No one seems to remember the navy blue Rolls Royce. Or the dozen or so basketballs that, like little orange garden gnomes, dot the circular drive in front of Jerry Stackhouse’s lakefront West Bloomfield, Mich., home. No one wants to talk about the recording studio in the basement, the piranha tank, the chic floor-to-ceiling cubist paintings or the retro Donkey Kong machine. No one even brings up the whitestone home’s startling faux Frank Lloyd Wright design. Instead, what the Pistons remember most about their preseason cookout at Stack’s house -- besides its being the first time the All-Star shooting guard had opened his home to the team -- is the plain old stainless steel grill out back by the dock.

It was here that folks first noticed the change. As he cooked the food and worked the party, visitors didn’t see the Stack with the perma-pinched eyebrow scowl, the one who regularly scrapped with teammates, the guy who jacked up an NBA high 1,927 shots in 2001 while the Pistons sputtered to just 32 wins. Instead, they saw the Stack who dished out his famous (or so he claims) barbecue ribs and fried shrimp, handed over the remote control to his plasma-screen TVs and unlocked his Jet Skis and studio.

He even teed up golfballs on the dock so teammates could chili dip ’em into Orchard Lake. Keys. Ribs. Drinks. Golf clubs. Remote controls. No one said a word, but you know damn well what they were thinking: Stack is actually passing stuff to us!

“We just sat back and watched him for a while that day,” says John Hammond, the Pistons director of player personnel. “And I just kept turning to my wife and saying, ‘Jerry’s different, he’s different. Something is very different.’ ”

***

Sitting in his office the day after he was hired late last May, the walls bare and several boxes still unpacked, Rick Carlisle waited for his star to show up. A no-nonsense teacher who had spent 16 seasons in the NBA as a role player and assistant coach, Carlisle landed with the Pistons when, after three years on the Pacers bench, he was passed over in favor of Isiah Thomas. Carlisle does not pamper or pander to his players. He’s an intense, straight-shooting hoops savant, which is exactly what rubbed many of the Pacers -- particularly then-rising star Jalen Rose -- the wrong way. By the time Carlisle realized that in Indiana, it was too late.

Now he was determined not to let it happen again, and he’d invited Stackhouse to a one-on-one meeting. How am I gonna sell a defense-first, ball-sharing plan to this guy? he wondered, as Stack walked through the door.

But as the two started talking, they discovered they were kindred spirits: two gym rats, both highly competitive, both with something to prove. “Some of his knocks are some of my knocks,” Stackhouse says. “He’s very confident, and some people perceive that as cocky. We’re similar.” And Carlisle, Stack recalls, “came across genuine, not like a lot of coaches who are trying to jerk your chain.”

Each man understood at that moment that they had the power to ruin or redeem the other. The Pistons hadn’t won a playoff series in a decade; Stack had already played for five coaches in six seasons. But as they talked basketball, they were practically finishing each other’s thoughts. This wasn’t chemistry; it was nuclear fusion. After an hour-and-a-half, the meeting ended like a soda commercial. “Let’s go get some shots up,” Carlisle suggested.

The summit meetings continued all summer, in Carlisle’s office, over the phone, in the film room, in the weight room, on the practice court. Stack had spent most of his off-seasons working toward his degree in African-American studies at North Carolina (he got it in 1999) or floating on his 56-foot Sea Ray. Until now, the work he did on his game was with fine-grain sandpaper.

Carlisle asked for more. The two studied the fine line between being aggressive and being careless. They worked on patience: nothing big, just the art of waiting an extra second or two to let a cutter work through the lane, or holding a screen one more Mississippi to create a bit more space on the weak side. They worked on anticipating double teams and detecting the open man. Carlisle told Stack that less was more, that he wanted to cut down on his 40-plus minutes. Stackhouse was dubious, but his trust in Carlisle’s judgment was vindicated when he found the energy to ratchet up his defensive intensity.

The changes were noticeable from the season’s start. Stack’s decision-making became more focused; his shot selection sharpened; his court vision cleared. The Pistons got off to a great start, stumbled to 17–19, then closed strong to win 50 games for the first time in five years. Stack again led the team in scoring with 21.4 points per game (compared to 29.8 last season), but did so while putting up almost seven fewer shots a night (17.4 from 24.1). He paced the Pistons and was fourth among shooting guards with a career-high 5.3 assists per game while chopping down his turnovers (266 from 326). His dedication to defense, in no small part enhanced by the presence of Ben Wallace, helped transform these Pistons, a lottery team a year ago, into an ’02 version of the Bad Boys, giving Detroit its first Central Division title in 12 seasons. “I don’t know of a star player in the past 15 years who has changed his game as much as he has changed his,” says Carlisle. “And only for the benefit of winning.”

“Rick was a blessing,” says Stack, who adds it’s not unusual for coach or player to pick up the cell and call the other. “It’s like a brother with him. You don’t say ‘I love you,’ but you both know it.”

***

It’s clear as the playoffs roll out that Stackhouse has made that most difficult of transitions: from scorer to winner. He can now control games with his scoring or his ability to make those around him better. The first two games of the series against the Raptors were a tutorial on the new improved Stack attack. Game 1: scrappy defense, passing. Game 2: dominant scoring, as in a career playoff-high 31 points, including three money treys in the final 5:17 with the game in the balance. “I’m in the mold to pass now, but I’m pretty good at snapping myself out of that if I need to,” he says.

But Stack’s not quite sure how to take all this caterpillar-to-butterfly stuff. “People want to talk about some light-flickering moment when I changed,” he says. “I grew into this. It took me three to four years to get to the status of All-Star, and then it was like, What’s next for me? What I found out was the ultimate way to prove myself as a player was to lead a winning team.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that by embracing his change he’s also condemning his past. So the inner battle over his basketball soul isn’t quite over yet. One day, sitting at the bar in his house, he says, “Yeah, I’ve evolved.” Two days later, your cell phone chirps. “Nothing’s changed,” he says, sounding more like he’s trying to convince himself. “I’ve always been about winning.”

That depends on whom you ask. Stack’s rep as a guy more likely to hit a teammate with a fist than a dime started in Philly, where he decked Jeff Hornacek as a rookie and had a practice fight with Allen Iverson during AI’s rookie season. Flinging up all those shots last season didn’t help. Former Sacramento guard Jon Barry was on the golf course with his buddies last September when his cell phone rang. It was his wife. She was crying. “We got traded,” Betsy Barry said, in a tone that made traded sound more like sentenced, “ ... to Detroit.” The rest of the round, Barry’s buddies yelled “DETROIT!” just before each shot. “You’re playing with Stack? That’s it, you’ll never see the ball again,” they told him. Says Barry, “I had heard all the stories: that he was selfish, hard to get along with, had accepted losing as long as he got his numbers. But I gotta say, the difference between my perception and what he’s been like has been night and day -- right from the beginning.”

When you’re the youngest of 11 kids fighting for attention, you don’t give up the spotlight too easily once it’s yours. And for Stack, motivation runs deeper. His father, George, got up every morning at 4 a.m. back in Kinston, N.C., for his shift as a sanitation truck driver. His mom, Minnie, quit her job as a short-order cook only five years ago, at age 67. Two sisters have died of diabetes, and both parents are battling the disease. Stackhouse, who continues to be tested, says, “I’m not out of the woods yet either.” So it’s no wonder he tends to approach life with a bit more urgency than most.

That sometimes can result in confrontations with teammates, like the ones he had with Hornacek and Iverson. During a team flight in 1999, Stack blackened the eye of former Piston (and Dookie) Christian Laettner during a donnybrook over a card game. A year later, then-Piston Jerome Williams ripped the organization while the team was getting swept out of the playoffs by Miami. Giving away three inches and 12 pounds, Stackhouse went after Williams in the Pistons locker room.

For the most part, he is unapologetic about the run-ins. “A guy like Joe [Dumars, president of basketball operations for the Pistons] would have been a bit more diplomatic,” says Stack. “But he was feeling the exact same frustrations as I was with this team. And if those clashes didn’t happen we wouldn’t be where we are today.

“I never fought with anybody who didn’t deserve it,” Stackhouse adds with a wry smile. “It’s only when a guy isn’t a team guy that I have a problem.”

Stackhouse is the hoops version of Fight Club’s Tyler Durden: He tends to attack others who possess the traits he’s not too fond of in himself. To curb that, Dumars went about building a supporting cast for Stack that would, for the first time in his career, complement his talents and temperament. The team already had a lunch-pail core -- starters Wallace, Michael Curry and Chucky Atkins were all undrafted. Dumars added Cliff Robinson from Phoenix to draw big men away from the hoop and provide tough D. Barry was acquired for his three-point range and calm hand off the bench. Corliss Williamson, imported from Toronto at the trade deadline a year ago, turned into the league’s top sixth man this season.

“Learning to trust my teammates was the biggest key for me,” says Stackhouse. Used to be that Stack would jack it up even when he was trapped in the corner or caught with the ball in midair. Now he looks for the pass, confident his teammates can finish. “He’s defending, he’s rebounding, he’s giving the ball up, he’s playing like a superstar on both ends,” says Sixers coach Larry Brown, the man who traded him away, along with Eric Montross, for Theo Ratliff, Aaron McKie and a No. 1 pick. “Stack’s playing at an unbelievably high level.”

Brown seems to be one of the few who saw it happening. An All-Star in 2000 and 2001, Stackhouse was left off the team this season. The Pistons were in D.C. when Carlisle got the bad news and summoned Stackhouse to his room. The coach was physically shaken by the news that Stack hadn’t been recognized for the sacrifices Carlisle had asked him to make. “I thought he was gonna start crying,” says Stackhouse, who held up his hand and halted his coach in midapology. “Let’s just keep rolling,” he told Carlisle.

***

If there’s one play that captures the change in Stackhouse’s game, it came on the last night of the regular season. After poking the ball away from the Bucks’ Glenn Robinson, the pair raced downcourt after it. (Remember, the Pistons’ No. 2 playoff seed was set while the Bucks needed a W just to make the postseason.) Yet it was Stackhouse, sore shoulder, strained groin, bone spurs and all, who sold out for the rock like a guy on a 10-day contract. He dove, screeched 15 feet across the court, turned toward the hoop in midslip-’n-slide and pushed the ball to a charging Wallace. The NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year finished with a two-handed tomahawk over his mushroom-cloud ’fro to put the Pistons up 21. It was the sweetest Ben & Jerry combo since Cherry Garcia.

Up in Dumars’ suite, the team suits celebrated like frat boys. Last spring, Dumars was the first person to whisper in Stackhouse’s ear: “Do you want to win? Then adjust.” As the crowd chanted MVP! MVP!, Stackhouse flashed them five fingers and a fist to symbolize the Pistons’ 50-win season. The smile on his face was so filled with genuine joy, it made Dean Smith, watching on TV in his home in Chapel Hill, rise up off his couch. “He was waving his towel, smiling that great smile,” says Smith, who remains close to his former player. “To me, that’s Jerry Stackhouse.” (All of Canada must be hoping that will one day be Vince Carter, too.)

The next afternoon, Stackhouse was back where it all started: at the grill. Charcoal, he says, is a must. He’d rather wear Kelly Tripucka’s short shorts in the NBA Finals than cook with gas. First, the meat, onions and spices get wrapped in aluminum foil and cooked for several minutes. Once they’re good and tender, the foil comes off and the sauce gets slathered. Then it’s dunkin’ time.

“I’m the best cook in the NBA,” laughs Stackhouse, wiping his hands on his new Pistons playoff T-shirt. “Hands down. No question.”

Even better: Now those ribs aren’t Stack’s best dish of the season.

This article appears in the May 13 issue of ESPN The Magazine.