AUBURN HILLS, MICH.—Jose Calderon never really had a lot of peace of mind during his last few years in Toronto: there was always someone nipping at his heels and wanting his job; a front office that never came out and anointed him as a leader on the team; rumours swirling one after the other; a general manager who eyed his expiring contract as an asset more than he eyed the man as a player.

But even with all that—the uncertainty that it brought and the angst it may have created—when the end finally came, it came as something of a surprise.

“It was hard, yes, very hard,” Calderon said Thursday in his first Toronto interview since his trade from the Raptors to the Detroit Pistons via the Memphis Grizzlies in early February.

“Even if you knew it was coming because of the expiring contract and all the rumours the last couple of years—I never got the whole, 100 per cent confidence that ‘hey, you are our point guard, you are our guy’—I always put that aside and I was always like, ‘this is my home.’

“I was playing good, we were playing better, I think it happened when I least expected it. It was like, ‘now it’s happening after all those rumours?’ ”

Yes, it happened. And it wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination because, true to his nature, Toronto’s career leader in assists and only one of four players to have played 500 games in a Raptors uniform, never got to let people know how he felt.

He was traded when the team was on the road. He hasn’t had a chance to get back to the Air Canada Centre since, he hasn’t had a chance to say thank you.

“It’s so quick sometimes, you don’t realize how many people you leave behind without saying goodbye,” he said after the Pistons practised here.

“You don’t have the chance to say thank you. There are so many people who helped me during all those years in Toronto for everything. Not just about basketball, it’s everything. Like life, with my family. Everything.”

That expiring contract, which will make the 31-year-old Calderon an unrestricted free agent this summer for the first time in his career, was his ultimate undoing. It proved too juicy for general manager Bryan Colangelo to ignore, even if the boss had never been given any indication Calderon wanted to leave.

The team threw in its lot with Kyle Lowry, who had been obtained in a summer trade as the latest challenger to Calderon’s job, and Calderon was expendable whether he wanted to go or not.

“I never had my mind set on what I was going to do in the summer so I guess they had to do it if it was a good trade for them,” he said of the Raptors move that netted Rudy Gay for Calderon and Ed Davis.

“I don’t know if people were thinking ‘oh no, we cannot let him walk.’ I don’t know if I wanted to walk away in July or not.

“It’s a different situation now, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But that’s why I was always, like, it’s not going to happen, I think they’ll just wait, I’m playing good, the team is playing good but, no, it happened.”

The move to Detroit—where Calderon was immediately installed as the starter on a team that already had Brandon Knight, Rodney Stuckey and Will Bynum—has given him a new perspective on the NBA and his place in it. Getting a different view is never bad. And the Pistons are hoping the view is good enough that Calderon wants to stick around.

“It’s been very good to have a guy like Jose, who’s a veteran, true point guard, leader, on your team,” Pistons president Joe Dumars said last week. “A lot of the stuff he brings is exactly an area that we needed to get better in, so that’s why I really enjoying watching him. The results are not where we want them to be, but in the middle of the season for where your team is right now, it was never the expectation that Jose would come in and just turn everything around for us. What he would do is give us a snapshot of what it’s like to have a true point guard out there.”

Calderon isn’t committing to anything past the end of this season. And while the economics, and optics, make a return to Toronto highly unlikely, it’s something he would consider.

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“Why am I going to close that door? I was there a great seven and a half years . . . for sure you have to talk and see what they’re looking for, what they want, how they want it and . . . communication is really important sometimes,” he said.

“I was perfectly happy and that’s why the door is wide open for Toronto; if not, I would say right now, ‘no way, I am not going back to Toronto.’ ”