featured-image

Nice start, kid: Dinwiddie shows flashes of why Pistons are so high on his future

An NBA team deals with the roster it has today on one track while looking three, four and five years ahead to the roster it hopes to build. The latter is always a moving target, but for the past two years – however far Pistons management chose to look down the road – one player factored foremost in future roster shaping: Andre Drummond.

That didn’t change when Stan Van Gundy took control of the franchise five months ago and hired Jeff Bower as his general manager. What has changed in that time is the firm inclusion of Kentavious Cadlwell-Pope at Drummond’ s side.

It’s too soon to say whether the third Pistons 21-year-old, Spencer Dinwiddie, will be at his other flank – with Greg Monroe firmly at the core, too, if the Pistons win his free agency – but Dinwiddie showed flashes in his NBA debut to explain Van Gundy’s air of confidence whenever his name is raised that seemed out of line with normal expectations for a second-round pick.

And that, of course, is because nobody believes Dinwiddie would have been a second-round pick if not for the knee injury that ended his junior season at Colorado last January.

With only a handful of NBA practices under his belt in more than nine months of little more than tireless rehabilitation and individual drills, Dinwiddie especially opened eyes in the five minutes that unfolded after he first stepped onto The Palace court.

Thirty-two seconds after entering the game – and the first time he touched the ball – Dinwiddie immediately drained a 3-point shot, fed to him by the team’s elder statesmen, Caron Butler. It probably isn’t coincidence that Dinwiddie’s locker is situated right next to Butler’s.

“CB told me he was going to give me my first NBA shot, so that was actually the first thing that I thought of when I hit the three,” Dinwiddie said at that locker after Thursday’s 109-103 win in the preseason finale. “ ‘Man, he was right. He’s like a prophet or something.’ Other than that, it was just playing basketball. I didn’t think anything special besides that flash in my head.”

Butler made a more reliable prediction to the many players he’s met around the league over his dozen years: Dinwiddie’s pretty good.

“He’s really, really talented. I’ve been telling folks around the league, ‘We’ve got a nice little steal right there with Spencer.’ He can really do it all. He can shoot the ball. He’s clever – he’s extremely clever.”

Butler was struck by how seamlessly Dinwiddie seemed to fit in despite the nine-month absence when he got back to full-court, five-on-five basketball a week ago.

“He was extremely sharp for a guy who missed our training camp, as hard as we were going in training camp,” he said. “Obviously, he’s young, but to have that rhythm and not be rusty, I was like, man, he stayed tuned mentally and hasn’t missed a beat.”

Dinwiddie finished with eight points and six assists in a little more than 15 minutes, admitting that fatigue overcame him faster than he expected – a combination of prolonged inactivity and the adrenaline rush stirred by his debut. He was thankful to make that debut when he did – in the preseason, putting that behind him and giving him an entire rookie season ahead.

“And in the comfort of The Palace, it was definitely nice to make my debut in a little bit of a lighter setting. “

The Pistons hope Caldwell-Pope is back in time for Wednesday’s regular-season opener at Denver. They also anticipate that Brandon Jennings, who sat out Thursday’s win with a sore left Achilles, will be ready to go.

That would tamp down any urgency for Dinwiddie to be available, but he left an impression with his combination of size, poise and – as Butler put it – cleverness. The things the Pistons saw in Dinwiddie, compelling enough for them to draft him despite a serious injury, weren’t hard to spot. He looks very much like a player who’ll contribute greatly to the effective flow of an offense.

Van Gundy has maintained all along that he had no expectations for Dinwiddie’s rookie season. The needle might have moved on that now.

“Like I told Stan when he drafted me – he said, ‘We’re going to give you as much time as you want; there’s no timetable at all’ – I was like, look, I plan on playing. I didn’t do all the (platement-rich plasma therapy), hyperbaric (chamber treatment), all that other extra stuff and all the hard work to just kind of chill out or not play the season. I planned on playing the whole time. It was just gaining their confidence and their trust. And now I’m ready to go.”