Asking Detroit Pistons fans to say something nice about Luke Kennard

We took to Twitter to ask our followers to compliment the longest tenured member of the Detroit Pistons.

Luke Kennard has blossomed into the product of modern basketball in his three years with the Detroit Pistons. He’s a versatile guard who’s garnered trade interest in this past year, largely due to his ability to hit from distance on a consistent basis.

Despite falling victim to bilateral knee tendinitis after just 28 games this season, Kennard was able to showcase the leap that he was prepared to make. In the season opener, he poured on a career high 30 points against the Indiana Pacers.

He was becoming more comfortable and more aggressive with his shooting. In a game where his scoring primarily came from three or from the foul line, this was everything we had wanted to see from him. The confidence was evident.

So, as we head into his fourth season, (whenever that’ll actually occur) we thought it could be fun to continue the theme and ask our Twitter followers to give Kennard genuine compliments. He’s quickly become one of the favorites within the fan base.

Even though this is essentially what was just written above, it’s true. Luke seemed to have some tentativeness with his shot selection in his first two years, but once he was spending more time with the Pistons, and not in the G-League, it slowly but surely started to fade away.

Once he began to feel comfortable with his shot, the sky was the limit. It’s a legitimate shame that last season got cut short for him.

The Pistons aired a “Back to Basketball” special a few weeks ago on Fox Sports Detroit, detailing the in-market mini camp that Detroit had held the week prior.

In there, FSD correspondent Grant Long mentioned that he hopes to see Luke take between 16-20 shots every night next season. This would be absolutely wonderful if it came to fruition.

I’ve not got much to add here, other than just to say that multiple people pointed this out so I felt it was necessary to include it. Admittedly, they’re not wrong. Now we just need to wait on the facial hair to come in!

We talk about his shooting and his ability to score with ease plenty around here. I’ve done my fair share of it in this alone.

However, one of the more interesting developments of the season was realizing that Luke is a tremendously gifted playmaker, and that’s what this tweet is referring to.

With or without the ball in his hands, he’s a threat. Teams are so busy strategizing to minimize his shot attempts, and they don’t account for the passing vision that he’s developed. Even when he’s off the ball, teams are forced to keep multiple eyes on him.

He can give you a sneaky back door cut, he can run the perimeter and hit off of a dribble hand off,  or he can knock down a give and go on the elbow. Pick your poison. On the offensive end, there’s not much you can do to deny his talent.

This has been thrown around from time to time. Looking at it now, as everyone in that class has had some time to develop and give us an idea of who they’ll be in the league, this is agreeable.

Luke was drafted 12th overall in 2017. Ahead of him were players like Malik Monk, Dennis Smith Jr, Frank Ntilikina, and you could argue that he could go ahead of Zach Collins as well.

Maybe it’s just one or two spots, maybe it’s more. We can however say with some certainty that at the very least, the trade talks that Luke has been involved in clearly means that he belongs in this league. Teams around the league know how important a guy like him is for a championship run.