Dear Pistons: Please free Boban

For most of time, the NBA bench was full of goofy scrubs who were simply not as good as starting lineup. No longer: in today’s increasingly optimized league, the NBA bench is filled with specialists who find a way to impose their single-facet superiority in 10-15 super-efficient minutes a night. Maybe it’s the vise-like post defense of David West, Ekpe Udoh, or Lucas Nogueira. Maybe it’s the crippling 3-point marksmanship of Kyle Korver, Nemanja Bjelica, or Wayne Ellington.

These bench specialists make real contributions that lead to real wins. But you would never describe their game — even their one money-maker, outlier skill — as dominant. I’d argue that there is, across the entire NBA, only one bench player who is dominant, and it is one of the game’s greatest failures of imagination that he averages a scant 8.9 minutes per game, with a heap of DNP-CD’s on top. I’m talking about Boban Marjanovic.

An absolute mountain of a human being, Marjanovic is somehow even larger than his listed 7-foot-3 height. He plays keep-away from other 7-footers. And it’s not like Marjanovic is some mouth-breathing lummox: the dude sinks almost 80 percent of his free throws and can dish passes out of double-teams with Sabonis-like flair.

Boban Marjanovic is the only weapon in today’s game who could — could — make an opponent coach regret their all-small lineup. With the Pistons on a seven-game losing streak and fading quickly out of the playoff picture, I say it’s going to be well-worth everyone’s time to find the upper limits of Marjanovic’s capabilities.

We are now in the third season of the Marjanovic era, and neither of his two years with the Pistons have captured the dizzying magic of Boban’s 2015-16 rookie year with the Spurs — a year that saw the entire NBA audience quickly fall into a deep bromance with Boban. Bizarrely, even though the Pistons more than quintupled the modest salary that Marjanovic earned in San Antonio, Stan Van Gundy has mysteriously thrown Boban into the doghouse from day one. Talk about mixed messages. Marjanovic still has more career appearances as a Spur than as a Piston.

Marjanovic’s entire career still has to be classified as a small sample size: Jayson Tatum has already played more NBA minutes (915 to 905). But that sample size gets larger and larger week by week, and Marjanovic’s only true statistical comparisons are the absolute legends of the game. How many players with a career of at least 500 minutes have a career PER better than 25? Eleven — and Boban edges out second-place Michael Jordan to be the best of them all. There have only been 21 individual seasons where a player qualified for the minutes title while averaging over 40 points per 100 possessions. Poor Boban can’t even get on the floor each night despite scoring 41.9 points per 100 possessions himself so far this year. That translates to an incredible average of 6.5 points in just 7.8 minutes.

It’s true that simply giving the ball to Boban in the post and then clearing the heck out of there is a reasonably effective play. In this play, even though Al Jefferson is cherry-picking alongside Boban, the man nicknamed Big Al is visibly humbled by Boban’s might:

Still, this is not going to cut it if Boban is to truly become a transformative weapon. If the opposing center is in good position when Marjanovic receives the ball, Boban does not exactly have Olajuwon-like layers of post moves to turn to. This has led to an alarming career-high turnover rate so far this year:

There’s a solution to this problem. Actually, the Pistons have already found it themselves, in this example from last season. Watch how Boban expertly uses a screen from a teammate to get a crucial step on his defender, Kosta Koufos. It takes five seconds for the ball to go from the half-court line to being alone, with Boban, at the rim:

Now the really devastating, beautiful stuff: Boban in the pick-and-roll. Here is where an opposing lineup full of 6-foot-6 wings can really rue the day they met Boban. Note how the defensively mighty Warriors provide timely help on this play, just like you’re supposed to: Klay Thompson is on-time and in-position. But this is Boban: he may or may not have actually noticed Klay Thompson somewhere underneath him:

This final pair of plays, also taken from last season, are so remarkably similar to each other I keep on having to check the game clock to make sure they’re different. Even though they’re less than a minute apart in game time, the Hornets fail to find a solution, giving up consecutive lay-ups:

Let’s say that, for a short time, Boban is given 20-25 minutes a night, with a league-leading usage rating. It’s true: it might end up being a failed experiment. It might.

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But there’s at least a sliver of a chance that the Pistons offense becomes an elite, dunk-tastic machine — an against-the-grain revolution at just the right historical time and place. Picture the Marjanovic pick-and-roll as a modern-day Stockton-to-Malone: everybody in the doggone building knows that it’s coming, but nobody in the basketball world can conjure how to stop it.

Worth a shot, right?