Joe D and the art of asset management

Building an NBA contender is the process of accumulating assets. What are assets in the salary-cap era? Draft choices. Young players on their rookie contracts. The absence of bloated contracts. Finding a quality veteran left standing on the outside looking in after all teams with salary-cap space and ownership willing to spend it have exhausted their resources.

The Pistons didn't have many assets at all when Joe Dumars took over. He built a 50-win team anyway. But Rick Carlisle's first team that ground out 50 wins with guys like Cliff Robinson and Michael Curry and Chucky Atkins in the starting lineup? They were fun and professional and gave you everything they had every night out, but everybody in basketball knew there wasn't much in the way of a championship nucleus to be found.

One year after that 2002 team overachieved its way - way overachieved its way - to the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs before losing to Boston in the second round, Joe Dumars started amassing the assets that would change the way people looked at the Pistons.

And that was a process that started with the free-agent signing of Chauncey Billups in July 2002. It's hard to believe now - as the Pistons prepare for tonight's game with Denver, the first meeting between the team and the man who gave them no worries at point guard for six years - but there was open debate about who the best free-agent point guard would be that summer: Billups, Travis Best or Jeff McInnis.

Best seemed the surest bet, actually. His ceiling wasn't very high, but he was a competent scorer and very good deep shooter and it seemed that, in tandem with Atkins, the Pistons would have solid point guard play. They wouldn't win that battle every night, but it wouldn't be an Achilles heel, either.

There was some sentiment, too, for McInnis, who came into North Carolina as part of a heralded three-man recruiting class with two other guys with deep Pistons ties - Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse, who was the resident shooting guard of the Pistons going into that fateful summer.

Billups? Well, no doubt he came into the league with the highest profile of the three. But that had been five years earlier as the No. 3 pick in the draft. If the All-Star game is in a player's future, it's pretty rare that the evidence hasn't been discovered within his first five years in the league. He might not have actually played in the All-Star game by then, but his candidacy for future games has usually been loudly announced.

Not Billups, not by the summer of 2002. Not even close. He'd been injury prone and given up on by five teams, none of which saw fit to make him a starter, let alone invest long-term in him.

Joe D did. He gave Billups a full mid-level exception deal for five years. To this day, it is viewed as the best MLE contract signing any team has ever made. By the time the 2002-03 season had reached its midway point, it had become clear: Chauncey Billups was a huge asset, not just because he gave the Pistons very good play at a critical position, but because he gave them very good play at a critical position at an extremely favorable cost to the Pistons.

That's basketball in the salary-cap era. And that's also why Joe D had to trade him.

Oh, it didn't have to be two games into the season. It didn't have to be this season at all, necessarily. But he had to trade him, because suddenly Rodney Stuckey became a more valuable asset: a decade younger and far cheaper. Until Stuckey's rookie contract runs out, which will be after the 2010-11 season, the Pistons have a player emerging as an elite point guard at a price even more favorable than what Chauncey Billups cost the Pistons six seasons ago.

That's why agent Andy Miller called Joe D last summer and acknowledged the facts: We know Chauncey isn't going to finish his career in Detroit, so when you go to trade him - not if, but when - we'd appreciate it if you could try to get him home to Denver.

When last season ended, I was talking to Joe D about Stuckey's future. It was clear, based on the closing rush he had to his rookie season, that he would play a far larger role in 2008-09. I asked if there was room enough in the backcourt for three high-caliber guards. He laughed and said, yeah, if you're familiar with the history of this franchise, there surely is.

He was completely right, of course - at least on one level. There were minutes enough to go around for Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton and Rodney Stuckey. Just as there had been 20 years ago for three guys named Isiah, Joe and Vinnie. But in the salary-cap era, employing two difference-making point guards is an unaffordable luxury.

So Billups was traded for assets the Pistons could put to better use: Allen Iverson, a player whose ability to score no matter the circumstances has been proven for more than a decade; and one of the most coveted assets of all, salary-cap space.

The signing of Chauncey Billups once signalled the beginning of an accumulation of assets by Joe D that culminated in an NBA title. History will be the judge, but perhaps trading him signalled the beginning of another such era.

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