Vince Ellis

Detroit Free Press

Player efficiency rating can produce funny numbers, but can show an idea of usefulness.

Detroit Pistons center Boban Marjanovic produced a PER of 29.7 this season.

Houston Rockets star James Harden, an MVP candidate, finished with a PER of 27.43.

It’s highly unlikely the towering big man would produce at that level if given a larger role with the Pistons.

But it’s enough to indicate maybe he should have been more than a spot member of the playing rotation.

Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy admits that is probably a coaching failure this season and has promised to instill offensive and defensive schemes for Marjanovic next season. He averaged 5.5 points and 3.7 rebounds over 8.4 minutes per game this season.

“We really didn’t build anything around him either offensively or defensively,” Van Gundy said after Marjanovic finished the season with 14 points, 11 rebounds and three blocked shots in the regular-season finale at Orlando.

“We’ve got to do some defensive things to help him and we’ve got to get him the ball even more offensively. But he was our third center and so we didn’t build enough around him. But we certainly will going forward.”

The concern with Marjanovic is at the defensive end. At 7 feet 3, he lacks the quickness to stay with outside shooting big men.

But Van Gundy thinks he can figure out a scheme to limit Marjanovic’s weakness.

“The guy’s an offensive force,” Van Gundy said. “And he can do more than we had him do. We haven’t had a guy like him, so we didn’t do a lot of cutting off the post. He can really pass. I think he can create some easy baskets, which we need to get, especially with the way we miss jump shots. We’ve really got to work on that.”

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Contact Vince Ellis at vellis@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@vincent_ellis56.

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