Rodney Stuckey repairs reputation with Pacers, enters free agency

This time a year ago, Rodney Stuckey was basketball pariah. His name sullied by a bad rep of being short-tempered and uncoachable. His once promising career viewed through the loser's lens of the Detroit Pistons and all of their dysfunction.

Good luck finding work when you have these red marks attached to your résumé.

So, last summer Stuckey navigated through free agency as an unwanted man. His agent's phone rarely buzzed, and only for the tenuous brush off, 'We'll get back to you.' Teams never did. That is until the Indiana Pacers needed to fill a hole in the roster and took a chance.

Though the Pacers might have rolled the dice, Stuckey won the bet.

Stuckey played 71 games as the bench beacon in an underwhelming Pacers' season, averaging 12.6 points, 3.5 rebounds and 3.1 assists per game. He became the first reserve player in franchise history to score 30 points or more in consecutive games and set career shooting marks from the floor (44 percent) and the 3-point arc (39 percent). Also, when Stuckey scored 20 or more points, the Pacers succeeded (10-2 in those games).

Needless to say, Stuckey, 29 and eight seasons in the NBA, was worth every penny of the one-year, $1.3 million veteran minimum's salary.

"You hear things but last year, (Stuckey) was as professional as anyone I've ever been around," said Larry Bird, Pacers' president of basketball operations. "He was great. He's a winner. He comes to play. He plays hurt. He's a good player and that's the kind of guys I want on my team."

On Wednesday, Stuckey returns to the open market of free agency — his name restored and career reinvented. The Star has learned at least five teams have expressed interest in speaking with Stuckey. The stain from his final six years in Detroit erased.

"I knew I wasn't that type of person," Stuckey said about the rumors that followed him last summer. "Just everything being dysfunctional (in Detroit) and not having structure really messed me up."

Understanding Stuckey means knowing how much he thrives, and yearns for, order.

Organized youth sports kept him from following the same path of his four older brothers who landed in gangs and consequently, trouble with the law while growing up in Seattle. Then when the family moved to the suburbs of Kent, Wash., straight talk from his seventh grade computers teacher roused him out of flunking grades.

What's more, Stuckey honors this structure with loyalty — calling the best friend, Marcus Hinton, he met during those AAU days "my brother" and still involving that middle-school computers teacher in his life today. While Stuckey played in Indiana last season, back in Kent, Ron Charrier and his wife handled the day-to-day work on the construction of Stuckey's new home. Charrier oversaw the inspection, installed the security system and even ordered the blinds.

"It's just things you do with people you're close with," Charrier explained.

So when Detroit vetted the barrel-chested guard out of Eastern Washington before the 2007 NBA Draft, the team was convinced that its idyllic situation would provide the needed stability and a breeding ground for its next star. Even now, Stuckey uses one word to describe his rookie season with a solid structure in the front office, a sage on the bench in coach Flip Saunders and a locker room crawling with veterans.

"Excellent," he said. "I was coming into the greatest situation."

Stuckey fractured his left hand during a preseason game and the injury sidelined him until December, but even that turned out to be a great break because he was able to take a master class in NBA leadership with professor Chauncey Billups. The veteran point guard took the rookie under his wing, opening his home so the two could watch boxing matches and extending the invitation for dinners on the road.

The Pistons stormed through the playoffs, Stuckey even started two games in place of the injured Billups, and advanced to the Eastern Conference finals. But only a few games into Stuckey's second season (2008-09), the Pistons traded Billups and two other players to Denver in exchange of Allen Iverson. The unraveling had begun.

"They made the trade and put (Stuckey) in the driver's seat and he wasn't quite ready yet; although he was willing, he wasn't quite ready," Billups said. "It was a tall order for him and I felt bad that they put him into that situation so early but that kind of shaped his tenure here, although I thought it was a little unfair.

"I felt like he could've been the heir apparent to me, but he needed another year or two with me. And if he would've had that, he would've learned all that needed to be learned about the position, about leading, about everything. But they just pulled the plug a little too early."

The Billups trade begat years of decline. The Pistons fired Saunders, then the coaches conveyor belt brought in six different voices and leadership styles in seven years.

"It was semi-chaos," was how Hinton, who stayed with Stuckey through several of his years in Detroit, described the Pistons.

Like asking the kicking and screaming understudy to take over the roles of Macbeth, The Three Witches and Lord Banquo, Stuckey struggled in the role as leader. He watched his role evolve constantly. Around him the once veteran locker room changed, and often staged mutiny against coaches. In one infamous episode in 2011, several players, including Stuckey, organized a boycott of a morning shootaround.

"A lot of drama," Stuckey recalled. "We could've had our own reality TV show."

Stuckey had his own individual clashes — confronting one head coach who levied a fine against him for being late for a team meeting. Stuckey claimed to be late only because he was getting his ankles tapped by the trainer and promised the coach: "I'm getting my damn money back and if I don't get it back, I know where you stay."

Now, Stuckey repeats these stories as if he's looking at a scar and remembering the pain behind it. He admits to being young and foolish. He would do things differently today, but back then, Stuckey could not handle the instability.

"There was just never structure and anytime you don't have structure, obviously things are just going to be tough. You know there's going to be a lot of dysfunctional things going on," Stuckey said. "You could never get comfortable or really ever figure out anything because it was always changing, and I didn't like that."

Last summer when Stuckey had a chance to leave, the whispers followed him out of Detroit. Several league sources informed The Star how rumors about Stuckey's perceived bad attitude hurt his stock during last summer's free agency.

"Moody, can't be coached, bad guy, can't win with him," said an Eastern Conference insider, repeating the circulated gossip. "Anybody that really knows him, would know… he's one of the most misunderstood guys in the league."

Then, Stuckey signed with Indiana. Soon after, injuries cast a spell on the season. But even when the losing streaks soured moods in the locker room, Stuckey remained consistently upbeat. He found structure in Indiana and happiness, too. Even friends noticed a cheerier Stuckey.

"He always answers the phone when you call," said Carl Howell, who coached Stuckey in Eastern Washington. "I think when he's not happy, you have to leave a message."

By February, Stuckey asked Pacers coach Frank Vogel to come off the bench and, in no small part, the move sparked a stretch when the Pacers won 10 of 11 games and made a run for a playoff spot. Recently when asked about the season, Bird, who will just as soon use the term "good little player" to describe a pro, could not bridle his enthusiasm about Stuckey.

"I want him back, too. He was great. Great worker. He worked as hard as anybody. He lifted just about every game. Every thing we asked him to do at the beginning of the year, he did it. He was fantastic," Bird said. "He knows how much I want him, I told him that at the end of the year."

It's a year later, and much has changed for Stuckey. A lucrative long-term deal or a favorable one-year plus a player option for the second year contract foreseeably coming this July, and just in time for his pending nuptials on the 17th. Great news for Stuckey and all, but the Pacers could find themselves competing for a key player pegged for their plans.

This summer, the phone should ring. Even so, Stuckey will prioritize sanity and structure this summer.

After Indiana's final game of the regular season, players dressed silently yet swiftly. But as the rushing sound of the showers filled the void in a quiet locker room, Stuckey rubbed lotion on his biceps and contemplated his future.

"I want to be back," Stuckey said then, and added: "We'll see what happens."

Call Star reporter Candace Buckner at (317) 444-6121. Follow her on Twitter: @CandaceDBuckner.