McDyess, Stuckey and a return to Zen

In trying to explain why the return of Antonio McDyess, a sixth man counted on to play no more than half of a 48-minute game, has been so eagerly awaited by the Pistons, it's instructive to recall what made the Pistons a champion in the first place.

When the Pistons won the 2004 NBA title, they raised an immediate debate about whether the formula for building championship teams had been changed. History - both pre- and post-2004 - would suggest the only sure way to an NBA title is to land an undisputed superstar and build smartly and compatibly around him. History, in other words, suggests the Pistons were the aberration, not the rule.

(It's a story for another day, but Joe Dumars knows that. He'd love to get the chance one day to show he knows how to construct a championship team around a superstar. But fate hasn't dropped one into his lap yet. What's he supposed to do in the meantime? Exactly what he's done - keep making shrewd signings, drafting well and not overpaying so desperate mistakes don't hamstring him down the road.)

The list of undisputed superstars is never as long as the list of players who get paid as such. It's a mighty select group, which is a major reason why so far this season there are three runaway favorites to win the NBA title. Two of them are teams centered around Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. The third is defending champion Boston, which has three future Hall of Famers.

I always thought the Pistons' amazing collective was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that they weren't beholden to the health, mood or whims of one person.

The curse, such as it is, is that the Pistons always have to find their Zen in order to be at their best. When they found it in the past, they were a joy to watch. But it always took real work to find it. The Pistons had to explore on a nightly basis how the mix of their five starters - Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton at guard, Ben Wallace and Rasheed Wallace up front with Tayshaun Prince on the wing for the nearly three seasons they were the NBA's most stable starting unit - could be put to greatest advantage.

That meant not only figuring out who had his mojo going on that particular night, it meant figuring out which individual matchup could be exploited to the greatest degree within the sometimes delicate framework of their five-man collective.

The Cavaliers and the Lakers might have their own issues, but that's not one of them. They go into every game knowing that the mission is to get LeBron or Kobe into their comfort zone, to keep it close on nights they're not superhuman from the opening tap so that they can exert their will in the fourth quarter.

One hundred percent of their playbooks are designed with what works best for LeBron or Kobe in mind - first to finding ways to defeat the gang defenses they'll face to put them in position to score, second to finding ways to exploit the overcommitment opposition defenses will make to limiting their damage.

Michael Curry, and Flip Saunders and Larry Brown before him, had to figure out how to milk the offensive potential out of five - or four, if you start from the premise that Ben Wallace was never a scoring option - capable scorers.

And always at work was the human dynamic of pecking order. That, too, is not an issue with the Cavs and Lakers. Everybody knows the overwhelming majority of plays are called with LeBron or Kobe at the epicenter. When three or four players are of relatively equal station, a coach has to be mindful of keeping them all involved - and not primarily because of soothing egos, either, but because to get the best out of those players requires exercising their abilities often enough to keep them honed. Put another way, the Pistons couldn't have succeeded leaning on Chauncey Billups, say, or Rip Hamilton, in quite the way the Lakers do on Kobe Bryant, and let everybody else try to play off of one player.

The only way the Pistons were going to get the benefits of their collective model was to have all components operating at full capacity.

Which is where the return of Antonio McDyess comes into play.

If there was anyone more responsible for steering the Pistons to their Zen place than the rest of them, it was Billups, of course. Since losing Billups, it's no secret the Pistons have struggled finding it consistently. They've been erratic, winning against elite teams like the Lakers, Cavs and Spurs and losing to struggling bunches like Minnesota, Philadelphia and New York.

The insertion of Rodney Stuckey into the starting lineup at point guard is one step toward achieving more stability. Stuckey was going to inch his way toward 30-plus minutes a game regardless of his role; starting him accelerates the process and, on more than a symbolic level, stamps him as the heir to the Billups role of taking the Pistons to their Zen place. That's a whole lot easier to do as a starter, at a point in a game where it first takes on a character, then it is off the bench, when often the chore becomes reversing momentum instead of establishing it.

But the return of McDyess also helps restore some familiarity to the Pistons. As the Pistons learned when he left, McDyess' absence had a ripple effect. The most obvious effect was on Rasheed Wallace, who took on more minutes because without a scoring big man on the floor - and Wallace and McDyess were Curry's only options - the offense struggled. But McDyess' loss also rippled through the bench. Without McDyess assuming a scoring burden, Curry was limited in the combinations he used that didn't include other scorers, whether they were frontcourt or backcourt players.

After a month of upheaval, the Pistons have two reasons for encouragement going into tonight's game at Washington: The commitment to Rodney Stuckey as a starter moves him closer to filling the Billups role that's gone unfilled since the trade - finding someone in charge of sensing the Zen order of the night - and the return of Antonio McDyess helps stabilize both the frontcourt and bench rotations.

• Fans can welcome McDyess back 7-8 p.m. Thursday at the Moose Preserve Bar & Grill in Bloomfield Hills, 43034 N. Woodward Avenue. McDyess will be the special guest on "Off the Court," which airs on the Pistons’ flagship station, WDFN 1130.

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