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True Blue Pistons
Award-winning journalist Keith Langlois, most recently lead sports columnist at The Oakland Press, joined Pistons.com as the web site editor on October 2, 2006. Langlois, who brings over 27 years of professional sports journalism experience to Palace Sports & Entertainment, serves as Pistons.com's official beat writer and covers the team on a daily basis.
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“This is where I wanted to retire,” Wallace said Thursday, preparing for another day in the gym, back at the Pistons’ practice facility this week for the first time since the school year ended last spring and the family relocated to their Virginia home. “A whole lot of other places weren’t really options for me. I got some calls from other teams, but I tried to be honest with them and let them know that this is where I want to retire. I maybe only had a year or two left; no need to leave here and try to come back again and finish up. I just didn’t want to go through those changes again.”
The man who won four NBA Defensive Player of the Year awards as a Piston before leaving for Chicago as a free agent following the 2005-06 season returned to The Palace a year ago on a one-year veteran’s minimum contract after three injury-wracked seasons, dealing with back and leg problems, and he came back to greatly reduced expectations – ones he began exceeding the day training camp opened and never really stopped.
A few minor injuries to both knees convinced Wallace and the Pistons to shut him down late in a season long-since undermined by injuries to a laundry list of teammates, but by then it seemed pretty clear that both sides were motivated to extend the relationship.
Posted Wednesday, September 8, 2010
“The experience was very important,” he said Wednesday. “It was different, because in my 20 years I hadn’t experienced the number of things that did occur last year in regards to the injuries and whatever. That was an adjustment, but you learn from that. I was able to sit down with Joe and evaluate a number of things that we’ve got to improve upon, things we did do well and things we’ve got to get better at. That’s the important thing.”
Like a litany of his players who’ve echoed the same mantra over the summer, Kuester is eager to get going and put last season further behind him, confident that a healthy roster will position the Pistons for results that will catch casual observers by surprise.
Posted Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Turns out White, the Pistons’ No. 2 pick in the 2010 draft with the 42-inch vertical jump, was performing with a handicap.
“He called me right afterward,” Adam Wilson, White’s personal trainer, laughed Tuesday from the Pistons’ Auburn Hills practice facility. “He was like, ‘You know my shoes weren’t tied.’ I’ve seen him do that stuff a lot in the gym. He’s a phenomenal athlete.”
Wilson and White drove to Detroit on Labor Day from St. Louis, where they’d detoured after leaving White’s Memphis home to visit his brother, and Wilson intends to stay with him from now until training camp starts Sept. 28 to continue the work they began together in the weeks leading to the June draft.
Posted Friday, September 3, 2010
Amare Stoudemire went from Phoenix to New York and Carlos Boozer from Utah to Chicago, and while both make their new teams better, their old teams were hardly left crippled.
We can all agree that Miami should be dramatically improved. But the Heat won 47 games a year ago. Let’s say they improve by 20 wins to get to 67. That figures to be more than offset by Cleveland’s drop from 61 wins and compounded by Toronto’s fall from 40 wins – the damage inflicted on those two franchises by the free-agent flights of LeBron James and Chris Bosh to Miami.
Posted Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Then it was off to school himself – Camp Kander. Stuckey will spend the next four weeks at the Pistons’ practice facility working with Arnie Kander getting ready for the opening of training camp. And on Sept. 27, when trainer Mike Abdenour dutifully records all the heights and weights, Stuckey will be curious to know where the needle on the scale will settle.
More accurately, he’ll be curious to know how much less he weighs since last season ended.
Posted Monday, August 30, 2010
That logically makes Jerebko the odds-on favorite to again start up front next to Ben Wallace.
But Charlie Villanueva is going to training camp with the intention of winning the starting power forward position.
“That’s my mentality – to be a starter,” Villanueva said after a heavy workout Monday following a weekend spent celebrating his 26th birthday with friends and family. “But at the same time, I don’t want it to be given to me. I want to earn it. I believe I can be a starter in this league. I’ve done it before. When we get closer to training camp, I would like to sit down with (Kuester) and just share thoughts, expectations for my role, and just take it from there.”
Posted Friday, August 27, 2010
And for No. 1 pick Greg Monroe, it’s New Orleans, where he spent the first 18 years of his life before going away to college at Georgetown. His mother, Norma, and sister, Brittany, still live in the East Bank home in Jefferson Parish that they had to abandon for a month in 2005 while they waited for both the post-Katrina flooding and chaos to ebb. There’ll be a Monroe family reunion in early December when the Pistons visit the Hornets for a Dec. 8 game.
“I’m definitely looking forward to going home,” Monroe said this week after returning from last week’s NBA rookie orientation program in New York and starting to work out under Arnie Kander’s supervision now that his doctor has given him full clearance to resume activity after having minor toe surgery in late July.
Posted Wednesday, August 25, 2010
That’s where ESPN.com has the Pistons this week – ranked 29th in the NBA, ahead of only the woebegone Minnesota Timberwolves.
“Twenty-ninth? Out of 30?” McGrady said, slack-jawed, a week after signing with the Pistons for the veteran’s minimum, when I told him of ESPN’s projection for the Pistons. “Wow! Really? We’re going to surprise a lot of people. That’s all bull, anyway, those rankings. That’s insulting. If you look at the team they had last year, if those guys don’t get injured, they’re a playoff team. Really? What are they looking at?”
And when McGrady says “the team they had last year,” what he’s implying is that the team the Pistons will field in the coming season figures to better – in large part because he fully believes adding him to the lineup makes it an inevitability.
Posted Monday, August 23, 2010
1. Who starts next to Ben Wallace?
Will it be last year’s rookie wunderkind, Jonas Jerebko? Or 2009 free-agent Charlie Villanueva? Or perhaps even 2010 lottery pick Greg Monroe?
Jerebko probably goes to camp as the favorite because you know what you’re going to get from him every night: supreme hustle, steady defense, a guy who’ll get you easy points by chasing down offensive rebounds or beating his man in transition. For his contributions in those areas, and the consistency of effort, Jerebko is always going to catch a coach’s attention.
Posted Friday, August 20, 2010
So that’s how the 18-year-old McGrady and the 41-year-old Long were teammates for a while in Toronto, Long well remembering his first impressions of McGrady.
“I knew he had all the talent in the world,” Long recalls 13 years later with McGrady now joining his hometown Pistons, for whom he played parts of 10 seasons in three stints and was a member of the 1988-89 NBA champions. “We went to Barbados during the summer for a mini-training camp and I saw the potential there immediately. I saw that this kid could be unbelievable if he had somebody to work with him and guide him. I was right about the talent level.”
Posted Thursday, August 19, 2010
I’d seen the same performance, essentially, a little more than a month ago in Las Vegas. It was July 13 and the Pistons Summer League team had a day off from game competition, so they worked out for an hour or so at the practice court at Cox Pavilion on UNLV’s campus. As it was breaking up and players were milling about, gathering their bags or getting treatment from assistant strength coach Dave Boyer or grabbing a bottle of Gatorade, White started throwing down some fairly routine dunks at one end of the court.
With a backpack on.
Then he shed the backpack and went to work. For his finale, he did the 360 with the between-the-legs flourish you see at the rookie shoot that’s become an Internet sensation.
Posted Wednesday, August 18, 2010
“I look at guys all the time (on tape),” Kander said. “You never know. Any time I hear a rumor, I get the tapes out and start watching. Because you never know what the possibility is.”
So Kander had a pretty good working knowledge of Tracy McGrady when his agent, Arn Tellem, called Joe D less than two weeks ago to say McGrady would like to join the Pistons. Actually, Kander’s had a working catalog on McGrady for a long time.
Posted Monday, August 16, 2010
Something about that rubbed Chicago Bulls management the wrong way, which caused what appeared a likely Bulls-McGrady union to unravel after he worked out for them earlier this month. But it was exactly what the Pistons wanted to hear. One of the most dynamic NBA players of his generation, at 31, feels he has plenty still to offer and feels the Pistons will give him an honest shot to display it.
“I wanted to play basketball,” said McGrady, who’ll wear No. 1 for the Pistons. “That’s what I told (Dumars). I wanted to play basketball. If anybody knows me, I don’t show a lot of emotion, but I have a chip on my shoulder. I carry things in the back of my mind. That’s what really motivates me.”
That gives McGrady plenty in common with his new teammates, driven to prove last season’s stinging disappointment was a fluke. When talks broke off with Chicago, McGrady had agent Arn Tellem call Dumars and see if the Pistons were interested, Tellem telling Dumars that McGrady had long admired the culture of the organization, that he was willing to come off the bench and that he would take the NBA veteran’s minimum salary for the chance to re-establish his place in the game.
Posted Friday, August 13, 2010
One of his gym mates last summer was Tracy McGrady, fresh off of microfracture knee surgery and about to enter the final year of a contract that last season paid him $23 million. McGrady wasn’t around Grover’s gym quite as much this summer, focused more on proving to teams that at 31 he still had much to offer, but Bynum saw enough in the two or three times their paths crossed to believe the Pistons got a steal for the veteran’s minimum of $1.3 million.
“He’s got a lot left,” Bynum said Friday at the Pistons’ practice facility. “Last year I saw him working extremely hard and I know it was kind of frustrating at times because he was still going through some pain. But now it’s been a lot longer time period where he’s healed and Arnie (Kander), you know, he works magic. So I’m sure he’s going to work some magic with him, as well. But he’s still got a lotta lotta game left and I’m sure he’s going to help us out a lot.”
Posted Thursday, August 12, 2010
Arnie Kander rolls his eyes, too, when he hears the rap that Monroe lacks the athleticism to emerge as an NBA difference-maker.
“They do an eight-stage test and come up with this formula,” the Pistons’ strength and conditioning coach said this week of NBA draft combine testing. “His vertical, his shuttle speed. We’re not training those things. You’re looking at an entire athlete together, meaning his visual components on the court, his reactions on the court, within basketball. That’s very different than running a shuttle drill or a vertical.
“Basketball is a reaction game. That’s where a lot of my testing is – teaching it one way and then calculating the speed they can get in the other direction. I think (Monroe) is actually a very good athlete. He’s got to get a little stronger, he’s got to get a little more explosive, but what I’ve seen so far I’m very impressed by.”
Posted Wednesday, August 11, 2010
“I look at these banners every day and that’s what I want to get back to – the years they won,” he said this week between sessions under Arnie Kander’s supervision. “That’s why I came. This is a great organization. I don’t say that because I’m playing here. I’ve always admired the Pistons, even before I was in the league. I still feel the same way and I’m still expecting great things from us.”
Gordon, like Charlie Villanueva and Will Bynum and other players who’ve passed through the practice facility in recent weeks, is aware of, surprised by and drawing motivation from the low regard the Pistons are being accorded by NBA analysts this summer, as if their 27-win season was the product of a fully formed team instead of one decimated by injury on top of trying to integrate eight new players to the roster.
Posted Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Tracy McGrady was in play, but the asking price was steep: Houston wanted both Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton.
Two years later, the price has come down considerably. For the veteran’s minimum, the Pistons will have one of the most dynamic offensive players of his era joining them for the 2010-11 season after reaching a contract agreement with McGrady.
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