(Editor's note: Pistons.com continues its NBA draft preview series with a look at three perimeter prospects possible with their second-round pick. Coming Wedneday: a look at interior prospects possible with the Pistons second-round pick.)
Taking Devin Booker in the lottery would raise some eyebrows, given the depth the Pistons already possess at shooting guard. Drafting one in the second round wouldn’t. When you’re picking 38th, the smart bet is to take the player with the best chance to gain a foothold of any sort in the NBA.
The recipe for drafting in the second round commonly is to find one skill in a player that translates to an above-average NBA ability and hope that’s enough to allow him to carve out a role.
The Pistons drafted 38th last season, too, and Stan Van Gundy saw in Spencer Dinwiddie unique passing ability on a 6-foot-6 frame. Dinwiddie, despite losing his entire off-season while recovering from ACL surgery, exhibited just that as a Pistons rookie. His 3.15 assists-to-turnover rate was easily best among NBA rookies.
Based on the type of perimeter players the Pistons worked out who are generally ranked in keeping with a pick at 38, the one skill Van Gundy might be hoping to find in the 2015 second round is shooting.
Three of the four top wing candidates brought to Auburn Hills for predraft workouts – Anthony Brown, Michael Frazier and Terran Petteway – are all small forwards or shooting guards who come to the NBA as scorers. Brown and Frazier were among college’s best 3-point shooters. Petteway is more scorer than shooter right now but almost half his shots at Nebraska came from the 3-point arc.
Brown, 22, averaged 14.8 points a game and hit 44 percent from the 3-point line as a Stanford senior. At 6-foot-8½, he’s a small forward more than a shooting guard at this point, but he has a clear understanding of the role he’ll likely fill in the NBA. It’s one he began actively preparing to play midway through his time at Stanford.
“That’s something that I wasn’t great at in my first two years in college,” he said when he visited the Pistons in early June. “I only shot 35 percent, but I was looking at the NBA and I said, ‘Where can I fit in?’ If you want to be in the NBA, you’ve got to shoot 40-plus at my size, so that’s something I’ve worked on repeatedly the last few years.”
Frazier, 21, is leaving Florida after his junior season. But he arrived in Gainesville already packing a 3-point punch. In fact, the .380 he shot from the arc in his last season was his worst as a Gator after hitting at a .447 clip as a sophomore and a .468 rate as a freshman. Furthermore, the great majority of Frazier’s attempts come from the 3-point line, about two-thirds last season.
“I think shooting is a lost art and I’m one of the very few guys in this draft that can shoot the ball very well,” he said last week after his Pistons workout. “I’ve proven that over my career in college, so that’s definitely something I can hang my hat on going into these workouts. I’m just trying to show I can do more than spot up and shoot.”
Frazier, who measured 6-foot-4½ at the NBA draft combine in May, wouldn’t offer the Pistons positional versatility. He’s strictly a shooting guard at this point. But if they judge his shooting ability to be the best individual trait on the board at 38, he might be a good developmental grab. With Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Jodie Meeks 1-2 on the depth chart, Frazier probably would get plenty of playing time with the D-League Grand Rapids Drive were the Pistons to draft him.
Nebraska’s Petteway is the only player the Pistons brought back for a second workout. His athletic testing numbers were on the low end at the draft combine, but the 6-foot-6 Petteway, 22, was one of college basketball’s most consistent scorers in his last two Big Ten seasons, averaging 18.1 as a sophomore and 18.2 as a junior.
“I can come in and be a two-way guard for these guys, come in and guard on the defensive end and also score the ball on the offensive end,” Petteway said. “Come in the game, bring a lot of energy, be a great teammate whenever my time is called, execute.”
Another perimeter player the Pistons brought in last week also identifies first as a scorer, but Boston College’s Olivier Hanlan is considered a point guard by most teams and that’s how he was listed on the information sheet the Pistons distributed to the media.
“I feel like it would be scoring off the bench,” Hanlan said of what he would bring foremost to whichever team drafts him. “I just feel like in college, that’s what I did best and I want to translate that to the NBA.
A rare NBA prospect from Quebec, Hanlan is leaving Boston College after his junior season in which he averaged 19.5 points, 4.2 assists and 4.2 rebounds a game.
“I always played point my whole life, in prep school and with the national team back in Canada,” he said. “I never really scored a lot of points, but in college I started getting pretty comfortable with the ball and scoring the ball, on the ball and off the ball, and became a really good scorer.”