Let’s start with what Rasheed Wallace hasn’t done since he joined the Pistons, because the blank spaces in the record of this born-again force are as significant as the spaces he’s filled.

He hasn’t been arrested, stopped for driving erratically, searched by the local police. He hasn’t offered his opinions on either the exploitation of minorities by the NBA or any other burning social issues, including Martha Burk’s silent war against Augusta National.

Wallace hasn’t complained about his teammates or his coaches, and the Detroit papers haven’t found it necessary to run a box on the scoreboard page keeping track of his technical fouls and suspensions, because, while he hasn’t taken a part-time job with the Harlem Boys Choir, he’s taken to collecting T’s at a much more leisurely pace than he did in Portland. There, he got a technical once every four games; in Detroit, it’s been one in seven games, a number that in today’s NBA is hardly worth mentioning.

The list of things Wallace hasn’t done goes on. He hasn’t scared young children, threatened bodily harm on interviewers, bitched about the officials or starred –- or even been mentioned -– in the Whine of the Week.

Because of all the things the man Portland couldn’t wait to get rid of hasn’t done –- including most of those listed above -- the things he has always done so very well suddenly stand out like a single perfect lily on a dung heap.

In Portland, Wallace came to be viewed as a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with what was once one of the strongest franchises in the league. Things got so bad there that you were as likely to read about the team on the police blotter as on the sports pages.

The players always said they were being picked on; that they really weren’t bad guys. Wallace, for one, either has experienced the biggest conversion since Saul of Tarsus took a lightning bolt to the eyes, or is proof that maybe everything that happened there really wasn’t the players’ faults.

That’s a discussion for another place and time. What’s relevant now is that there now seem to be abundant reasons why both New York and Detroit so badly wanted him. And one of those reasons in Detroit wasn’t because Larry Brown needed someone around to make him forget about Allen Iverson, whom Brown had attempted to coach in Philadelphia.

The Pistons were a pretty good team last year, but they couldn’t get out of the Eastern Conference finals, where they were swept by the New Jersey Nets. The first thing the team did in the offseason was dump coach Rick Carlisle, who landed on his feet in Indiana, and hire Brown. The second thing they did was look to get tougher.

The Pistons under Chuck Daly invented tough. Pat Riley with the Knicks and Heat picked up where Daly left off. And now Brown has perfected it, and he’s managed to do it without creating the perception that the Pistons, like Daly’s and Riley’s teams, are a band of thugs.

They’ve played tough defense all year, but Brown wanted one more premier forward, a man he felt could finally help him win the East. Wallace was that man.

When he arrived, he seemed determined to make the best of his new lease on life. And Brown and Detroit made it easy. In Portland, he was the lightning rod for everything that went wrong, the biggest name on the team.

In Detroit, Wallace didn’t have to carry the load at either end of the court. His scoring, in fact, was at 13.7 points per game entering the Nets series, down more than three points a game from last year, while his rebounds are right at his career average of seven.

With the Knicks, who need so much more help, those numbers wouldn’t have been the difference. But with the Pistons, who already have one of the best front-court defenders in the game in Ben “No Relation” Wallace, Rasheed Wallace’s numbers are just what the franchise ordered.

And now is when the trade that no longer looks like a risk will really show if it was worth it. The Pistons were swept last year by the Nets. Monday night, in the first game of their second-round playoff series, Wallace and the Pistons held the Nets to 57 points on 27 percent shooting. On Friday, Wallace again did his thing as the Pistons went up 2-0 in the series.

The series isn’t over, but the Nets headed home to New Jersey for Game 3 wondering if they’d ever see an open shot, and, if they did, if they could make it. Give the Pistons credit for that – it is, despite what you hear, still a team game. And Wallace is part of it.

Not the biggest part or the smallest part of the most important part, but the part that was missing last year.

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