Walter Sharpe: the Razor Sharpe

Editor’s note: Pistons.com today starts an eight-part series on the eight players from the Pistons’ NBA Las Vegas Summer League roster who have NBA futures. This week we’ll do daily stories on the three second-round draft picks, holdover center Cheikh Samb and free agent point guard Will Bynum. Next week we’ll post stories on the three players who figure to be part of the playing rotation – Rodney Stuckey, Arron Afflalo and Amir Johnson. In today’s Part I, we look at Walter Sharpe. Coming Tuesday: Will Bynum.
One by one, the free agent small forwards who might have filled the most obvious hole on the Pistons’ roster – a quality backup behind Tayshaun Prince – signed elsewhere this summer.

James Posey left Boston for New Orleans. James Jones hooked on with Miami after getting squeezed out in Portland. Orlando snatched Mickael Pietrus off the market from Golden State. C.J. Miles signed an offer sheet from Oklahoma City as a restricted free agent. And on it went.

The Pistons weren’t about to pay starter’s money to someone who doesn’t figure to command more than 15 minutes a game – if that.

And it’s not like the Pistons don’t have options. They would bring back Walter Herrmann at the right price. Arron Afflalo showed as a rookie that he’s capable of guarding most small forwards, especially in a league trending smaller. Rip Hamilton has shown eye-opening ability to contain the elite small forwards in the East, everyone from LeBron James to Paul Pierce.

And then there’s the X-factor – Walter Sharpe.

Sharpe, the surprise pick of the Pistons when they traded out of the first round from 29 to 32 and picked up an extra second-rounder from Seattle in the process, comes to Detroit with a shallow body of work. He played only 18 college games over the past three seasons, dogged by academic and behavioral woes that he and the Pistons are fully confident have been remedied by the diagnosis and successful treatment of narcolepsy, a sleep disorder.

But as Sharpe showed in the Las Vegas Summer League, he has a rare skill set – a lanky frame that seems to make him bigger than his 6-foot-9 listed height, a fluid running motion and, most notably, an obvious comfort level handling and passing the ball on the perimeter.

The Pistons aren’t going into training camp expecting Sharpe to emerge as Prince’s backup, but they’re not going to put up barriers to stunt his growth, either. Though Sharpe’s relative inexperience might argue against a quick ascent, it also could suggest that his learning curve will be accelerated once he gets a healthy dose of exposure to the speed of the NBA game.

“I wouldn’t say anything is unrealistic,” Pistons vice president Scott Perry said after watching Sharpe in Las Vegas. “I’m sure if you talk to Walter, he’d say (being Prince’s backup) ‘is going to be me.’ That’s part of the reason he’s a good player. He has that belief. We know he has to grow and mature. If that happens, that’s tremendous. But we are not putting that pressure on him to have to be that from day one.”

Sharpe started all five Summer League games at small forward – in itself a transition, since he’d always been an interior player – and averaged 8.8 points and 3.4 rebounds while shooting 37 percent.

But it wasn’t in the numbers but the flashes – the ability to take the ball from the wing to the basket in a few long, easy strides; the comfort level in posting up overmatched smaller forwards in the post; the ease with which he strokes the ball from the perimeter to beyond the 3-point line – that makes observers feel Sharpe has an NBA future, whenever it arrives.

“We’re asking Walter to come in and move from being in the post to being a perimeter player and guard the hardest position on the floor,” Pistons coach Michael Curry said in Las Vegas. “It’s an adjustment for him, but he’s a kid that loves to play.”

Sharpe said the biggest adjustment is on the defensive end, expending a level of energy to which he was unaccustomed in chasing small forwards through screens and guarding in a much wider space than when he would check big men.

“It was different,” he said midway through the Summer League. “It took me the first two games. It was mostly fatigue, coming down and playing the three and just moving the whole game. I never had to do that. It’s just a transition. I’m adjusting.”

“At this level, and I know Michael’s told him and we’ve mentioned it to him as well, at that position – not to suggest there are nights off at other positions – but that position, in particular, is a bear,” Perry said. “Most of your teams, you’re dealing with a guy who is a focal point of your offense. Small forwards typically score and they typically run around a lot, receive a lot of screens, use ball screens, make one-on-one moves off the dribble.

“In college, he played primarily inside and could lock into a guy on the post and move in a much smaller area. Now he’s having to defend the whole court. As he gets in NBA-caliber shape, he’ll be able to do that in longer stretches and feel more comfortable doing it.”

The focus on defense and the pace at which he was learning to play affected his offense, Sharpe said, yet the flashes were already becoming more prevalent as Summer League wound down. Sharpe began to show that in individual workouts for NBA teams as the draft drew nearer, once he began focusing his efforts on basketball when his hope of regaining NCAA eligibility began to fade around June 1. In the three weeks between then and his workout for the Pistons – which they stretched to two days to get a better feel for him as both a player and person – Sharpe shed 20 pounds and began outplaying similarly sized players many had pegged for the lottery.

“I feel good about Walter Sharpe,” Perry said. “I felt good when we drafted him and I wasn’t surprised at anything I saw in Las Vegas. He’s a guy who if you look at five minutes of tape, you say, ‘Man, who is this big, skilled, talented guy?’ And then you look at another five minutes and say, ‘He’s got a lot to learn.’ We knew both of those sides when we drafted him. The bigger thing will be just getting through the year and adjusting and learning more about his body and conditioning and how all that is going to get handled and worked through.”

Under Joe Dumars, the Pistons have put a premium on players of strong character and players with a burning desire to win. The Pistons see those traits in Sharpe and were encouraged by the way he took to coaching in Las Vegas.

“The more organized basketball hours he gets, the more he learns about the game – learning to be more efficient – the better he will be,” Perry said. “He has a lot of natural ability, but he will quickly learn that at this level, there are a lot of guys with natural ability. What begins to separate them is the work they put into the game to surpass the next guy.

“Michael has commented a number of times that Walter is like a sponge. He’s going to remember what you tell him. He’s a willing learner. It’s going to be a year of learning, like it is for every rookie, no matter how talented.”