The Boston Celtics, in case you slept through the summer and haven’t picked up a magazine and don’t own a television, enter the season as the first, second and third most discussed team in the NBA’s Eastern Conference. They hesitate to call Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Paul Pierce the Big Three in Beantown, that nickname having been as good as retired and run to the old Garden’s rafters along with the numbers of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish.

The Pistons can’t compete with that – except on the confines of a hardwood playing surface – but they did emerge from the preseason, poised for Thursday’s season opener at Miami, with a big three of their own.

The three biggest stories of Pistons preseason:

Delayed gratification
While others off of Joe Dumars’ radically remade bench will have roles of equal or greater significance, no two players stirred more intrigue – or own higher ceilings – than Amir Johnson and Rodney Stuckey.

So it was disappointing, though a long way from catastrophic, that both of the Pistons’ vibrant young talents suffered preseason injuries that will delay or lessen their impact.

Johnson went down with a fairly severe left ankle sprain four days into camp and had to be shut down during Tuesday’s practice, little more than a week into his return, with residual pain in his Achilles tendon. All normal and not cause for concern, training guru Arnie Kander insists, and any suggestion that Johnson is snakebit or injury prone is grossly premature at this point.

But it’s going to make it tougher for Johnson to stake his claim to frontcourt minutes. The Pistons have largely featured a three-man frontcourt rotation for several seasons with occasional room for a fourth. But there’s no ironman like Ben Wallace around any longer and Flip Saunders seems pretty determined to keep Rasheed Wallace’s minutes to around 30. That provides an opening for Johnson, whose skill set makes him unique among Pistons big men, but he’ll have to get back to full strength and prove himself in practice to earn his shot.

As for Stuckey, “broken hand” sounds bad but, truth be told, it’s a lot less troubling than a knee that swells inexplicably or even an ankle sprain, which often lingers well past the return date. Stuckey’s hand is held together by screws while nature knits the fractures back together and he’ll be as good as new – probably before the initial six-week estimate is up, by all indications.

His preseason finale in the win over Washington was the most compelling glimpse yet into Stuckey’s potential, at least to outsiders. But the Pistons had already seen enough of the kid – through his college days, in Las Vegas this summer and at their practice facility before training camp opened – to believe to their core that he’ll be an important piece of the puzzle this year, sooner rather than later.

And everything they’ve learned about him to date suggests that Stuckey will use the down time to observe, digest and educate himself to the nuances of the NBA. There’s no substitute for playing, of course, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be benefits to watching and waiting, either.

Biggest losers
We mean that in a good way. In the 30 or so pounds Jason Maxiell shed, the 20-plus Rasheed Wallace dropped and the 15 Flip Murray melted away, the collective conditioning level of the team even before training camp started is a good indication of the temperature out at Five Championship Drive.

For a team wholly convinced that championships are within their grasp, all seasons that end without a parade are disappointing. But the way last season unraveled on them during the Eastern Conference finals left a particularly bitter taste in the back of the their throats. They lost to San Antonio in Game 7, returned the next year and came up a little short against the Shaq-Wade Heat. Disappointing, sure, but the Pistons at least viewed those teams as their peers and understood their margin for error was fine against them.

They felt – and still do – that they were a clearly superior team to Cleveland, LeBron James’ out-of-body experience in Game 5 notwithstanding.

Rasheed Wallace is widely tagged by outsiders with seemingly indifferent play, and he’s lent credence to such criticism by making some careless, if misconstrued, comments as to the drudgery of the regular season being endured as a necessity to get to the games that really matter. But Saunders has gone out of his way this preseason to say that Wallace has been nothing short of fully attentive and purposeful in his play – in the preseason, no less.

“He hasn’t had a bad practice yet,” Saunders said as recently as Tuesday.

As omens go, take that one and run with it.

Locked and loaded
There are no absolutes in the construction of a championship team, but a fairly common ingredient is the presence of a shooter without conscience sitting at the coach’s side, ready to be summoned at any time to punch up the offense.

Say hello to Jarvis Hayes, who appears ready, willing and able to come in launching Hayes-makers.

It’s a testament to the enduring value of such a player that every time the Pistons get someone they think can fill the bill, Vinnie Johnson is evoked. It’s going on 20 years since VJ’s heyday and they’re still trying to find a worthy successor.

Hayes might be a one-year rental – and if he is, that probably means he did his job so well here that somebody else offers him starter’s money – but so far, he looks positively Johnsonesque in his unshakeable confidence that every shot he launches is destined to alter the scoreboard.

It doesn’t always work that way, of course, but designated shooters – like NFL cornerbacks – must have short memories. Hayes appears amnesiac. And it’s too early to tell for sure, but he hasn’t yet shown he’s so wrapped up in his identity as a scorer that he forces bad shots or grinds the offense to a halt looking for good ones.

With Antonio McDyess abandoning the bench to join the starting lineup, it’s especially critical that Saunders has someone on his bench he can look to for consistent scoring over 82 games. At some point this season, hopefully he can look down and find a plethora of such players – Stuckey and Johnson among them – but for now, Jarvis Hayes looks like a masterful free-agent pickup at below-market wages.