John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

The Detroit Pistons and Henry Ford Health System announced this afternoon plans for a training, rehab and sports medicine facility in Detroit's New Center district.

The multi-use facility will serve as team headquarters, practice facility, and comprehensive sports medicine facility managed by the health system. It will be called the Henry Ford-Detroit Pistons Performance Center.

As part of the joint development, Henry Ford will become the official health provider for the Pistons beginning with the next season.

The move downtown by the Detroit Pistons will mean more than having a dozen players and a few coaches playing their games at the soon-to-open Little Caesars Arena.

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The relocation into the city will come with potentially hundreds of workers, a big investment in a new facility, and lots of spin-off benefits for the Detroit community in terms of taxes, restaurant meals sold, and other benefits.

Given the likely size of the investment and the number of employees involved, the Pistons move could equal or exceed the importance of other recent downtown relocations such as the recently announced move by software giant Microsoft to the One Campus Martius building.

Detroit Mayor MIke Duggan said at a press conference this afternoon the new facility will be "transformational" for Detroit. Details were still being worked out, including final cost estimates, but if all goes well, construction would begin in the summer and take a little more than a year.

"In every sense - in every sense - Detroit will be our home," Pistons executive Arn Tellem said.

Pistons Coach Stan Van Gundy said the facility will be the best in the NBA.

The site of the facility will be between Second and Third streets, a few blocks south of the hospital. It is presently a surface parking lot. Rosetti architects will serve as the lead architects of the project.

Tellem, vice-chairman of Palace Sports & Entertainment, gave a ballpark figure to the Free Press late last year on the scope of the new facility.

“We’re not just playing our games there,” Tellem said then. “We’re moving our offices. Our practice facility development will wind up being in excess of $50 (million) approaching $75 or more million dollars development in the city. A lot of that money will be going to Detroit employees and Detroit firms to do the building.

“We’re going to employ hundreds of people downtown, we’re going to be paying city income taxes where the city is going to get dollars every year. When you talk about the players’ (salaries), that will be significant income. So we’re going to be contributing in a lot of ways and the study we provided that was done by the University of Michigan, the economic impact we will have on the city will be in the hundreds of millions.”

Choosing the New Center district for the headquarters and practice facility also signals that the recent redevelopments downtown and in Midtown are spreading north. The spin-off benefits could prove significant for the district particularly with the expected opening of service of the Qline streetcar line this spring as the line terminates in the New Center area.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JGallagherFreep.