Stan Van Gundy sent his players off for the summer with homework to do. In the exit interviews virtually all NBA coaches hold with players as a season concludes, he solicited their input and offered his evaluations of how they can return as improved products.

They should know he gave himself homework, too.

A big part of it will be all the hours he spends between now and July 1 preparing for both the June 23 NBA draft and the opening of free agency eight days later. The Pistons don’t have an extraordinary shopping list this off-season – not compared to his first two years since hiring on, at least – but it’s essential they get it right with the needs they have.

But Van Gundy is carving out some time for self-analysis, too. He’s aware he has an extremely young team – the youngest starting five of any of the 16 playoff teams – and drawing out their best requires pushing different buttons than he’s accustomed to using, or perhaps pushing them with a little more finesse.

“We’ve got to improve from our end on the coaching side in a couple of ways,” he told J.J. Redick, a player of his in Orlando, on a recent The Vertical podcast. “I have a different group here than what I had in Orlando, younger, and I think I’ve got to first be able to balance being demanding with also being aware of the effect I can have on guys’ confidence at times, so creating a little bit of a different environment.

“That’ll be a little different for me. I’m not talking about being soft. There has to be both. There has to be that accountability and at the same time not have guys on the floor afraid to make a mistake, afraid to take a chance. I’ve got to have improvement there.”

That’s some pretty good insight into why Van Gundy can be unyielding and yet not grate on players the way so many coaches with surface similarities often do. There are going to be several times every season where he’ll be publicly critical – after being privately critical, so players don’t hear it first on social media or elsewhere – of some aspect of his team’s performance, citing star players and role players alike for shortcomings of focus or execution if they cost the team its best chance to win.

But there will be at least as many times where he’s critical of himself. When Anthony Davis scored 59 points as the Pistons lost a season-high fifth straight game in late February, he put it on himself – even though Davis was draining fadeaway 3-pointers by the end – for not devising a better scheme. He questioned his rotation patterns or his play calling in other instances.

Now he’s extended his self-reflection beyond the strategic to the psychological. I don’t think he’ll be any less tolerant of lack of preparation or effort or other cardinal sins, but he’s going to take pains to temper his approach.

He told Redick something else that should perk up the ears of Pistons fans. Van Gundy finished his first season as Pistons coach lamenting his inability to find a way to make the Andre Drummond-Greg Monroe tandem more effective. He spoke often in his second season about still searching for ways to bring out the best in his young core players.

But the Pistons started taking off offensively after the trade for Tobias Harris and there is every likelihood they’ll keep getting better at that end as all of those young players improve their skills and put more games together under their belts, learning each other’s strengths, preferences and tendencies.

Familiarity will help Van Gundy as much as it helps teammates, he suggested.

“We’ve changed our roster so rapidly and constantly, learning new people and new lineups, I don’t think we necessarily put guys in the best spots for them,” he said in the podcast. “I think by the end of the year I finally had a handle on guys and I think going into next year, probably with a lot less changeover, we should be able to do a better job of that in terms of our offensive system.

“So it’s internal improvement, it’s improve the roster and it’s improve the job we do coaching them. And if you get slight improvement in all of those areas, hope it adds up to a lot of improvement.”

Holdover young players a year older and better, two or three newcomers who inject an incremental roster upgrade, general roster continuity at last benefiting them and a coach who’ll start with a better grasp of how the puzzle pieces fit. That’s the snapshot of the 2016-17 Pistons. Let’s see what the picture looks like after they’ve all turned in their summer homework.