“That first year, 40 games or so into the season, he had a tough stretch and it was very hard on him,” Joe Dumars recalls today. “I remember being on the road in Atlanta and calling him into my room and saying, ‘Listen, you act like I’m going to go out and start looking for another point guard. You’re the guy. I’m committed to you.’

“You could see his confidence just drawing in and I was like, ‘No, no, no – get up. We’re not going to abandon you. We’re not going to throw the towel in on you. You’re our point guard.’ He and I still talk about that conversation today.”

Dumars has never had a discussion with anyone from any of the five NBA front offices that gave up on Chauncey Billups – Boston, Toronto, Denver, Orlando and Minnesota – about why it didn’t work out.

“That’s a conversation that never comes up,” he smiles. “I don’t bring it up and no one else does, either.”

But he acknowledges that it is extremely unusual for a player drafted No. 3 overall to drift as Billups did and then emerge as an All-Star for his sixth franchise.

“You rarely see a guy come into his own that far down the road,” he said. “As I’m sitting here, I can’t think of another situation where a guy who went that high finally came into his own five years down the road. But with Chauncey, it was probably going to take him that long even in a great situation. I don’t think he ever played the position – point guard – solely. He bounced back and forth, and that’s tough.

“But when he got here, I said, ‘Here’s the ball. You’re the point guard. I’m not looking for another point guard. I’m going to go and find other positions now.’ I don’t think that happened for him anywhere else.”

Dumars still saw “big-time talent” in Billups, but he admits he had no idea he would blossom into one of the NBA’s brightest stars in the big moments that define such players.

“Really, there was no way for you to know that,” Dumars said. “He was never really in those positions. He was in Minnesota before he got here and they weren’t going to Chauncey Billups down the stretch.”

It didn’t take long for the Pistons – Dumars and then-coach Rick Carlisle – to realize that the Billups they got would exceed their expectations.

“We realized right away, ‘Wow, we found something here with him. He hit all those game-winning shots, we all realized that we’d fallen into something.”