DETROIT -- Not much seems to keep Detroit Pistons sophomore forward Saddiq Bey away from the court.
The 23-year-old has not missed a start since Feb. 14, 2021, and started in all 82 games this season. He joined just four other players who achieved the feat this season including Deni Avdija, Dwight Powell, Kevon Looney and Mikal Bridges.
In being available from every game this year, Bey became one of the team’s most dependable players. He helped navigate them through a four-game stretch where several rotational players entered the health and safety protocol midseason.
But Bey’s availability wasn’t the only way the Pistons leaned on him over the course of the season. The former Villanova product was the team’s third-leading scorer behind Jerami Grant and Cade Cunningham.
By the end of this season, Bey averaged 16.1 points, 5.4 rebounds, 2.8 assists on 39.6 percent shooting from the floor and made 34.6 percent of his shots from three. His inefficiency does not fully reflect the number of tools he added to his game.
Nearly half of Bey’s field goal attempts came from inside the arc, which is 13 percent more than his rookie season. Only 47.9 percent of his points came from long range, which is down from 61.3 percent one season ago.
“I think I just tried to just try to show a complete game every year,” Bey said. “I know who I am, what I’m capable of and who I can bring to the team. So I never want the coaches or our team to feel (like) it’s the only thing he can do, whether that’s shooting, you know I want to contribute on every end -- passing, ball handling, shooting, defense rebounding. So I just try to play as complete as I could be every year and hopefully that leads to wins in whatever role that may be.”
Bey spent plenty of time the last offseason fine-tuning his game. He didn’t have a ton of time off last summer after spending time with Team USA ahead of the Olympics. So the powers that be stressed to him the importance of getting the right amount of rest before he attacked his offseason program.
“Saddiq is one of those guys will come back in at night, walk through the locker room,” Pistons head coach Dwane Casey said at the team’s exit interviews. “The other night he’s sitting in the locker room at 11 o’clock at night watching basketball on television in the locker room. He’s a basketball junkie. And to his detriment, sometimes you can overwork. Don’t tell any of the other guys that I said that.
“But with him, he needs to get to take a breath, get away, decompress, let his body recoup because from the USA Basketball last summer, which was a kind of a funky summer last summer, he came straight into training camp didn’t take any time off. So he needs to get away from it a little while and then come back. So that was what we talked about. And I thought it was a great idea. He talked to medical people about it. It’s a credit to him and have all sorts of curse you don’t see is such a basketball junkie and he works so hard at his craft.”
Casey and general manager Troy Weaver could not have been happier with the progress that Bey made in his second year. While the two, of course, did not expect the team to go 23-59 this season they said that they could see the development of each of their young players as the season progressed.
So as Bey looks to the future of his game, he’s not focused on one specific thing. He said he is focused on making his game as complete as possible.
“I think just hearing from a lot of the guys and just hearing from around the league of players who reach those different levels is not you know it’s not spreading themselves out too thin and say ‘I need to work on this dribble move or this shot or this stepback,’” Bey said. “It’s just I think it is sharpening the things that you see myself doing in the game and perfecting those and perfecting that craft. I think that will help me throughout the season.”
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