Upgrading a roster that fell well short of everyone's goals was among the many topics discussed by Dumars at an end-of-the-season news conference Wednesday.

Among the other highlights:

-- Michael Curry will be back as coach next season, Dumars said. In Curry's first season, the Pistons finished 39-43.

Dumars didn't place the blame for the Pistons' season on Curry.

"It was a rocky year for him, up and down, too," Dumars said. "The fact that we made so many changes, for a first-year coach, I had to step back and be a little bit more patient than I have been with some things. I wondered during the season, 'What effect is this having on a first-year coach?' I tried to put myself in his shoes as to what effect it was having.

Up and down season for him, up and down season for us. We never got any traction."

-- On Allen Iverson: "It was a new experience for him and for us. We've been more of an executing, strategically-attack you type of team. And his free spirit, his freestyle, just never got on track with us. His situation was a microcosm of the whole year; one step forward, two steps back. It never clicked like you hoped it would do for that short period of time."

-- On season of transition: "What we tried to do is make it as painless as possible. Even doing that, it's never easy and it's never pain-free. I think as you look back to this season, it was just a season of inevitable change and inevitable pain along with that change."

-- On team's lack of identity: "I've always prided us on being a team that whenever we stepped on the floor, every single night we would battle to win. Going through this transition this year, that wasn't the case. That bothered the hell out of me, that we weren't that team that battled every night like I thought we should."

-- On the Cleveland series: "If you're not good enough, you sit there and you know it. You know it. And you're not as upset. By the time we got to the Cleveland series, we weren't good enough. I wasn't pulling the little bit of hair in my head out. I wasn't pulling it out, because I'm looking at it and saying, 'they're better than us.' "

-- On Rodney Stuckey: "The thing with Stuckey, I don't think he's a 48-minute-a-game point guard. It's good for him when a guy like Will Bynum comes in and he (Stuckey) can play off the ball, too. We look at him, he'll be a point guard, but more so this year what it did was confirm that he's a combo guard. We have to play him on the ball and off the ball, going forward."

Pistons pick up Bynum option

The Pistons announced on Wednesday that the team has picked up the option on guard Will Bynum for the 2009-2010 season that will pay the 26-year-old $825,497.

In what has been a disappointing season on so many levels, Bynum's play was one of the few bright spots.

Expected to see spot duty as the team's third point guard, Bynum played his way into the regular rotation as a key sub off the bench.

He appeared in 57 games (one start), and averaged a career-high 7.2 points per game. Bynum had a career-high 32 points against Charlotte this season, which included a franchise-record 26 points in the fourth quarter.

In Game 4 of Detroit's first-round series against Cleveland, Bynum scored a career playoff-high 22 points.