All feel-good stories have a limited shelf life, and it appears the one in Detroit may have ended after one month.
The resurgent Pistons learned Sunday that point guard Brandon Jennings has been lost for the season after going down with a ruptured Achilles near the end of the third quarter of the Pistons' loss to Milwaukee on Saturday night.
You have to feel for Jennings, but as always, we also have to sort out what this injury means for the player and the team. Let's do so FAQ style.
How long will Jennings be out?
The most recent high-profile Achilles injury in the NBA was the one Kobe Bryant suffered late in the 2012-13 season. At the time, ESPN's Kevin Pelton wrote about the history of that type of injury. As Pelton wrote, the standard recovery time for this kind of injury is typically six to 10 months. Bryant was back on the court in about eight months, but he lasted only six games before going down with an unrelated knee injury.
Jennings is younger and has been remarkably durable during his career, missing appreciable time only in 2010-11, when he sat out 19 games for Milwaukee with a foot injury. So while you can't really speculate about Jennings' recuperative powers, these factors could aid his cause. Given an average recovery period of seven and a half months for Achilles injuries, that means Jennings could be ramping it up by the time training camps open in the fall.
Will he be the same when he returns?
The question of his effectiveness isn't one we can truly answer. Jennings is a player who, like most young NBA point guards, relies on quickness and explosion to get where he wants to get on the court. As he is pretty left-hand dominant, Jennings needs that quickness to maneuver against defenders who overplay his strong hand. He's not particularly explosive in terms of elite leaping ability, but he does need a solid push off the floor to finish over stronger defenders, a group that includes just about all NBA rim protectors.
The most similar historical player to Jennings may be Nate Archibald, an All-Star performer in the 1970s. Both are listed at 6-foot-1, though Jennings is listed at 169 pounds, 19 more than Archibald. Both were lefties, and both were score-first point guards. Archibald was 29 years old -- four years older than Jennings -- when he ruptured his Achilles before the 1977-78 season and missed the entire campaign.
It's not a perfect comparison, because Jennings is just entering his prime while Archibald was just exiting his. Plus the difference in sports medicine between then and now is like the difference between the horse buggy and the spaceship. With those caveats in mind, we'll note that, per basketball-reference.com, Archibald's PER was 20.8 before his injury and 13.8 over the final six seasons of his career.
But even for Archibald, it wasn't as grim as all that. He was more of a passer and less of a scorer as the starting point guard for the early Larry Bird teams in Boston, including the 1981 champions. He played in three more All-Star games.
An Achilles injury is not good, but neither is it a death knell for a career. Jennings has youth and modern medicine on his side. He will be back, but we just don't know at what level.
What is Jennings' contract status?
Jennings has one year and $8.3 million left on his deal beyond this season. If Pistons coach and general manager Stan Van Gundy had designs of moving Jennings over the summer, that plan would probably be compromised. However, given Jennings' play of late, it's doubtful a trade was high on Van Gundy's to-do list.
Just how well was Jennings playing when he was injured?
Jennings ranks second on the Pistons with 4.5 wins above replacement, which is 43rd in the league. Since Dec. 22, when Detroit cut bait with Josh Smith, Jennings has been a top-20 player, leading the league in assist rate while putting up a 56.0 true shooting percentage on a 29.3 percent usage rate. Replacing any of those elite-level traits -- facilitating, efficiency, volume -- is tough. Replacing all three on the fly with limited resources is likely impossible.
But as Pelton and Amin Elhassan point out, Jennings wasn't likely to keep this up anyway. If you buy that argument, then Detroit won't be trying to replace the Jennings of the past month, but rather the one who we've seen over his five and a half NBA seasons. That's an easier proposition, but not a happy one. Whether or not it was likely to continue, Jennings' sterling play over the past month was the most obvious driver of the Pistons' recent success.
How do the Pistons replace him for the rest of the season?
The Pistons are under the cap, but just barely. This means that Detroit doesn't have any cap exceptions it could use to replace Jennings, but it also can't go over the cap by signing an above-minimum free agent. Free agent Nate Robinson makes some sense, as he could replicate some of Jennings' ability to create shots, though he's not a playmaker. ESPN's Marc Stein reported that Detroit could revisit talks for New York's Pablo Prigioni. If Van Gundy opts to simply elevate D.J. Augustin into the starting role, then Prigioni would make sense as a top-notch backup.
If Van Gundy is more interested in finding a bona fide starter, then a package for another Knick, Jose Calderon, might make sense. Calderon is a former Piston with two years left on his deal after this season, which is why New York may be agreeable to a swap. However, Van Gundy probably (hopefully) won't be willing to absorb long-term money simply to position Detroit for a run at a low playoff seed. The Lakers' Jeremy Lin is another name sure to hit the rumor mill.
Can Detroit still mount a playoff push?
Augustin hasn't played particularly well this season, but he was terrific last season as an injury replacement for Derrick Rose in Chicago. Since Smith's exit, Augustin, like virtually everyone on the Detroit roster, has been much more effective. He has played a different role than Jennings as a backup and thus with different lineups, but the Pistons have been plus-1.6 points per 100 possessions with Augustin on the floor post-Smith. Augustin may be able to step in and have a similar offensive impact, especially given the evidence that Jennings was going to decline anyway. There isn't as much hope Augustin can hold the fort on the defensive end.
The current Hollinger Playoff Report gives Detroit a 52.5 percent chance at the playoffs with a projected win total of 37. However, that win total would be just one more than Miami and Charlotte, so the Pistons' margin for error was already small. Chances are, losing Jennings seriously harms the Pistons' playoff hopes. If that becomes apparent over the next week or two, it could mean that Van Gundy has to rethink his short-term plan once again and the Pistons will look to next season and beyond.