I’d never make a living scouting college players, but I did learn a valuable lesson many years ago when asking a scout about how a certain player with gaping holes in his game could possibly make it in the NBA.

“Look,” he told me, in the exasperated tone of an impatient parent telling a kid for the last time that the eight-hour car journey was only in its second hour. “This isn’t like summer camp. You don’t have to get every box on the sheet checked off.”

When evaluating college players, look for one or two things they do especially well and figure out if they’ll still be able to do them well – or well enough, at least – when the talent level takes another considerable leap in the NBA.

The NBA is filled with players who can dominate one or two categories of the stat sheet. Pistons fans know better than most the value of such players. Dennis Rodman became an invaluable member of the back-to-back championship Bad Boys for his defensive versatility and offensive rebounding. He couldn’t handle the ball and he couldn’t shoot it – a pretty toxic combination on one end of the floor – but what he did, he did so well that it didn’t diminish his NBA profile. Ben Wallace was an even more extreme case.

As the Pistons were gathering in the lobby of their team hotel Sunday morning before heading off to UNLV’s campus for a scrimmage with the Boston Celtics, new assistant coach Michael Curry was talking to free agent hopeful Ibrahim Jabber, a point guard out of Penn.

“Do what you do all the time,” Curry told him, using a little humor to punctuate the point. “Like Sammy,” Curry continued, nodding his head at second-round pick Sammy Mejia of DePaul, who knocked down a game-winning 3-pointer in Saturday’s debut game of the Pistons’ Las Vegas Summer League experience. “Sammy doesn’t rebound, and he always doesn’t rebound.”

Mejia collected just two in 29 minutes of the opener while playing mostly small forward. The Pistons knew all along that rebounding wasn’t Mejia’s forte, but if he can do more of what he did consistently in the opener – make good decisions with the basketball, knock down open shots, play solid positional team defense and generally spend more time around the basketball than most – Mejia, too, will have a shot to make the 15-man roster.

There have been players who’ve risen to genuine superstar status in the NBA who use the same formula. Magic Johnson had very little in the way of a jump shot when he got to the NBA, but long before he became a truly effective 3-point shooter – albeit on the strength of an awkward looking tip-toe release – he was one of the game’s top handful of players. Jason Kidd even today can dominate games without scoring.

The day after Joe Dumars selected Rodney Stuckey and Arron Afflalo in June’s draft, Afflalo was asked by a reporter if he expected to earn playing time initially solely on the strength of his defense. With Dumars at his side, Afflalo began to answer the question before his new boss cut him off. “No,” Dumars said emphatically. “We want him to be versatile, do everything. He’s not a one-dimensional player. We want him to score, defend – no one dimension. He can shoot the ball, he can score and that’s what we expect.”

But Afflalo is showing here in Las Vegas that even if his offense isn’t polished to the point it figures to be – and there’s no reason to think that with his sound fundamentals and his superb shooting form that he won’t become an effective scorer, too – he’ll still be able to help the Pistons with his advanced defensive skills.

Stuckey has some catching up to do on defense, as the eight fouls he picked up in his Summer League debut suggests. But he, too, flashed some dazzling offensive skills – explosive strength to the basket and a transition jumper stroked with supreme confidence – that indicate the Pistons can live comfortably with whatever growing pains he might endure.

Joe Dumars was the ultimate in well-rounded guard play – someone who could handle the ball superbly, get to the basket and finish, stretch a defense beyond the 3-point arc and, of course, play lock-down defense. He wants that for both of his first-round rookies, too, and the Pistons are getting early indications from Arron Afflalo and Rodney Stuckey that such a package will ultimately be delivered. In the meantime, they’ve also shown they don’t need to get every box on the sheet checked off to be of immediate help.