AUBURN HILLS – The NBA is a far-flung league but a small world. Everybody knows somebody with a connection to each of the league’s 29 other franchises.

So it didn’t take long for Reggie Jackson to hear from his Toronto ties when his Pistons hired the Raptors departed coach, Dwane Casey.

“As soon as Coach got fired from Toronto and we got him, everybody – it was the same. It was genuine. It wasn’t, ‘I’m telling you some B.S.,’ ” Jackson said. “Everybody told me, ‘You’re so lucky. You don’t know.’ They felt like they lost a best friend. That’s how everybody feels that I talked to.”

Casey has said his first order of business upon being hired by Pistons owner Tom Gores in June was to get to know his players. A lot of his time was spent in Southern California where a number of Pistons – Blake Griffin, Luke Kennard, Henry Ellenson and Jackson among them – spent big chunks of their off-season training. Long before players amassed here after Labor Day for voluntary workouts, they’d established a solid foundation and a level of trust.

Everything Jackson heard about Casey so far has been validated.

“I’m like, ‘All right, so we got one,’ ” Jackson said. “We’ll figure out how we’ll rock together and everything else, but we got a good person. We can’t control who we work with, but we just want to work with good people. That’s it. I feel like we got fortunate. That’s how guys truly felt about him is he’s the right guy. So I’m excited to go through this journey.”

It wasn’t lost on Jackson that Toronto won 59 games while entrusting a starting role to a rookie, A.G. Anunoby, coming off an ACL tear that ended his college career the previous January, or that a Raptors bench widely acclaimed the NBA’s best was led by an undrafted point guard, Fred Van Vleet, and included other young players like Pascal Siakam, Jakob Poeltl and Delon Wright.

Jackson already sees a difference in body language from his young teammates – the players Ed Stefanski, hired as senior adviser to Gores in May, cited as critical to develop into major contributors: Stanley Johnson, Henry Ellenson and Luke Kennard.

“The game’s 90 percent mental,” he said. “I think guys have a different spirit. Guys are more upbeat and guys are more confident in themselves already. That was the first thing I noticed (Casey) brought. The glass isn’t half empty; it’s half full. So I think the perspective is different and guys are feeling better about themselves.”

Jackson has been a big booster of Johnson’s future, in particular, and felt empathy for his ups and downs. At 22 and under Casey’s hand, he thinks Johnson comes into the season with the best opportunity yet to realize his potential.

“I don’t know what the results are going to be, but that’s definitely a different player,” he said. “He’s a different player. Felt bad for him, honestly, since he’s been in the league. Had a tremendous amount of confidence first coming in and to watch it just dwindle – it’s tough.”

Jackson draws a parallel to how he felt early in his career at Oklahoma City, where the presence of future MVPs Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden limited his role.

“The only thing I know I wanted is to come in here and – want to be successful – but the one thing I wanted was my chance. If I fail or succeed, I just wanted a shot in a fair, full shot. That’s all I want for my teammates – that when they got out there, they felt like they had the belief in themselves. That’s the biggest thing in life – you just want a fair shot.”