If you’re wondering what kind of ovation he’s going to get, I’m expecting it to be one that will absolutely bring down the house. When you take into account it wasn’t Chauncey’s decision to leave Detroit, and when you factor in the kind of person he is and the kind of player he is and what he truly meant to the Detroit Pistons, how can it be anything else?

And he deserves it. And when it comes, it will tell me how much our fans appreciated this run that the Pistons have been on to six straight Eastern Conference finals.

He was the man who made it go on the offensive end and he matured so much in front of our eyes. He was legitimately Mr. Big Shot. I can’t even count how many shots he made to win games or at least make them winnable. Talk about getting it done in crunch time. You’ve got to miss a few if you’re going to take all of those big shots, but I’ll take my chances with Chauncey with the ball in his hands and the game on the line.

He was a legitimate leader and a great community guy. It’s too bad in pro sports that players can’t just graduate with highest honors and go on to the next phase of their lives, but that’s not the reality of today’s game. It’s too bad that basketball operations bosses like Joe Dumars sometimes have to sacrifice a little part of the present to plan for a better future.

When the trade happened, as a fan myself I hoped for two things. I hoped that Chauncey would be happy in Denver, first, because he certainly deserved it after what he’d done for us. And if you know him personally, you know what a quality guy he is and what a great family he has. You clearly wanted something good to happen for him in Denver, personally and professionally, and it has.

But we were also hoping that the addition of a superstar-caliber player would help the Pistons maybe take that step beyond where they’ve been stalled recently, in the conference finals. Everybody kept telling us, if you don’t have a superstar, it’s hard to get to the Finals and ever harder to win. Well, we certainly had guys who were superstars in my opinion, but league-wide, Allen Iverson is the definition of a superstar.

I had hoped, just like everybody else, that AI would help us get to the promised land. He’s such an incredible talent, but so far it’s been difficult to assimilate him and his style of play.

I don’t think anybody who is a Pistons fan, or especially those of us who are part of the Pistons family, won’t do a double-take when Chauncey comes into that building on Tuesday in somebody else’s uniform. There are a lot of guys who will forever be identified with the world-championship team that Joe D put together. But certainly Chauncey was just as much the face of our franchise as anybody else.

It seemed like as the years went by, he grew more and more into that role. Even though in the championship season he was the Finals MVP – and a very deserving Finals MVP – as the years went on, it seemed like he grew more and more into the face of our franchise.

There are so many standout memories of Chauncey at The Palace, but you can’t forget the shot that forced overtime against New Jersey in the playoffs of that title year. That was phenomenal and showed not just the basketball world, but the whole world, that the Detroit Pistons were never going to go down without a fight.

I thought the way he played under the bright lights in the 2004 NBA Finals against the Lakers when he took it to Gary Payton, one of the league’s all-time great defenders at the point guard spot, and dominated him and dominated the Lakers, was his finest hour.

We had a guy named Ben Wallace who had an outstanding NBA Finals series and he probably played well enough in most years to be Finals MVP, but Chauncey was so good at quarterbacking that team and making all the plays necessary, not only for himself but his teammates, that he was such a deserving MVP. I couldn’t have been happier for him, and I couldn’t be looking forward to seeing him come back home to The Palace more than I am.