Detroit Pistons announce hires and promotions including assistant coaches Keith Bogans, Rashard Lewis, Brandon Bailey and Brittni Donaldson

Sep 23, 2022 - 2:55 PM

The Detroit Pistons shuffled their roster on Thursday with the trade for Bojan Bogdanovic, and on Friday the team announced a slew of promotions and hires throughout its basketball and business operations.

Detroit Pistons media day is Monday, and before we can talk basketball exclusively, we gotta talk about organizational matters.

Most directly tied to the Detroit Pistons on the floor is new faces on the assistant coaching staff. Keith Bogan and Rashard Lewis, former NBA players who we saw on the sidelines during NBA Summer League for the Pistons, are joining the staff as assistant coach/player development coaches. Joining them in the same role is Brandon Bailey, most recently with the Boston Celtics. Brittni Donaldson is also joining the Pistons as an assistant coach and director of coaching analytics.

This is a role similar to Sammy Gelfand, who joined the Pistons in 2018 from the Warriors, and was linked as a target of the New Orleans this offseason. Donaldson player college ball at Northern Iowa, graduated with a degree in statistics and actuarial sciences and got a job at STATS LLC. She compiled reports using player tracking data to send to teams and eventually caught the eye of the Toronto Raptors who poached her and made her the youngest NBA assistant coach at 26 in 2019.

Most recently she spent time as a coach for the Hamilton Honey Badgers and founded a youth-focused sports analytics company Strata Athletics.

On the basketball operations side, the Pistons promoted George David to associate general manager, Rob Murphy to assistant general manager of the Pistons and President of the Motor City Cruise. Josh Bartelstein and Tony Leotti have been promoted to assistant GMs and Eric Tellem, son of Pistons executive Arn Tellem, has been promoted to Senior Director of Pro Scouting. Jon Phelps is now senior director of basketball strategy and Jamal James joins the Pistons organization as the director of college scouting.

The Pistons also added Sebastian Poirier, most recently of the Brooklyn Nets, as senior director of medical, Rachel Cutts as head athletic trainer and senior physical therapist and Trent Salo has been promoted to senior director of sports performance.

For the Motor City Cruise, Ben Carloni has been promoted to General Manager and Stacey Lovelace, who played in the WNBA, including for the Detroit Shock and played at Detroit DePorres, is now assistant general manger and special assistant to Troy Weaver.

Finally, Dan Lefton has been promoted to SVP and chief revenue officer, Alicia Jeffreys to SVP and chief marketing officer, Nicolet Lewis to SVP and chief people officer, and Kevin Grigg to SVP and chief communications officer.