With the trading of Jodie Meeks, all of the five free agents Stan Van Gundy signed in his first summer as Pistons president of basketball operations are now ex-Pistons. Meeks was the only one who signed for more than two years, getting a three-year deal.

Anyone extrapolating from all those short-term deals that Van Gundy was falling in lockstep with the recent NBA trend would have been … well, wrong.

Turns out that wasn’t Van Gundy’s blueprint at all. He went with a bunch of short-term deals in 2014 for Caron Butler, D.J. Augustin, Aaron Gray and Cartier Martin because he needed an immediate roster infusion and knew he didn’t have a whole lot to sell to the more desirable tier of free agents. They were a bridge to the future.

Since then – and since Van Gundy and general manager Jeff Bower have fully implemented an NBA scouting staff unparalleled in scope among NBA teams – they’ve gone a different route. The Pistons have stayed remarkably disciplined at identifying players they’ve felt had more to give than their opportunities elsewhere revealed and landing them with their prime physical years immediately ahead of them.

So they acquired Marcus Morris from Phoenix at 25 with four years of experience, Reggie Jackson from Oklahoma City at 24 with 3½ years in the league, Tobias Harris at 23 with 4½ years on his resume. Morris came with four years left on his contract, Harris with 3½ left on his. Jackson came as a restricted free agent – a big part of the reason it cost them pennies on the dollar in talent returned to OKC – but the Pistons were determined to retain him for the maximum five-year term and reasonably assured they’d be able to do so. They did.

They’ve locked up Andre Drummond for four years and would like to do the same with Kentavious Caldwell-Pope as he approaches restricted free agency. In free agency this summer, they signed Jon Leuer for the maximum four years and gave Ish Smith – who’s played for nine teams in six NBA seasons, never operating on anything more than a one-year contract – his first multiyear deal, for three seasons.

“Let’s just say our approach is a little bit different than some teams,” Van Gundy said. “A lot of the people who analyze these deals who automatically think shorter deals are better deals and that the best deals you can get are for the least amount of guaranteed money, we don’t look at it that way at all. I think we have valued having guys locked up.”

Longer term deals only become problematic if the front office errs in its projections for a player’s contributions. Here’s where the story reverts to the pro scouting department Van Gundy had in mind as a central component of the vision he presented to Pistons owner Tom Gores when they were in the getting-to-know-you phase before Gores hired him.

Van Gundy’s logic is unassailable. For all the millions teams that hope to compete must commit to attract free agents – or assume in trading for veterans already under contract – why not invest a relative pittance of that on a percentage basis in a scouting department to create a database of intimate knowledge of all NBA players?

Teams operate expansive amateur scouting departments to follow college and international prospects on virtually every continent save Antarctica. Why assume you know everything necessary about the approximately 450 current NBA players just because they’ve arrived? Why not regularly track the progress they’re able to make once they’re in the league? Improvement doesn’t – or it shouldn’t, at least – stop once players start getting paid. In fact, with so many players coming to the NBA at 18, 19 or 20, they’re nowhere near fully formed.

At the heart of Van Gundy’s roster building is faith in his pro scouting department under the direction of assistant general manager Jeff Nix. It’s a competitive advantage the Pistons enjoy. They’re exploiting it for all it’s worth.

“We’re confident in our evaluations of guys,” Van Gundy said. “We’re basically dealing with younger players and I think there’s an advantage for us in Detroit to have guys locked up for longer.”

To illustrate his point, Van Gundy cites an exception to their strategy of identifying players they feel will outperform their histories and lock them up for several seasons: Aron Baynes. Baynes’ side, exhibiting the same belief in his potential, held out to get a player option in the third year of the free-agent deal he got from the Pistons in 2015.

“Having that third-year option really changes a lot of things because if he opts out, number one, he opts out earlier,” Van Gundy said. “You would’ve liked to have him locked in. But the other part of that is when he opts out after two years, you don’t have his full Bird rights, so as these prices go up you can’t even go after him.”

It was the likelihood Baynes will opt out next July that led the Pistons to act now to sign his replacement as San Antonio’s backup big man, Boban Marjanovic, a year ahead of truly needing him. Again, the Pistons identified a player they believe will outperform his past. And they got him for three years of his prime.

“We might’ve been able to get each of these guys on a year less on the deal,” Van Gundy said of Smith, Leuer and Marjanovic. “We’re the ones who wanted to push the contracts out. We haven’t been as willing to push the contracts out, necessarily, for older guys. But for these guys – we get Ish at 28, 29 and 30. We get Jon at 27, 28, 29 and 30. We’re the ones who wanted that extra year. It wasn’t like their agents were having to fight us to get the extra year. We wanted it.”

It’s a strategy that has allowed Van Gundy to assemble a starting five that finished the season as one of the league’s five youngest – and the only one among them to make the playoffs. They’ve fortified it over the summer with three more free agents, all with their best years ahead of them – almost every player on the roster locked up for at least two and in most cases the next three seasons. Trusting their evaluation process has worked out pretty well so far. When Van Gundy smiles about the depth he perceives on this year’s roster, chances are he’ll be proven right about that, too.