Rarin' to Go

That logically makes Jerebko the odds-on favorite to again start up front next to Ben Wallace.

But Charlie Villanueva is going to training camp with the intention of winning the starting power forward position.

“That’s my mentality – to be a starter,” Villanueva said after a heavy workout Monday following a weekend spent celebrating his 26th birthday with friends and family. “But at the same time, I don’t want it to be given to me. I want to earn it. I believe I can be a starter in this league. I’ve done it before. When we get closer to training camp, I would like to sit down with (Kuester) and just share thoughts, expectations for my role, and just take it from there.”

If there were gold stars given out for off-season attendance at the practice facility, Villanueva would have a galaxy’s worth. Though Villanueva only missed three 2009-10 games due to injury, he was nicked up the entire season. It started with a hamstring strain and ran the gamut from there: a broken nose that required surgery, a painful bout with plantar fasciitis, and back spasms that severely limited his mobility over the second half of the season and rendered him almost exclusively a jump shooter.

Because he and Ben Gordon symbolized the remaking of the Pistons – the fruits of Joe Dumars’ 2009 off-season spending with the cap space gained in the Chauncey Billups trade – and because Charlie V was the one who was most often in uniform, he bore the brunt of fan frustration during a hugely disappointing 27-win season that snapped the Pistons’ string of eight straight playoff appearances.

Villanueva’s response? Spend the summer right here, joined at the hip to strength coach Arnie Kander, to transform himself physically and come back a different player.

“I’ve improved my body in general,” he said. “My body feels good. I feel like I can get off the floor easier. Today, I might not have shown it, but I don’t get tired as easy. My body, my shot – anything I do, I just feel like it’s been better.

“It’s amazing what Arnie can do. I’m serious. I haven’t had any back pain. Before, even before the season would start, just sitting down and getting up, I would feel it a little bit in my back. Now, I haven’t felt anything.”

Despite dropping around 15 pounds over the summer, Villanueva said he feels not only quicker and more explosive but stronger. Kander set goals of improving Villanueva’s running stride and getting his first two or three steps to be more explosive when their work together began in May and Charlie V said those areas are noticeably improved for him.

One of the drills Kander has devised this summer involves ballhandling in a series of six boxes, approximately 20-inches square set up in two rows of three. The drills vary, but players have to dribble in patterns in 18-second bursts of energy – dribbling only in the squares prescribed for each drill – that require them to keep their feet constantly moving as the ball goes from one box to the next. Kander exhorts them to beat the ball to the square with their feet – to “defend” the dribble.

“It’s not a ballhandling drill,” Tracy McGrady told me last week after taking his turns. “I figured that out the second time I did it. It’s a lateral movement, defensive drill.”

“Arnie tries to fool you,” Villanueva said. “You’ve got to stay low. You can’t do that drill standing up straight. It’s a combination of a lot of things – a defensive drill, a ballhandling drill, a conditioning drill. It’s good stuff. It seems petty at first, but it’s very effective.”

Kander’s constant use of basketball-related movements in what passes for his weight room, combined with his on-court drills, are designed to ingrain proper technique in muscle memory. Villanueva could feel it translate for him when he played for the Dominican national team earlier this summer and is eager to get to training camp to play five-on-five against NBA talent to put it to the supreme test.

“It’s becoming natural,” he said. “Just the fact I’ve been doing it since May, it’s starting to become natural. It was harder for me during (last season) because it was new for me. That’s why I decided to stay here and get a good summer with Arnie under my belt. When the season comes, I already know what to do and how to maintain my body. Arnie has done a great job. It was the best decision I made to stay here.

“I can’t wait for training camp to start. I can’t wait to get the season rolling. I don’t know if there are going to be any more changes, but the team we have now, we all have a bad taste in our mouth from last year. We’re all going to come more than ready for this season. Same thing with the coaching staff. We just all feel like last year was a fluke and we have something to prove.”

Camp opens in just four weeks. Villanueva will be here for all of them, doing more of the same, and will enter this training camp feeling better physically than he has in any of his five previous NBA seasons.

“I’m going to be more than ready,” he said. “I can’t wait.”