Dumars’ Point Is Reclamation

If there’s one superstar on this Detroit Piston team of rejects-turned-champions, he is sitting in Suite 219 at the Palace.

While the players meet with reporters on the court, the man who put the whole thing together, who defied decades of NBA conventional wisdom, is isolated, in the dark. He prefers it that way.

“I do my best work in the shadows,” Joe Dumars says.

He spent his 14-year playing career with the Pistons in the shadow of Isiah Thomas, his more celebrated backcourt partner. As the team’s president of basketball operations, Dumars has assembled an unlikely collection of players that won the championship last year and is back in the NBA Finals looking for another.

What Jerry West did for the Lakers in the 1980s and ‘90s, Dumars is doing for the Pistons.

He isn’t stuck on statistics or news clips. No need for numbers or reputations. He goes by what he sees, what those he trusts tell him, and finally what instinct instructs him. He watched Game 3 halfway up the arena, joined by only four other people in a suite that accommodates 30. He was in the same spot when the Pistons worked out the next day.

“I just observe people’s tendencies,” Dumars says. “See what their personalities are like, try to look beyond the dribbling and running and jumping, try to see what’s inside someone.”

Wednesday, after Tuesday night’s first Piston victory in the series, he saw players who felt better about themselves, players who now understand the level at which they must play to compete with the San Antonio Spurs.

Of course, it’s easy to see the swagger restored after a big victory. Where Dumars excels is finding the potential in players everyone else has abandoned.

Point guard Chauncey Billups has been traded or let go five times. Center Ben Wallace wasn’t drafted and was traded by his first two NBA teams.

Guard Richard Hamilton was traded by the Washington Wizards, despite a 20-point scoring average, in part because the Wizards thought he might be too frail.

Forward Rasheed Wallace was considered a member of the NBA’s all-head-case team in Portland. Forward Tayshaun Prince was the No. 23 pick in the 2002 draft.

Now they’re considered the best overall starting five in the league.

“Most of the moves basically have the same DNA, and that’s guys who were basically missed or passed over or given up on for some reason,” Dumars said. “I think what this team really shows is sometimes -- not all the time, but sometimes -- the fact that you show a player that you believe in him, probably more than he believes in himself at the time, can elevate guys. That’s the DNA of this team. These cats have been down before. That’s why when we were down 2-0, [they rallied]. These cats have been down before.”

There’s a loyalty the players feel toward Dumars that just doesn’t exist in other organizations.

“Joe gave a lot of us opportunities that we never had,” Billups said. “When you finally get that opportunity, you want to make well. You want to show your appreciation. I think that’s what we get.”

Just ask Antonio McDyess, another Dumars find who looks as happy as a puppy rescued from the pound. McDyess was considered finished after three knee surgeries, but Dumars saw something he liked.

When he got home after Piston games, he watched McDyess’ games with the Phoenix Suns on the satellite dish, then signed him for a guaranteed $23 million over four years, even though McDyess’ scoring average had dropped to less than half of his 20 points per game peak. But he has been repaid with a reliable sixth man who has averaged about eight points a game in the playoffs.

“He trusted in my knee and trusted in me coming in to help this team,” McDyess said. “It was a lot of people that gave up on me, and he wasn’t one of them. He told me when I first came in that I still had it. He believed in me. When you’ve got the GM believing in you, you only can believe in yourself.”

Dumars was sold after talking to Billups, who had played with McDyess in Denver.

“I knew I was getting an incredible guy,” Dumars said. “In saying all that, you have to take risks. You can’t sit back and conservatively try to become a world champion. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t sneak in the back door and try to win a world championship. You’ve got to take chances, you’ve got to take risks.”

It’s a go-for-it approach that he developed in Natchitoches, La., a place of “gumbo-eating, crawfish-eating, Cajun folks,” as he describes it. But there was great athletic talent there.

“I guess we’re all products of our environments,” Dumars said. “I knew if I was going to get out of Louisiana, get out of the bayou, it wasn’t going to be the conservative route. You’ve got to go for it.

“You better bring it, or cats are going to be at your dome. You’ve got to compete, man. Because cats are coming at you. You either compete or you shut it down. I wasn’t about to shut it down.”

He played on an AAU team with Karl Malone and John “Hot Rod” Williams and saw he could hold his own against the top competition in the country. He starred at McNeese State and was the Pistons’ first-round pick in 1985 and averaged 16 points a game for his career.

Dumars was chosen the most valuable player of the NBA Finals in 1989, when the Pistons swept the Lakers. Which brings up an interesting point.

Seventeen of the 21 other players who won that award since it first was given in 1969 are in the Hall of Fame, or practically guaranteed to be enshrined. Dumars isn’t, yet.

Michael Jordan would be the first to argue that Dumars deserves to be.

“Who says he shouldn’t?” he said, somewhat angrily, when I asked him about it once.

If Dumars does join Thomas, it will put the Pistons in line with the other 1980s champions, such as the Lakers (Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy), the Boston Celtics (Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish), and Philadelphia 76ers (Moses Malone, Julius Erving) who established the standard that it takes at least two Hall of Fame players to win a championship.

That’s what makes these Pistons so remarkable. It’s likely that none of these players will reach the hall. Yet it’s possible the team could have two championships.

In that case, Dumars should definitely go to the Hall of Fame. As an executive.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Adande, go to latimes.com/adande.