Gordon, Villanueva Offering Early Returns on Investment

Gordon, Villanueva justifying Joe D's July decisions
Well Spent
by Keith Langlois



Officially, the Pistons’ runaway Wednesday win over Charlotte goes in the books on Nov. 11, 2009. But this was a game the Pistons really won on July 1, 2009, when Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva agreed to contract terms with Joe Dumars on the first day free agents could negotiate with NBA teams.

Joe D’s free-agent bounty got the Pistons a convincing Veteran’s Day win despite the fact the two veterans expected to have the most to do with Detroit’s success this season – Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince – were again unavailable with injuries, Hamilton for the seventh straight game and Prince the fifth straight.

Yet the Pistons squared their record at 4-4, and went to 3-2 in the five games played without both links to the six straight conference finals teams, by building a 35-point lead and cruising to a 98-75 win over a Charlotte team that came in with the same 3-4 record as the Pistons.

They got a combined 52 points from Villanueva and Gordon without playing either one in the final quarter, so thoroughly did the Pistons dominate both offensively and defensively. It’s the second half of that equation that raises eyebrows, by the way.

Because there was more than a modicum of skepticism from analysts about the wisdom of allocating the Pistons’ hard-won cap space on two players viewed by many as one-dimensional.

But John Kuester entered his first NBA coaching job not giving players an alternative. They were going to play defense well enough to give their shot-makers ample opportunities to win games.

“They have never wavered,” Kuester said of Gordon and Villanueva’s commitment to all those things that don’t show up in the box score, necessarily. “They’ve never said, ‘You knew what I was.’ They’ve never said anything like that at all. All they wanted to do was get better and they’ve taken the challenge of allowing me to coach them.

“Ben Gordon and Charlie have accepted everything we’ve talked about. They’ve bought into it. They realize when they have slippage. They realize when they haven’t contested every shot. I try to formulate an opinion on how they interact with me. They said one thing: ‘Hey, I’ll work, coach.’ ”

They certainly went to work on Charlotte.

Gordon and Villanueva combined for 52 of the Pistons’ 81 points through three quarters, by which time Charlotte trailed by 28. They scored with great efficiency, too. Gordon’s 22 points came on 16 shots, Villanueva’s 30 on just 17, making 13.

But both continued to show their arsenal isn’t limited to scoring, Gordon turning in eight assists without a turnover and Villanueva giving signs that playing next to Ben Wallace is rubbing off on him in attention to detail and pride in team defense.

One sign: Late in the first half, Villanueva hustled for a steal and turned it into an end-to-end layup despite two closing Charlotte defenders on his heels. On the next Charlotte possession, Villanueva produced another steal, helping the Pistons close the half on an 11-4 run that gave them an 11-point halftime cushion.

Another: Late in the third quarter, after he’d already poured in 15 points in the quarter and the Pistons led by 26, he appeared to cleanly block a Flip Murray shot, but got whistled for the foul, reacting as if he’d just missed a layup with the game at stake.

“Recognizing how hard Ben Wallace works on defensive motivates you,” Kuester said. He probably came into this environment thinking, ‘I want to be a good defensive player.’ Well, I don’t want you to be a good defensive player – you’re going to be a good defensive player. You’re going to do it within our system. And that’s one of the things he’s bought into.”

Gordon, for his part, passed up good shots to turn them into better shots for Villanueva when Charlie V was exploding for 18 third-quarter points, and his steal early in the third quarter and pass ahead to Villanueva for a breakaway layup put the Pistons up 13 and fueled that early third-quarter run that essentially made Charlotte pack it in for the night. The Pistons entered the night last in the league in assists, averaging 14 per game, but recorded a season-best 26 in the win.

“I don’t think our (assists) ranking right now is indicative of the kind of team we are,” Gordon said. “We have a lot of unselfish guys. Sometimes we rely on ourselves too much. Tonight we did a good job of moving the ball, recognizing when guys had it going and we got everybody involved.”

That included Rodney Stuckey (16 points, seven assists, five boards on 6 of 10 shooting) and Will Bynum (16 points, 5 of 6, four assists), who brought down the house with a dunk in each half, the first a posterization of 7-foot-1 Tyson Chandler and the second a breakaway tomahawk. Bynum said it was payback for the 2001 Derby Classic, a high school all-star game held in Louisville, Ky., when Bynum missed a similar attempt over Chandler.

Less noticeable in the box score, but not in the consciousness of his teammates, was Wallace, who announced his impact on the game early with two deflections (one leading to a turnover and fast break), two blocked shots and one pretty assist in the first two minutes of the game. He didn’t so much as attempt a shot or free throw, yet put a huge stamp on the game that went beyond his nine boards, three blocks and three steals.

“Ben Wallace had corporate knowledge,” Kuester said. “Having somebody with peer pressure telling you, hey, you’re doing this or that, is so huge for us. It allows us to coach. Ben Wallace is so valuable, not only as a player, but to me he’s like an assistant coach out there, too.”

“Ben Wallace is the glue to this team,” Gordon said. “A lot of the things he does out there don’t go unnoticed by us. It might not show up on the stat sheet every night, but we definitely see what he’s doing. He just sparks us defensively. It seemed like he had about 50 deflections, a lot of rebounds – he’s just always in the right spot at the right time.”

Of course, that’s only half the battle. What you do with opportunity is the other half. Joe Dumars was in the right spot last July 1, when free agency dawned. The basketball world wondered about his execution when he spent his money on Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva. At least a few of those doubts are eroding just eight games into their Pistons careers.

“I knew Ben Gordon was very talented one on one and would score points for us,” Kuester said, “but I’m just so impressed with his unselfishness and how he wants to defend. He told me, ‘I want to be a complete basketball player.’ You get eight assists and no turnovers and you score at the pace he can and you also complement other players, that’s huge for our team.

“I didn’t even know what Charlie was all about because he had that hamstring pull (that cost him more than two weeks of training camp and the preseason). Now he’s starting to get his feet wet and feeling comfortable. He was impressive tonight. Those two guys are buying into what we’re doing.

“It was a good acquisition, a good free agency for us.”