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At 18, Pistons can look to history and find a really good player – and perhaps a star – from every draft

Almost every draft has that guy – the one in the green room trying to put on a brave face while his insides liquefy. His is the last table still occupied. He sees the camera’s red light. He tries to paste something akin to a smile on his face, but he knows they’re talking about him and parsing every inch of his game, his character and his regrettable decision to stay in the draft.

One of Stan Van Gundy’s all-time favorite players was that guy. It worked out OK for Rashard Lewis.

Maybe the Pistons will get that guy this year. Chances are he’ll still be on the board at 18. Chances are someone the Pistons didn’t expect to slip past the lottery will be available to them at 18 and they’ll have to ponder a fit they’d considered on only a cursory level.

Last year, Bobby Portis was sort of that guy. The Pistons worked him out for their pick at No. 8 and legitimately considered him. He checked off a lot of boxes as a bigger power forward who displayed 3-point shooting potential to slot in next to Andre Drummond – just the kind of player the Pistons will be looking to acquire this summer. Portis was no worse than 50-50 to go in the lottery. Instead, he wound up tumbling all the way to Chicago, picking 22nd.

Chicago’s depth chart argued against taking Portis. They had Pau Gasol, Taj Gibson and Nikola Mirotic all ahead of him at power forward. But front offices have to play for a future beyond next season, too, and the Bulls are surely thankful they took Portis today with Gasol and Joakim Noah both pending free agents and Gibson about to be in another year.

It’s not that Portis had any red flags to scare off a bunch of teams, the way it goes sometimes for those guys who fall past all reasonable expectation. But, pick by pick, teams have their reasons for taking Player A instead of Player B. Portis could have been the very next guy on the board of every team picking between 14 and 21. That’s how players fall – they’re everybody’s second option.

And it often winds up working out for the best for both sides, the player falling to a better team with a more stable environment and the team getting a surer thing than it ever expected to land and one on whom outsized expectations aren’t immediately loaded.

“The history of the draft tells you that you can find good players at 18,” Pistons general manager Jeff Bower said earlier this month at the Chicago draft combine. Assistant general manager Brian Wright, who heads up the amateur scouting department, said virtually the same.

Portis and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, who showed flashes before injury derailed his rookie season, were both available at 18 last year. Rodney Hood almost single-handedly rallied the Jazz in a Pistons January road win and looks ready to blossom into a big-time scorer. He went 23rd in 2014. Teammate Rudy Gobert, a Defensive Player of the Year candidate in waiting, slid to 27th the year before that.

Terrence Jones went 18th and Evan Fournier 20th in 2012. Two high-ceiling Pistons starters, Tobias Harris (19th) and Reggie Jackson (24th), came out of the 2011 draft – as did Kenneth Faried (22nd), Mirotic (23rd) and Jimmy Butler (30th). Eric Bledsoe and Avery Bradley went 18-19 in the 2010 draft. Ty Lawson, Jeff Teague, Darren Collison, Gibson and DeMarre Carrol went 18 or later in 2009. The year before that, Ryan Anderson, Courtney Lee, Serge Ibaka, Nicolas Batum and George Hill all were picked in the 20s.

So, yeah, it’s not an exaggeration to say that there is a good player to be found at 18 in every draft. It’s not an aberration. It’s not a 50-50 call. It happens. Every year.

You’ll notice a healthy dose of international players sprinkled through that list. This year, DraftExpress.com has eight foreign-born prospects among the 15 players ranked 14-28. The Pistons have a strong European presence with a full-time scout imbedded plus J.R. Holden, an American who splits his time scouting both sides of the Atlantic and uses the connections he made through a wildly successful European playing career to find out that extra nugget of information which can tip the scales.

Information is the currency of the scouting business. This will be Van Gundy’s third draft, but really the second for the team he didn’t have time to put in place until after the 2014 draft – when the Pistons didn’t have a first-round pick, anyway. Last year’s draft produced two players, Stanley Johnson and Darrun Hilliard, that both gave every indication of having long, productive NBA careers as rookies.

What Van Gundy appreciated most is that both players were exactly as advertised. Wright and his team of scouts nailed their assessments of Johnson and Hilliard in terms of strengths, weaknesses and character. It gives him every confidence that they’ll do so again – and that if there’s a guy in the green room this year whose wait becomes uncomfortably long, the Pistons will know him fully and perhaps become the happy beneficiary of his plunge.