A little about Grant Hill’s Hall of Fame induction – and on a glaring omission – plus Ish Smith, Anthony Tolliver and Blake Griffin’s fit with the Pistons top the agenda for this week’s edition of Pistons Mailbag.
Shelton (Detroit): Now that Grant Hill is in the Hall of Fame, do you think it’s time to have his jersey retired by the Pistons? He has had a similar career to Dave Bing and should be equally rewarded.
Langlois: The Grant Hill case is an interesting one. I’m not sure Bing is a good analogy. Bing spent his first nine seasons with the Pistons and was traded to Washington for his age 32 season. He would play only three more seasons after leaving Detroit, so 75 percent of his career was spent wearing a Pistons jersey. When you think of Dave Bing, you think Pistons. Hill spent more than twice as many seasons (13) with other organizations than he did with the Pistons (six). That said, the Pistons got the best six years of Hill’s career. He was on track to join Isiah Thomas as greatest players in franchise history. The stain on Hill’s time with the Pistons – and it’s unfair, because he was a flat-out brilliant player – is that they never got out of the first round of the playoffs in his six seasons. Four times they lost in the first round, twice they failed to qualify. In his final season with the Pistons, Hill averaged 25.8 points, 6.6 rebounds and 5.2 assists. He was never the same player again, robbed by the persistent foot injuries that limited him to 47 games over the next four seasons – what should have been the absolute pinnacle of his career, ages 28-31 –though he was still very good once he got past the foot problems. That Hill left the Pistons as a free agent – one month after Joe Dumars, the player his father, Calvin, asked to mentor Hill as a rookie, became Pistons president of basketball operations – caused some bruised feelings. But that’s been water under the bridge for a long time. There would be no serious objections raised, I suspect, if Pistons ownership decided to honor Hill in such a way. Pistons vice chairman Arn Tellem issued a congratulatory statement on Saturday, the day Hill’s pending induction to the Hall was made official, so that affirms the path is open to a jersey retirement.
Daheef (Bronx, New York): Is Blake Griffin a good fit in Detroit?
Langlois: The flip answer is that All-Star-caliber players are good fits anywhere. Since the Pistons have been built around Andre Drummond, the core of the question is really about whether Griffin and Drummond fit well together. Stan Van Gundy staked a good chunk of the Pistons future on an affirmative response. His logic is that Griffin and Drummond and both good passers, Griffin commands double teams and that only increases opportunities for Drummond to make plays at the rim without impediment. The fit becomes even better if Griffin continues to improve as a 3-point shooter. He didn’t really get serious about taking them until late last season – two seasons ago, he averaged 0.5 3-point attempts per game; last season, and it was mostly due to a focus on it coming out of the All-Star break, that went to a career-high 1.9; this season it’s jumped to 5.6 – and he’s already a nearly league average 3-point shooter at 35 percent. The fit will get that much better if the Pistons can field 3-point threats at a minimum of two other spots alongside them and preferably all three. A unit of Reggie Jackson, Reggie Bullock and Luke Kennard, for instance, would give the Pistons three perimeter threats. Stanley Johnson is the current starter at small forward and he’s struggled to crack 30 percent from the arc over his three seasons, though he’s on his way to being an elite defender and has obvious potential across the board. But, yeah, if Blake Griffin stays healthy he makes the Pistons a better team – that constitutes “good fit” in my book.
Dominic (@dominicb031): Any chance of the Pistons getting Kawhi?
Langlois: I’d put the odds of Kawhi Leonard being anywhere other than San Antonio next year at no more than 10 percent. Since there are 29 other teams, you can divide 10 by 29 and that’s roughly where I would peg the chances of the Pistons and Spurs executing a trade that puts Leonard in Detroit next season. In other words, the Pistons will have a better chance of retaining their No. 1 pick in the draft this year, top four protected, than they will of putting together a package that induces the Spurs to deal their franchise cornerstone.
Bands (@billybands): Will Henry Ellenson be in the rotation next season? How do you see him progressing?
Langlois: It’s … complicated. There are a lot of moving parts here. The biggest variable might well be what happens with Anthony Tolliver in free agency. He’s had more of an impact this season than most reasonable expectations would have projected. Remember, when the season started and Reggie Bullock was unavailable while serving a five-game suspension, it was Tolliver of the 14 available players who spent opening night in street clothes, designated inactive. He’ll be 33 when next season starts but he’s playing the best basketball of his career and fits ideally behind Blake Griffin at power forward. But he might have played himself out of the Pistons’ price range. They’ll have the mid-level exception to use but spending all of it – unless some other roster jockeying pares salary – would put them into tax territory and that’s unlikely to happen at this point. And with Jon Leuer returning from injury and Ellenson entering his third season, it could be argued that the Pistons would be better served spending limited resources to restock the wing positions thinned by the deal for Griffin. With James Ennis also headed to free agency, Stanley Johnson will be the only small forward on the roster. It seems imperative the Pistons prioritize that position in free agency if they haven’t already filled the void by July 1 via trade. They’d still have a frontcourt of Andre Drummond, Eric Moreland, Leuer, Griffin and Ellenson. Ellenson would have to beat out at least one of them to crack the rotation and that’s if Stan Van Gundy goes with a rotation with four big men. Leuer’s ability to play both power forward and center would allow him to go with a three-man big rotation, much as he largely did with Drummond, Griffin and Tolliver before Griffin’s ankle injury.
Darrell (Detroit): Anthony Tolliver has been invaluable this year. What will it takes to re-sign him next season and perhaps even toss in James Ennis and Dwight Buycks? Since the Pistons lack sufficient cap space to sign a big-time contributor, perhaps their best path to improvement is to maintain the chemistry that the team has been building since the Blake Griffin trade.
Langlois: As I wrote in response to the previous question, Tolliver might become a luxury the Pistons can’t afford given (1) their depth at power forward with Blake Griffin, Jon Leuer and Henry Ellenson all under contract for next season and (2) his play almost certainly driving up his price in free agency, perhaps to a point the Pistons would push themselves into tax territory. As for Ennis, if not him the Pistons will be looking for somebody much like him – a small forward who can defend and presents a 3-point threat. The Pistons have Buycks under a non-guaranteed contract for next season. Unless they come across another point guard in some fashion, he’ll be their No. 3 point guard behind Reggie Jackson and Ish Smith today.
Speedy Truck Sinke (@Joe_Truck): Why didn’t Ish Smith start taking threes until like a month or so ago? (Not trying to be sarcastic; I’m actually curious.)
Langlois: Smith took 2.07 3-point attempts a game in March – 31 in 15 games – so he’s still not taking all that many by any standard but his own recent past. Among players in the rotation, even that rate would be less than all but Andre Drummond. Reggie Jackson, the other point guard in the rotation, attempts 5.1 3-pointers per 36 minutes. Langston Galloway is at 9.1 and Anthony Tolliver at 7.5. Reggie Bullock, the team’s best 3-point shooter, takes 5.8 triples per 36 minutes. Smith is a career 29 percent 3-point shooter in a league where the average is now 36.2 percent. One reason he’s probably shooting it more of late is that it’s been going in. In fact, over his last 28 games he’s at 44.2 percent. Stan Van Gundy credits one of his assistant coaches for prodding Smith to be more willing to launch when open. “I give a lot of credit to Ish, but a lot of credit to Tim Hardaway because he’s encouraged him to shoot that when he’s open so people can’t lay off. When you shoot the ball in rhythm and not worried about it, then you’ve got a better chance of making it. He’s shot the ball well, but give Tim a lot of credit for that.” Two seasons ago when Smith started 50 games for Philadelphia on a team that was No. 8 in 3-point attempts and encouraged everyone to launch, Smith averaged a career-high 3.0 triples per 36 minutes and also shot it better at .336. Can Smith maintain a 44 percent rate? Maybe not. But if he takes them more often and makes it an off-season priority, getting up to league average next season could be within reach. Here’s what Van Gundy said on Tuesday: “I hope it’s something that he’ll actually spend a lot of time on in the summer and continue to shoot it like he has been over the last couple of weeks. I think it adds a totally different dimension to both him and the team, so I think that should be an off-season priority with him. I’m not sure there’s a whole lot left – he’ll turn 30 this summer – where he could take a step, so that would be an area where he could.”
Leslie (Totowa, N.J.): Your thoughts on the 2018 Hall of Fame class?
Langlois: I don’t usually have any quibbles with the folks who make the cut. My issue is with those who don’t. That Jack McCloskey continues to be ignored is egregious oversight that diminishes the Hall. This year, Rod Thorn and Rick Welts were inducted in the contributor category. I’d put McCloskey’s resume up against theirs in a heartbeat. He spent a lifetime in basketball, as a player in the very early days of the NBA, as a college coach at Penn and Wake Forest, as a head coach in the NBA with Portland and – the crowning achievement of his more than half-century in basketball – as the general manager who more than anyone is responsible for making the Detroit Pistons a credible NBA franchise. The Pistons were a long-floundering franchise when he took over. Every move that made the Bad Boys – from drafting Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Dennis Rodman and John Salley; to trading for Bill Laimbeer, Vinnie Johnson, Rick Mahorn, Adrian Dantley, Mark Aguirre and James Edwards; to hiring Chuck Daly – was all Jack McCloskey. He built a champion from scratch amid the NBA’s golden era at the peak of power for the league’s two flagship franchises, the Celtics and Lakers, all while the player most deem the greatest to ever play, Michael Jordan, was in his prime within the same division. The man who built Jordan’s Bulls – but, by the way, did not draft Michael Jordan – Jerry Krause, recently was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Now Thorn and Welts. No quibbles with any of them. But McCloskey should have beaten all of them to Springfield.