Brandon Knight Says the Detroit Pistons Couldn’t Shoot Last Season


Wanna know why Brandon Knight had such poor assist numbers as a point guard last season? According to Knight, it’s because most of his Detroit Pistons teammates couldn’t knock down a shot to save their lives. Per the Racine Journal Times (via PBT): “Knight averaged a mere four assists a game while playing for the Detroit Pistons last season. That tied him for 38th place in the NBA. Not good. But Knight insists that stat is rather deceiving. ‘I’m not trying to blame anybody,’ Knight said while carefully choosing his words. ‘But the team we had … It was a tough situation. When you have shooters, it’s easy to get assists because they’re going to knock down open shots. We had, maybe, one (Kyle Singler) knock-down shooter. And I didn’t have any bigs who could stop and pop. The only one we had was Charlie Villanueva and he didn’t play much. And, when he did play, he was with the second unit so I wasn’t playing much with him.’ But that wasn’t the sole reason, Knight says, for his subpar assist numbers last season. He points out that, contrary to public perception, he wasn’t strictly a point guard. He also spent a considerable amount of time at the shooting guard spot. ‘In the first half of the season, I was playing the point guard position; in the second half, I played off the ball,’ said the 21-year-old Knight, whom the Bucks acquired July 30 from the Pistons in a trade for disgruntled Brandon Jennings. ‘So, of course, my assists are going to go down. A lot of people outside looking in … they look at the stats. But a lot of them didn’t know that. When I started off the season, I was averaging about 5.5 assists and then, when I was moved, it dropped down to 4. I was handling the ball just here and there.’ With the Bucks, Knight will be handling the ball almost exclusively. Said new Bucks coach Larry Drew emphatically and succinctly, ‘Brandon is a point guard.'”