Detroit Pistons all-time roster: The best players in franchise history
By Zac Snyder
Power Forward: Ben Wallace
It’s probably cheating a little bit to list Ben Wallace as a power forward instead of considering him at the center position, but he was listed as a forward when he received All-NBA third team honors for the 2001-02 season. That’s good enough for me.
Wallace arrived with the Pistons as part of the sign-and-trade deal that sent superstar Grant Hill to Orlando. He was a rather unheralded commodity at the time, though he showed some propensity to rebound and block shots in his one season in Orlando (his first season as a full-time player).
He blossomed, almost immediately, into one of the NBA’s most feared shot blockers and rebounders. Wallace’s rebound totals jumped from 665 in the 1999-00 season to a league-leading 1,052 in 2000-01 (his first year in Detroit). His blocked shot totals rose from 130 with the Magic to 186 to 278 in 2001-02 (another league-leading mark).
In his first run with the Pistons (which lasted from 2000-01 through 2005-06), Wallace averaged more than 1,000 rebounds and 200 blocked shots.
Big Ben wasn’t the type of scoring threat that’s typical of superstar basketball players — he never averaged 10 points in a season — but he was the backbone of a Pistons team that dominated the Eastern Conference for much of the 2000s and won a championship (largely) on the strength of their defense.
Wallace made four-straight All-Star teams as a member of the Pistons from 2002-03 through 2005-06, made six All-Defensive teams (five first team and one second team), five All-NBA teams (three second teams and two third teams), and was the league’s defensive player of the year four times (2002, 2003, 2005, 2006).