ORLANDO, Fla. — The green patch in Saddiq Bey’s hair isn’t a fashion statement. It’s a mentality. It’s him tapping into the persona that makes the Pistons’ second-year forward the clutch player he’s proved to be. It’s a stream of motivation that helped the 22-year-old end up where he is today.
The patch is an ode to The Joker, the famous villain who has terrorized Batman, everyone’s favorite hero, for more than 80 years. Bey grew up watching Batman cartoons, gravitating more toward the character who generated mayhem throughout Gotham. Bey, too, wants to create chaos. He wants to be the villain. Bey wants you to hate him. He wants you to say something so that he can say something back.
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Bey is the guy who, after a 23-point performance in Toronto, a night in which he hit the game-winning shot, said he likes playing on the road more than at home because “I like the boos.” This is the same guy who, in Charlotte, stared down and beat his chest at a single fan after a game-clinching 3 because the spectator had a lot to say in the 47 minutes prior.
Bey put together a 34-point performance in Milwaukee earlier this season. As a rookie, he dropped 30 points on the Celtics in Boston. And Thursday night, in downtown Orlando, 15 miles from “the happiest place on Earth,” Bey tormented fans with a 51-point, 10-rebound performance en route to a 134-120 Pistons win.
It might feel like a coincidence that the biggest performances of Bey’s career have come away from Detroit, but it’s not.
“Being on the road, I feel like the world is against me,” Bey said 30 minutes after his career performance, still in his jersey, which was drenched in celebratory water from his teammates. “Even though fans are probably just trying to enjoy the game, I feel like everyone is against us as a team.”
There’s a seriousness to Bey that can’t really be described unless you’re around him. Bey doesn’t give himself much free time — he’s always in the gym; the first-one-in, last-one-out type — but when he does, he spends it watching movies like “Interstellar.”
“For some reason, he was into scary, suspenseful movies,” Joe Cremo, Bey’s college teammate at Villanova, told The Athletic. “We’d always end up watching those kinds of movies, and I’d be like, ‘Why do you like these scary, suspenseful movies?’”
Bey does, however, carry a playful side, but it only comes out when business is done. He takes his profession seriously, so much so that teammates and co-workers push him to have more fun away from the court. Bey has Kobe Bryant’s Nike logo tattooed on him. The “Mamba Mentality” that became synonymous with the late Bryant very much resides in Bey. He takes care of his body, which is built like an oak dresser. Bey would have been a bodybuilder if basketball didn’t work out for him. He hasn’t missed a basketball game due to injury since high school.
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All of this — the mindset, the love for the game, the maintenance — created Thursday’s performance. To you, Bey might not have been the most likely candidate to put up the Pistons’ first 50-ball in four years (Blake Griffin), but it’s not a surprise to those who are around him every day.
“Saddiq is someone who works hard,” Isaiah Stewart said. “He’s just a gamer, a baller. It ain’t no surprise to me.”
After the first 24 minutes of the matchup with the Magic, it felt like Bey was going to make a real run at the franchise’s single-game scoring record (Jerry Stackhouse, 57 points). He scored 30 points in 19 first-half minutes. Everything Bey, who went 6-of-9 from 3 in the first half, put up was going down. Orlando started trapping the second-year forward, and instead of forcing shots in a meaningless game, he made the correct reads. The right passes.
Bey’s 51 points came within the flow of the offense. This wasn’t a 48-minute-long heat check. Detroit recorded 34 assists as a team on the night. Bey was just in one of those zones. All NBA players have tapped into that frequency at some stage in their playing career. Not all, though, can say that they’ve done it at this level.
“You see it coming, and why not?” head coach Dwane Casey said of giving Bey the opportunity to go capture the milestone late in the game. “If we won tonight, lost tonight, at least we had a very productive night for a young man. That’s going to give him a jolt of confidence that you won’t believe going forward, whether that’s the rest of this year, going into the summer, going into next year … you can’t pay for those types of moments for a young man.”
Bey’s career night came on the heels of a few rough outings. He said he got a bit of a reality check after a 7-for-21 shooting performance in a loss to Miami earlier this week. Bey said his mother texted him Thursday morning, urging him to be more aggressive. After the game, Bey added that the game ball from his 51-point outing will go to his mother, who is the reason Bey wears No. 41, the number his mother wore as a college basketball player.
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Off the court, Bey carries empathy. On it, he moves with mercilessness. Bey wants opposing fans to feel like they wasted their hard-earned money. He wants opposing fans to get excited just so he can silence them. Bey wants to be disliked, which is fitting given the lineage of the franchise he plays for.
“My whole life I always felt like being on the road gave me another edge and made you focus on being with your team,” Bey said. “That’s the competitive spirit I try to have.”
(Photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA Today)
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