I am sure Joe was smiling today. If Stuckey can improve each game upon his perfomance today, then Joe will have made his best draft pick since Tay in 2002. He is more man's Billups so far than Wade. But then, it appears that he can get to the line when he needs too.

Stucco will still need to impress Flipper to get some playing time so he needs to get his arse down there and participate in some of the work outs to see what's going on himself.

Now if we can get AA to play consistently and progress as fast as this we will have two role players off the bench who can give us a combined 25 minutes a game.

Hmmm. Its not that easy to judge NBA talent when you don't have the best NBA players out there to see them play against. Still, this game did feature quite a few players either already playing in the NBA or pretty sure to be doing so soon.

Lets start with our late 2nd round pick, Sammy Mejia (pronounced meh hee ah). At first glance, it looked like he did very little in this game. But he did guard the best player on Memphis quite a bit, Rudy Gay, and Rudy Gay had one awful night trying to score. Sammy also had some assists. Afflalo also helped on Mejia though, and its hard to say that Mejia really had that good a defensive game since he had 7 fouls. He did definitely get in a lot of players grill thruout the game, but the question is would he even stay on the floor in a real game.

Afflalo consistently missed wide open jumpers. He did have one nice drive inside. Defensively, he certainly seems to know what he is about. Good footwork. Then again, Delfino had great footwork on defense, and could have just as easily missed those same wide open jumpers. Not impressed yet.

Stuckey was the star of the show, by far. Conley was playing in this game too and he was a lotto pick, highly touted. But it was our guy, the 15 pick, who consistently was getting inside their D and rising and knocking down the shot. Stuckey did not look that bad shooting longer jumpers either, just not with 3 point range. (Though most of his longer jumpers rimmed out.)

Cheikh Samb (sp) played fine. He scored very well, and you got to factor in that two of his misses were forced shots from deep as the clock expired, and got plenty of rebounds. Overall,he was very active, setting picks, fronting, and challenging shots. Samb is good around the basket, knowing how to put the ball in well on offensive rebounds. He can shoot with a bit of range. But since he really had no NBA centers to contest with, just how well he would defend such remains to be seen. Samb is not particulary fast. Certainly not slow either. He seems to have good instincts in passing the ball, with good ability to go along with it.

Maxiell dunked when he felt like it. He swished outside shots over bigger defenders. He blocked several shots. He even gathered his share rebounds. Perhaps the highlight of the game was one particularly thunderous rim rattler he put down. (Though this was overshadowed collectively by all the shots Stuckey made.)

Stuckey draws lots of defenders, and seems to make good enough decisions on when to pass instead of shoot when he drives toward the basket. Based on just this one game, so far I would say he can spell CB. Stuckey can finish well, or rise up and can the short jumper. Or just stay back and can a midranger if you play off him. Pretty good stuff.

A guard named Jaaber for us looked ok, but I noticed our defense seemed to be off when he was in vs. Stuckey. Perhaps Stuckey is a bit tougher a defender. He does seem to be able to stay with his guy and get a hand up to bother shots. Stuckey pulled some rebounds down too.

Of the others that played, Profit seemed to be worth looking at some more.

I will watch again, take some notes this time, and do another report on the same game tomorro.

PS, 9-9 at the line does tend to endear me toward Stuckey all that much faster.

anyone have a link for the game? i couldn't watch live...couldn't find on nba.com yet. probably just have to wait

Dre took a couple nice pics at the SL. You can find them here.

2007 Pistons Game 1 Photos from Dre

Lee, that was a pretty good summary.

Mejia is interesting. He missed shots, but still looked comfortable. The announcer made some comment like "Flip Saunders wants to have him on the roster because of his defensive abilities." I'm not sure if I believe that, because it doesn't seem like something Flip would say, but I doubt they would completely make it up. We'll have to see if it was a bad night by Rudy Gay or good D by Mejia.

Its something Flip would say, to keep his job. But not something Flip would actually mean.

ou nd:

He does kind of seem like a cross between the two to me. A bit quicker than Billups with a larger variety of shots than him (Similar to Wade in the way he can use the floater, glass, etc). He doesn't have the range or PG abilities of Chauncey yet, but his ability to score in the lane is already better than Chauncey.

I can't wait to see how this translates to the NBA. Flip should like him since he's a scorer, so I can't imagine him not playing a big role this year. Anything less than 16-18 minutes per game will be a disappointment IMO. He should see most of the backup PG and SG minutes.

How cool is it that we're 2-0, and we're getting Amir on the team soon, we should give us a 6 man All-Piston rotation?

The way Amir dominated the NBDL, he should have great success in the summer league. Watching Stuckey and Amir work together could be fun.