So here's the idea, we may not know how available players are or how much they'd be willing to accept in Free Agency, but we should know what we want from our rebuilt team. Here's an attempt at that.

The first thing we need is a set of players that have:
-Fresh legs - What this pertains to is how much basketball the player has played in the last 2 years and if they're capable of a heavy load for a several year stretch. A great example would be a player like the Birdman, despite being 28, he is coming off the bench in Denver and is coming off of a 2 year league suspension. So his body is much fresher than an average 28 year old NBA player. The opposite of that would be Tayshaun who is 29, but his body is worn to the point that he's playing like a 32-33 year old (by the end of the regular season).

-Athletes - The future of NBA defense is athletics. We can no longer depend on hard fouls, hand checks, and other types of defense. If teams like Atlanta and Denver have proven anything, they've shown that having 5 athletes on the floor, with the fundamentals, can do great things defensively. I don't think an example is really required.

-Hungry/Hardworkers - The definition of this would be a guy like KG pre-championship. I think guys that have shown glimpses but haven't been given a real chance fit this bill. Its more difficult to gage whether or not a hungry player would pan out, because i saw Fabio as a player that fit that bill. I think Marcin Gortat has that ability to play with a chip on his shoulder. I would consider this a Pistons core quality.

-Consummate team players - Again, this one is somewhat difficult to gage because sometimes a player takes more shots to get better stats to get more money, but once that new contract is signed, they become a different player. Ben Gordon would be a good player to monitor regarding contract-year syndrome. I would consider this a Pistons core quality.

Alright, that being said, I would also prefer to get rid of the remaining characters from our old core. I have several reasons for this. One reason is because our old attitude is not conducive to a long run of multiple championships. Though we did get as close as one Horry 3 away from repeating, the mentality of the team went from "no respect" to "yea thats right respect us" to "lets take games off because we've already proved ourselves" to "its not our fault, its the stupid coach that lost us the series" . I also believe that if we let the old core go, we can better accommodate new leadership in the locker room. The only core player i'd want to keep is Dyess, but i would like to keep him more for his attitude and demeanor and would use him off the bench. But my reasons are selfish, and if Dyess chooses to play for a contender, I would wish him well he worked hard when some of the other players were hardly working.

So that brings us to personnel, I will divide the players into different categories, stars/future starters and role players/bench players. It has to be assumed that the stars/future stars will get wiggle room because they are not super stars, so they may lag in one category or another, but they excel in other(s).

Stars/Future Starters:

Amare Stoudimire PF (Pheonix wants to cut salary)
Jason Richardson SG (a stretch, but Pheonix neeeds to cut salary)

David West PF (NO neeeds to cut salary)
Tyson Chandler C (a bit over payed, but NO neeeds to cut salary)

Chris Bosh PF (not sure what the Toronto situation is or the Chris Bosh situation)

Chris Kamen C (Clippers have a logjam in the frontcourt)

Marvin Williams SF (Super young 22/23, Coming off of a now-rebuilt ATL team, would be a good FA pick-up)

Marcin Gortat C (Fresh legs, lots of practice experience single-covering D Howard, can be had for cheap 5-6ish)

Role Players/Bench Players

Birdman PF (played for the league minimum this year)
Zaza Pachulia C (Passion Player)
Anderson Varajao PF (Hate playing against him, maybe it'll be fun to get the benefit of all that flopping)

This by no means is a complete list, but i think its a good start. I think a very good offseason would be a scenario like:

Trade Tay/Rip/Amir to Pheonix for J Rich + Amare (Pheonix gets 5 million dollars in cap savings + Amir's contract expires so 3 mill expiring contract). Maybe J Rich/Rip is kind of a lateral move that Pheonix wont like but a guy can hope.

Sign M Gortat for 5.5mill/yr and sign Marvin Williams for 7.5mill/yr

This would yield the following starting line:

M Gortat - C
Amare - PF
Marvin Williams - SF
J Rich - SG
R Stuckey - PG

This doesnt consider the bench and our new initiative to play faster, but its 1 possibility of MANY.

Great post. I too believe that in order to rebuild, we must establish some type of identity or the type of plaer that we would like to rebuild with.

No Isiah Thomas type moves where you just go out and get talented players and then they play horribly as a unit.

I like the idea of targeting big athletic type players who seemed to play hard every night, didn't matter whether they were being blown out they still consistently left everything on the floor.

If you are gonna build a team with defense, lets get the athletic defensive guys, even those ones who are obviously capable of lockdown defense, but wasn't in that kind of system so they hotdogged it.

I am of the firm belief that in order to build a championship team that you must have 2 allstars and a a hall of famer. At the very minimum two allstars.

Pretty good...

If you're looking for those qualities and all in one player, then a guy like Amir would fit perfectly.

The problem is that in additional to all those qualities, you also need shooting ability, range, post skills or ballhandling skills, bball IQ, defensive positioning fundamentals, and on and on.

As far as fresh legs, I don't think we need to get all new players to accomplish this. We played our starters more than all but 6 other teams in the league. The teams ahead of us were much younger and tended to be small market teams with thin benches. The solution is just to avoid burning the players out. And Rip is one of the bench conditioned athletes in the league. He reportedly runs several miles per day, even on game days. His problem wasn't fatigue.

Tay on the other hand... either limit him to 30 mpg or get rid of him. He's not built like a tank. It is absolutely amazing that he hasn't missed an NBA game given his mileage, but much of this has to do with his desire to tough it out. He's like a pitcher than says he's fine even though he's just walked 4 straight batters in the 7th inning. This is part of the coach's job- get your team to play their best bball in the playoffs. The key is to manage mental and physical burnout.

__________________
You can never have perfect introspection: because if you could, then you could determine what you were going to do ten seconds from now, and then do something else.

I agree that the Pistons should target guys who haven't played a lot because they've been suspended by the league.

Letrell Sprewell will be 39 this year, so his playing days are over..

B. Wallace, O'Neil, and Artest...A good front court...

I was thinking maybe Roy Tarpley and Richard Dumas formerly of the Suns. Those 2 will be fresh as daisies after all the time off that they've had.

Eddy Curry should be fresh at this point.

Eh, I'm wary of guys who haven't been suspended.