As the NBA draft neared last June, Dumars and his staff narrowed their focus to four players: Stuckey, Thornton, Nick Young and Thaddeus Young, believing that not all of them but likely one or more would be on the board when the pick the Pistons got as payment for sending Darko Milicic to Orlando came up at No. 15.

But as it got closer to draft day, Dumars forgot about Thornton. The predraft buzz had seemingly ensured the 6-foot-7 scoring machine from Florida State would be a lottery pick and unavailable to the Pistons, who seemed a perfect fit for Thornton in any number of ways.

They wanted to reduce the burden on Tayshaun Prince and had a void behind him at small forward after trading Carlos Delfino to Toronto before the draft. They needed scoring punch off their bench. And Thornton's widely acknowledged work ethic would have matched the Dumars blueprint for staffing his roster.

"I liked Al's relentless approach to the game," Dumars said of Thornton, a unanimous All-ACC selection and third-team All-American who averaged 19.7 points and 7.2 rebounds a game for Florida State while shooting 53 percent and flashing 3-point range. "He goes hard every single minute he goes on the court. I never saw him, in all the times we scouted him, take a play off. That appealed to me immediately.

"The second thing is he has a scorer's mentality. He's about putting the ball in the basket and that obviously appealed to me. If you think he has the kind of work ethic that your team has been built on and he has the ability to really score the ball and compete, those things jumped out at me."

But as Thornton appeared out of reach, Dumars switched his focus to Stuckey, a player the Pistons had discovered during the 2005-06 season at Eastern Washington and followed meticulously since. And the more he zeroed in on Stuckey, the more enamored he became of him.

When draft day dawned last June, Dumars was as certain as he could be of two things: Thornton would be gone before 15 and Stuckey would be there for the Pistons to take.

"At the start of the day, I thought it was a foregone conclusion Stuckey would be there at 15. Midway through the day, we got word that the Clippers were going to take Stuckey at 14. We started looking harder at Nick Young and some of the other guys that could possibly be on the board. And then late in the evening, middle of the draft, we kind of got word that Stuckey would still be there. It was a roller-coaster, as usual, that day."

The first semi-curveball of the draft came when Philadelphia picked Georgia Tech freshman Thaddeus Young at 12. New Orleans was up next and there were indications the Hornets were leaning toward Nick Young, the explosive shooting guard out of Southern Cal. But with Thornton still on the board - he'd been projected to go as high as No. 7 and was a possibility every pick thereafter - Dumars figured that's where New Orleans was going. Instead, the Hornets took Kansas sophomore forward Julian Wright.

"I was the most shocked guy after maybe New Orleans drafted at 13 and didn't take Al Thornton," Dumars said. "To know that over the next two picks, you've got Al Thornton and Rodney Stuckey sitting there and you're 15 and 14 is on the clock, I was a happy guy."

Thornton, like Stuckey, had an eye-opening preseason, averaging 16 points a game and making 10 of 16 3-pointers, until - also like Stuckey - he suffered an injury in the final week. While Stuckey remains out with his broken left hand - though he appears to be on track to beat the six-week estimate for his return - Thornton's foot and ankle injuries have merely limited his role to date. He played a season-high 19 minutes, most of anyone off the bench, as the Clippers beat Chicago on Tuesday night, scoring seven points and grabbing four rebounds.

And what if the Clippers, as many figured they would, had taken Young, the local product, leaving Dumars to choose between his two favorite prospects?

"I've got to say we'd have taken Rodney Stuckey," he laughed, "because he's here right now. But it would have been a lot more painful decision if we'd have found ourselves in that situation. That's a scenario we never played out because there's no way both of those guys are going to be there at 15. There's just no way. For it to unfold as close as it did was ironic, I guess."

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