Stewart’s … well, you might not call it a steadying presence, exactly. But all season long, these Pistons have won largely on the strength of their defense and physicality, and Stewart’s ability to lock down the lane has played a significant part in the development of the NBA’s No. 2 defensive unit.
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Detroit opponents take just 26.3% of their field goal attempts at the rim when Stewart’s in the game, according to Cleaning the Glass — a mark that would rank second in the NBA over the course of the full season. They convert just 58.8% of those attempts in his minutes; that would be the lowest point-blank percentage in the league.
And that includes all interior tries during Stewart’s minutes. Drill down into just the ones where he himself is the closest defender, and opponents are shooting a cataclysmic 43.2% at the basket when Beef Stew contests, according to Second Spectrum — far and away the lowest mark among 233 players to guard at least 100 such up-close tries, and even stingier than last season’s 46% success rate (which ranked second in the league, behind only Chet Holmgren).
“I’m not 7-foot, I’m not 7-2, I’m not 7-3,” Stewart recently told James Herbert of CBS Sports. “The fact that I am who I am and they see me at the rim and they defer, I think it’s a respect thing. […] Not everybody’s driving in looking to score every time because of my presence and my timing on taking dunks out the air. I don’t see anybody around the league that’s an undersized center that’s able to time dunks, take dunks out the air. It does something for us. It builds momentum and it sends us heading in the right direction the other way.”
That level of interior impact, combined with Stewart’s flexibility and versatility as a switch defender on the perimeter, would make him a strong candidate for a spot on one of the two All-Defensive teams come season’s end … if he’d played enough to qualify.
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While the sixth-year veteran has appeared in 55 games this season, only 49 of them “count,” under the player participation guidelines instituted before the 2023-24 season; he has played fewer than 20 minutes eight times, and the NBA only allows players to count two contests in which they played between 15 and 20 minutes toward their year-end total. As such, as Herbert noted, Stewart needed to play in every remaining Pistons game, and to play at least 20 minutes in all of them, in order to qualify for All-Defensive honors; missing Sunday’s loss to Toronto, then, eliminated him from the running.
The silver lining to that particular gray cloud: If there’s no pressing reason to keep sending Stewart back out there to preserve his eligibility, the Pistons can afford to use whatever time they need over the next month to get him right. Detroit can proceed with caution in managing an injury that has become one of the NBA’s most common and most daunting, in hopes of ensuring that Stewart — who missed the final five games of Detroit’s 2025 NBA playoffs loss to the New York Knicks with a right knee injury — can stay on the court this postseason.
“It’s something we’re going to take time with,” Bickerstaff said Sunday. “Those are things you don’t want to mess around with. I can’t give you a timeline because we’ll always try to see how he responds. The most important thing for us is that he gets well, so we’ll take our time and make sure that he’s well.”
