Every NBA team’s worst Thanksgiving road trip companion

Detroit Pistons: Andre Drummond

I’ve been told to never meet your heroes. It feels like good advice.

Andre Drummond is one of my heroes, I think. It’s hard to say. My hero closet is quite full. I have Hakeem Olajuwon in there, and Jason Segal, Dale Cooper, my fiancée, various family members, Andrea Bargnani, Bidoof, and at least a dozen more. It’s crowded, but they’re happy in there.

Now, in some cases, I have met heroes. For example, my fiancée and I are engaged, and that takes, at a minimum, some level of interpersonal contact. It was a risk, but it worked out okay.

In the case of Drummond, I’m not sure what the endgame is. How does it go better than whatever idea of him I have in my head? I don’t have a full picture of his personality. I just know him as the guy who runs fast, jumps high, gets rebounds, and got me back into Pistons basketball for the first time since I could say the words, “Allen Iverson is a Piston.” It was a steady erosion from that point.

Drummond fell to the Pistons, and I had hope. When he was projected through his sophomore season as having the ceiling of Dwight Howard, I decided to latch on. It’s been mostly ups and some downs since then.

But what if I hear he doesn’t like it here? What if the story of him and the star of iCarly was actually really tawdry? What if he’s a dick?

I don’t want to know.