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In a roundabout way, losing '14 lottery pick led to Pistons landing Reggie Jackson

The first bit of adversity Stan Van Gundy faced after taking Tom Gores up on his offer to run the Pistons wasn't Brandon Jennings' ruptured Achilles tendon. It wasn't the jigsaw quandary posed by trying to squeeze Josh Smith, Greg Monroe and Andre Drummond into the same lineup. It wasn't even the preseason back injury to Jodie Meeks that threw his rotation out of whack for the first quarter of the regular season.

No, the first bit of rotten luck to befall the Van Gundy era came less than a week into the job when the Cleveland Cavaliers – who else? – came from the No. 9 position on the 1.7 percent chance they had to get the No. 1 pick. That pushed the Pistons down to ninth and meant they lost their lottery pick in what was billed as the best draft in years.

The good news in all of that is that Van Gundy has his pick this year, no matter what happens in the May 19 lottery. He's in Europe now, along with general manager Jeff Bower, where he's expected to see two of the projected top-10 picks. Croatia's Mario Hezonja and Latvia's Kristaps Porzingis both play in Spain's ACB, considered the world's premier league outside the NBA.

But let's suppose the lottery had played to form last year and the Pistons had kept their pick at No. 8. No way to know for sure, but my guess is the seven players who went 1-7 a year ago would still have gone in those seven spots even with teams picking at different spots.

Milwaukee would have taken Jabari Parker No. 1 from everything we know. Philadelphia would have gone with Andrew Wiggins at No. 2. In some order, Joel Embiid, Aaron Gordon, Dante Exum, Marcus Smart and Julius Randle very likely would have been off the board when the Pistons' turn came up at No. 8.

The next four players to go were Nik Stauskas, Noah Vonleh, Elfrid Payton and Doug McDermott. Based on the marching orders Van Gundy gave his then-skeletal staff last May – to find " players who are smart, tough and can shoot" – my hunch is the Pistons would have wound up taking the guy who instead went to Sacramento with the pick at eight, Michigan's Stauskas.

He and McDermott were widely considered the two best shooters in the draft and Stauskas flashed the ability as a college sophomore to put the ball on the floor and create, too. He also had the length for his position Van Gundy likes and, plus he's nearly two years younger.

Not only that, but he fit a roster need, at least as Van Gundy viewed the roster at the time. The only shooting guard on the Pistons team Van Gundy inherited was the 2013 lottery pick, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Until Caldwell-Pope's breakout Summer League performance which came nearly two months after he landed in Detroit, Van Gundy wasn't in possession of much to give him confidence the rising sophomore had a stranglehold on the position.

Where it gets even more interesting is to consider the ripple effects that drafting Stauskas might have had on Van Gundy's first off-season.

With Caldwell-Pope and Stauskas at shooting guard, would Van Gundy have made Meeks his priority in free agency? Possible, I suppose. But more likely that small forward would have been prioritized over shooting guard. Maybe that wouldn't have led anywhere different than what eventuated, at Caron Butler's doorstep. Van Gundy wanted one veteran he trusted implicitly to help infuse the locker room with the culture he intended to create and it's tough to imagine anyone striking him as a better candidate than Butler.

Trevor Ariza and Luol Deng were the two top unrestricted free agent small forwards, at least once you concede that Carmelo Anthony wasn't a realistic target. The other top small forward who moved in free agency was Chandler Parsons, who jumped from Houston to Dallas as a restricted free agent. It's doubtful the Pistons would have tied up cap space for 72 hours to target either Parsons or Gordon Hayward – who actually signed an offer sheet from Charlotte, matched by Utah – but it's certainly possible they would have made a play for Ariza or Deng.

Had they done so and landed one or the other and then got a Butler version of a shooting guard to help bridge the gap until Stauskas was deemed ready to share the position with Caldwell-Pope, would they have had enough cap space to sign D.J. Augustin?

Maybe not. And without Augustin, they would have been very hard pressed to put together a package to put them at the forefront of contenders to land Reggie Jackson. Oklahoma City wanted Kyle Singler, too, but a highly competent backup point guard was a must return for the Thunder if they were going to give up Jackson in any deal. Remember, the trade wasn't about the future for OKC; it was about putting together a team to win it all this year.

When the smoke clears, landing Jackson might well be the signature moment of Van Gundy's first year. He was that impressive, especially over the final 16 games when he averaged 20 points, 11 assists and five rebounds.

As Van Gundy said when the Pistons lost their No. 1 pick to Charlotte last year, it was going to happen either then or in 2015. If landing Jackson was the off-shoot of losing it last year, then that really wasn't the first bit adversity in the Van Gundy era, after all.

Coming Friday, we'll look at reasonable expectations for what the Pistons might get from this year's lottery.