AUBURN HILLS, Mich. - Twenty-four years ago, Jack McCloskey furrowed the brow of Pistons owner William Davidson when with the 18th pick in the NBA draft that June – and local hero Sam Vincent of Michigan State still on the board – Trader Jack announced in the Pistons’ war room that the pick was some obscure guard out of a school that had zero name recognition.

History will record that McCloskey did the right thing in passing on Vincent in favor of McNeese State’s Joe Dumars, who went on to a Hall of Fame career and today sits in McCloskey’s old seat.

Now Dumars might be faced with a similar decision on June 25. Armed with the 15th pick in a draft rich in point guards, Dumars might find himself choosing between such big-school stars as Ty Lawson of national champion North Carolina, Jrue Holiday of UCLA, Jonny Flynn of Syracuse … and Eric Maynor of Virginia Commonwealth.

Point guard isn’t necessarily a position of great need for the Pistons, but drafting a player with little chance at a productive NBA career at a position of greater need does nothing to advance a franchise. If the best player available at 15 is a point guard, Dumars will grab him and move forward. Besides, with only two point guards on the roster and Dumars looking for ways to get Rodney Stuckey and Will Bynum on the floor together, the Pistons will be looking to add another point guard via one forum or another this off-season.

And this draft, which otherwise is spotty, is the surest way to address that need.

So why would Eric Maynor be a good fit?

Well, for starters, he’s the tallest of the true point guards who could fall within range of the 15th pick, Flynn, Lawson and Wake Forest’s Jeff Teague among them. Holiday, more a combo guard who some have compared to Stuckey, is the same 6-foot-3 as Maynor, though more powerfully built.

Maynor was lightly recruited out of Fayetteville, N.C., overlooked by his home-state ACC powers, mostly because he hadn’t displayed a consistent jump shot. That’s no longer an issue. Maynor averaged 22.4 points a game as a senior and shot .463 overall and .361 from the 3-point line. He won’t be a 3-point NBA threat early in his career, but has shown enough to convince scouts he will develop that shot, as most young guards entering the league must.

Maynor first came to prominence as a sophomore at VCU when he led a 2007 first-round NCAA tournament upset of Duke, scoring on a last-second shot. He very nearly repeated the deed as a senior when he went one-on-one against premier UCLA defender Darren Collison but left a clean 17-foot look just short in a one-point loss.

One quality of Maynor’s that could appeal to the Pistons is that with his size – unlike Lawson or Flynn – he could play in the same backcourt with Bynum at times, Maynor guarding the shooting guard and Bynum the point guard, while also being able to play next to Stuckey. And as a four-year college player who had to carry his team for the last three seasons, Maynor might be best equipped to assume playing time as a rookie.

That’s the way it worked, at least, 24 years ago when the Pistons passed on bigger names to take a less-heralded guard, equally comfortable playing with Isiah Thomas or Vinnie Johnson, who’d spent four years carrying his little-known school.