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Despite Prince, Hamilton injuries, bright spots abound for Pistons
What's Gone Right
by Keith Langlois
We know what’s gone wrong over the first 15 percent of the Pistons’ season: Rip Hamilton came down on O.J. Mayo’s ankle in the opener and hasn’t been seen since, and sometime between Game 3 and Game 4 Tayshaun Prince wound up with a ruptured disc in his lower back.
What’s gone right is a longer list – a list that would be receiving far more attention if it wasn’t for the double-whammy of Prince-Hamilton injuries that have combined to mute the effects of What’s Gone Right.
Let’s air out some of the things that have unfolded as well as Joe Dumars could have reasonably hoped last summer when he was plotting the course of the franchise for the next generation:
1.John Kuester – I continue to be struck by something Joe D told me in Las Vegas, during Summer League, a few weeks after making the decision to hire John Kuester when media speculation had focused on bigger names like Doug Collins and Avery Johnson.
He said that after making franchise-shaping decisions – a big trade, the choice of which free agents to sign, a major hiring – sometimes he’d leave his office at night with a knot in his stomach, not quite as certain as he’d like to be in the outcome. But the night he hired Kuester, he said there was no knot, and he went home feeling even better about the decision than he might have expected.
Just a guess, but I’m betting he feels better still about the choice today for the response he’s seen from his players. Perhaps that’s best revealed in the way they’ve played team defense – and a nod here to another thing that’s gone right, the decision to bring back Ben Wallace – after a summer spent gnashing teeth over how a team low on individual defensive stalwarts could stop anyone. A coach who hasn’t won his team’s blind faith doesn’t get players to play D the way Kuester has.
Kuester has retained all of his teaching acumen that won him universal acclaim as an assistant coach while adapting seamlessly to the onus of being, as George W. Bush once famously declared himself, the decider. The reality of having executive power hasn’t overwhelmed Kuester, the great unknown with all first-time head coaches.
2.Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva – The swift moves on Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva – both agreed to contract terms less than 18 hours after the curtain opened on free agency last July, the first two free agents of the season to do so – were far from universally hailed.
That’s mostly because media-driven speculation that begun in early November upon the news of the Billups-Iverson trade and its obvious cap ramifications focused on names that were never realistic – LeBron James or Chris Bosh or Dwyane Wade – eventually coming to the Pistons.
But Gordon (26) and Villanueva (25) gave Joe D exactly what he’d hoped to gain from trading away Billups, parlaying a point guard with 11 seasons of wear on his tread into two players who both will be younger than Billups was at the time of the trade (32) when the five-year contracts they signed to become Pistons will expire following the 2013-14 season.
In an NBA skewing more and more to offense, and to players capable of creating points for themselves, the Pistons got two guys who can score in waves, and despite the dislocation they’ve felt due to the injuries, and to the great adjustments demanded of all by the incorporation of so many new moving parts, Gordon and Villanueva have already given abundant evidence that their scoring ability is going to be a pillar of the franchise over the next five seasons.
3.Stuckey and Bynum – Rodney Stuckey admitted on the eve of training camp that last season left him “overwhelmed and confused,” a season that, but for the lessons in adversity absorbed, really lent little to his development as a player due to all the trauma around him.
Stuckey still has things to learn about the game’s nuances, but there’s no question the Pistons are every bit as convinced of his potential to be a game-changing player at both ends as they were two seasons ago when he gave them daily evidence that he brought things to the table no one else on the roster could. He had 28 points through three quarters against Dallas earlier this week before cramping shut him down in the fourth quarter. Kuester has said Stuckey has the total package to become the best perimeter defender he’s ever been around.
That track he was on two years ago, derailed last season? He’s back on it.
And then there’s Will Bynum, the one unchallenged positive to come out of an otherwise dour 2008-09 season. It’s always easy to root for the Little Guy, but they usually qualify more as a feel-good story than a bullet point on the other team’s game plan. Bynum has elevated himself way above the warm and fuzzy, changing games on a nightly basis and providing far more than just point guard depth.
At 26 (Bynum) and 23 (Stuckey), the Pistons have two more major building blocks in place.
4.The rookies – The only prominence Austin Daye, DaJuan Summers and Jonas Jerebko were supposed to play this season was in practice, where Joe D and his staff would be constantly evaluating them to better inform their 2010-11 off-season plans.
If they came to trust that one, two or all three were ready to be thrust into the playing rotation or the starting five, even, after getting their feet wet as rookies, then that would open up all kinds of trade possibilities for the Pistons, or shape plans for the 2010 draft.
If there’s a silver lining to the Prince-Hamilton injuries, it’s that the evaluation process has now been compressed and accelerated.
Jerebko has proven a defensive revelation, holding his own against the likes of Vince Carter and Hedo Turkoglu and Brandon Roy. Daye, though still sometimes flummoxed by the speed and strength of opponents, is giving tantalizing glimpses of what a unique talent he can be for his ability with the ball in his hands and covering ground defensively with his freakish wing span. Summers, in chances this week with the Pistons fighting uphill against the Lakers and Portland, has flashed some of the same size-athleticism possibilities and, in practices, his shooting stroke can be breathtaking.
Because of their versatility, each of them showing the capacity to play three positions, they give Kuester the ability to play them all at once or in various combinations of twos. That means that not only can the Pistons present teams with a devastating three-guard lineup, as Kuester has often employed to get his best scorers on the floor together, they can also go 180 degrees the other way and play ultra big.
That’s the lineup they used against Portland to cut a 20-point deficit to one, when they must have unofficially set the franchise record for deflections in a quarter as Daye, Summers or Jerebko alternately harassed Brandon Roy into giving the ball up and effectively took him out of his familiar fourth-quarter role of setup man for the Blazers.
When Prince and Hamilton return, soon hopefully, I’m not sure how often we’ll see the three rookies together again, or in pairs.
But it sets up interesting possibilities for the future, one that looks about as bright as Joe D could have possibly imagined it would when he sat down last summer to plot the franchise’s course.
