Tobias Harris is set to meet with five opposing teams when free agency opens after the Pistons could not reach a deal with him during their exclusive negotiating window. The next step comes with Detroit still trying to keep the veteran forward, but no contract has been finished yet.
That matters because Harris is turning 34 next month and was one of the most important pieces in Detroit’s rise last season. He averaged 13.3 PPG, 5.1 RPG, 2.5 APG and 0.9 SPG on.469/.368/.866 shooting in 27.7 MPG across 63 regular season appearances in 2025/26, then finished as the Pistons’ second-leading scorer in the playoffs.
Detroit also has a real financial path to bring him back. The Pistons hold Harris’s Early Bird rights and could theoretically offer him more money than most other teams, which makes the absence of a deal during the past two-plus weeks more striking rather than less. Harris signed a two-year, $52MM contract with Detroit in the 2024 offseason, and the team has said it wants to re-sign him.
J.B. Bickerstaff made plain how central Harris became to the roster during the season. He said Harris was always there when the team needed him and called him the club’s safety blanket, crediting him for making the play that had to be made no matter the situation. That kind of trust is hard to replace, especially for a team that leaned on him as a steadying presence on and off the court.
The five-team field could still narrow the moment free agency begins, but the unresolved part now is whether Detroit’s advantage with Early Bird rights is enough to overcome the momentum of those meetings. Marc Stein and Jake Fischer previously identified the Spurs as a possible suitor, and a source told Sam Amick of The Athletic about the wider set of meetings, putting Harris on the clock as the market opens.
