the stated reason for jerebko being our emergency SF when tayshaun went down was that jerebko had two years of professional experience under his belt in europe and was more ready to defend opposing SFs. makes sense, too. he blasted out of the gate and his play made it impossible to bench him. i don’t think you’d get any argument from anyone if you said he was our best player. i also don’t think you’d get any argument if you said he’s objectively better than summers. tayshaun is objectively better than summers, too. but the merit-based pecking order ends there. jonas and tayshaun are rocks. but tayshaun’s one of the few players whose role and minutes were 100% justified, and jonas was out.

the issue is with the rest of the pack: stuckey, bynum, mcgrady, rip, gordon, daye and even charlie v. a bunch of flawed, unspectacular players that each have perfectly comprehensible (whether justified or not) reasons to play ahead of summers. regardless of ability. if you’ve got eight equally unspectacular perimeter players (and i’m sure summers is flawed, too. i can’t possibly stress enough that i’m not arguing that summers is great, just that i don’t TRUST this organization enough to assume that he was squeezed out of the rotation by being a worse player than the guys in front of him), not everybody is going to be able to play. it’s a numbers game.

i always considered you one of the more astute commenters here, but god only knows where you got this faith in the organization that they’re running things properly.

rip was a co-captain and was given way too many chances for anyone to say he “earned” the minutes he got. he was also our highest paid player and someone we’ve wanted to trade for years. so he had to play. there you have a bunch of reasons he’s going to get minutes, without having to even consider his on-court performance.

daye was a first-round pick who detroit knew would be a project. if you don’t give him some burn, you’ve wasted a perfectly good mid-first round pick. also, by last season it became abundantly clear to everyone that this team needed playmaking, and dumars passed on some nice young point guards to draft daye. personally, i’d never ever draft a project like daye at small forward (who’s going to require as much time to develop as any big man), but now that you drafted him you have to follow through. he’s a potential matchup nightmare down the road, and nobody would ever argue summers had a higher ceiling, so he was one piston who needed more than anyone. maybe more than monroe. after one year, monroe is widely (and probably rightly) considered our best player; heading into his third season, daye remains a project with no reasonable timetable yet to emerge as a complete player.

you just won’t convince me that summers ever stood a chance here.

i think the pistons had 13 rotation-quality players who could contribute in the right role and system, but basically everyone on the roster is a role player with major flaws, and there was never much of a clear pecking order. you’ve got a bunch of players, mostly on the perimeter, few of whom had actual positions, and when that’s the case it can easily come down to a simple numbers game. when kuester cut rip and bynum out of the rotation (bynum was wisely reinserted after one game), he said himself that it was just a numbers game. there are only 240 minutes to go around, and you’d like to have some consistency, right?

every healthy body started at least once. everyone except ben gordon got a DNP-CD, and he accomplished nothing on the floor all season, making him a prime candidate for a temporary benching. rip started well past the point when it was obvious he was ineffective. stuckey stunk up the place, regressed and rebelled all season, and he was basically entrenched, even after his slaps on the wrist and persistent petulance and ineffectiveness. one of daye or maxiell started at PF for such a long stretch to start the season it could make your head spin, and neither was any good.

we all saw enough evidence last season that the pistons did not operate on a level playing field and that there were plenty of reasons (whether good or not) why someone who’s basically as good as the 12 other mediocre players gets squeezed out. daye, jerebko and monroe weren’t all going to work here, and nobody could have sensibly predicted they would. and all you need to do is point to the numbers game. no assumptions necessary.

We know for a fact that John Kuester was willing to play young players over highly-paid veterans. Jonas Jerebko is the perfect example of this. A second-round pick from Sweden that nobody expected to contribute started over the newly-signed Charlie Villanueva. Love Kuester or hate him, that did take some stones.

We can infer from this fact, given that Summers and Jerebko were touted by the team as combo forward with versatility to play multiple positions, that Summers did not outplay Jerebko. Why can we infer this? Because Jerebko started, and Summers did not.  We can also infer from this that Summers did not outplay Charlie V? Why can we infer this? Because Kuester didn’t hesitate to bench big money players in favor of youth, as demonstrated with the JJ/Charlie arrangement. 

That is not to say that I think all of Kuester’s moves were this calculated (i.e., I’m not arguing that there was rhyme or reason to everything he did). I’m saying that in this specific instance, there are very good reasons to believe that Kuester did not believe Summers was NBA-ready.

And we can further say, given the franchise hasn’t extended a QO, that the management of the team feels similarly.

I think that’s pretty well-supported by facts.

Now I’ll give my opinion: the Pistons are right about this one. Summers hasn’t demonstrated he’s a rotation-caliber player.

Now I’ll give a prediction: Summers won’t become a productive NBA who regularly contributes to the rotation of a winning team.  He wasn’t outstanding in college, and he didn’t develop at the professional level. Those types of players don’t stick for a reason. The only reason we’re debating this is because he wore the jersey of our favorite team, and there’s bias as a result.

Given that, I was a little disappointed in Summers performance in the 6-man rotation game against the 76ers on Feb. 25th. He was the only small forward in that rotation.   Summers played 39 minutes, went 3 for 8, not bad, but only 2 rebounds.  Detroit got beat badly on the boards, 49-32 and Summers could only get 2 rebounds.

I wish him success wherever he goes.  Just the Pistons luck, though, Summers will figure out rebounding and ball handling on some other team and Detroit could not just wait for him anymore.