Replacing Rasheed

To the extent anyone will approximate Wallace’s contributions offensively, Charlie Villanueva is the logical and likely candidate. Only Villanueva of the five veteran big men – Kwame Brown, Chris Wilcox, Jason Maxiell and Ben Wallace fill out the rotation – represents a perimeter shooting threat, which had become Rasheed’s most consistent weapon over the past few seasons.

As Joe Dumars said last week in the Q&A we posted in four parts on Pistons.com, if you can’t field an efficient low-post scorer at power forward, then the best alternative is to find one who poses a 3-point threat.

Charlie V is busy these days trying to get the Dominican Republic qualified for the 2010 World Championships. The Dominicans won their first game of the quarterfinal round Tuesday afternoon as Villanueva had a team-high 19 points, plus eight rebounds, in an 80-74 comeback win over Uruguay. In four games in the preliminary round, he was among the tournament’s top 10 in scoring (16.5) and rebounding (9.2) while playing on a team that includes Atlanta’s Al Horford up front as well as Sacramento’s Francisco Garcia, the tournament’s leading scorer through the first round.

That type of performance, against quality competition in a pressurized setting, has to be encouraging to the Pistons as they prepare to move Villanueva into the lineup for the prime years of his career.

It bears keeping in mind that the Rasheed Wallace who came to the Pistons was largely a finished product at 29 and with eight-plus seasons under his belt when Joe Dumars swung the trade-deadline deal in 2004 to land him. And the image Pistons fans have of him is that rare big man who could score with equal proficiency from inside and out.

But Wallace at 25, the age at which Villanueva comes to the Pistons, was a far different player.

Here are Wallace’s numbers over the five seasons – the length of the contract Charlie V signed with the Pistons in July – that begin with the NBA season in which he turned 25: 16.4 points and 7.0 rebounds, 19.2 and 7.8, 19.3 and 8.2, 18.1 and 7.4 and 16.0 and 6.8 (the year in which he became a Piston).

Here are his numbers before that: 10.1 and 4.7, 15.1 and 7.4, 14.6 and 6.2 and 12.8 and 4.9. Villanueva’s numbers over his first four years: 13.0 and 6.4, 11.8 and 5.8, 11.1 and 6.1, 16.2 and 6.7. Wallace’s shooting percentages were superior to Villanueva’s early in his career, but mostly because a young Rasheed didn’t shoot nearly as many 3-pointers. Villanueva’s career shooting percentage of .451 is good for a player who’s taken 23 percent of his attempts from the 3-point arc.

While Wallace has been one of the NBA’s best deep shooters among big men for years, he was far from that early in his career. In the first year of our five-year window, Wallace took only 50 3-point attempts all season and made only eight. His 3-point attempts went from 50 to 162 to 317 in a three-season span. In Rasheed’s first four seasons, only 7 percent of his attempts were 3-pointers.

Villanueva took 258 triples last season and connected at a .345 clip, which compares to Rasheed’s 2003-04 season when he was 87 of 248 (.331).

Villanueva has a back-to-the-basket game and scores around the rim, as well, though like Wallace it’s not something he’ll do over and over again. The one area where Villanueva is more advanced than Wallace is in his ability to put the ball on the floor and go with it. That was one of the things that struck Dumars about him as he did his homework leading to free agency.

Villanueva is no more likely to evolve into a point forward than Wallace, but his assist numbers did spike last season to a career high 137, a 1.8 per game average that nearly matches Rasheed’s career mark of 1.9. Rasheed became less turnover prone as his career progressed, but at a similar age he was about as likely to commit them as Villanueva has been.

It’s harder to quantify with any great certainty a player’s defensive contributions – though some teams are developing their own complex metrics and the Internet is rife with stats gurus who attempt to assign values to individual defenders – but it’s fair to say Charlie Villanueva comes to the Pistons with the reputation as a mediocre defender.

Wallace was never a premier shot-blocker, but always a threat. His career best was the 2.0 he averaged for his partial season with the Pistons in 2003-04 and his career average is 1.3, about twice Villanueva’s rate so far.

The Pistons won’t ask him to assume Wallace’s defensive role, which since Ben Wallace left has usually included primary responsibility to defend the opposition’s top scoring big man, be that back-to-the-basket scorers like Dwight Howard and Zydrunas Ilgauskas or face-up fours like Kevin Garnett and LaMarcus Aldridge. The Pistons likely will keep him away from the former since all four of their other big men are better equipped and more practiced at guarding the post.

Bottom line, at 25 Charlie V appears on course to have a career that parallels Wallace’s in many respects offensively. If he can hold his own defensively, and hold up his end within the team defense framework John Kuester will impose, the Pistons will have done about as well as they could have reasonably expected in plugging a hole at power forward after getting 5½ years of Rasheed Wallace’s career at that position.