Charlie Villanueva has never been shy about narrating the NBA the way players remember it: unfiltered, blunt, and heavy on the details that never make the transaction wire. On a recent installment of To The Baha, the former Detroit Pistons forward dropped one of those “wait, what?” locker-room stories that instantly reframes a forgotten corner of a lost season.
According to Villanueva, it happened during his Detroit stint in the early 2010s, at a time when the Pistons were stuck in that awkward in-between phase… no longer the “Going to Work” era, not yet the full teardown, just a roster of overlapping wings and stopgap veterans trying to survive a year that felt longer than 82 games. Villanueva’s version is simple and cinematic:
“Corey Maggette knocked out Kyle Singler, boy, Kyle went to sleep. Corey never suited up again.”
Charlie Villanueva tells a story about a locker room fight in his Detroit Days
“Corey Maggette knocked out Kyle Singler — boy, Kyle went to sleep. Corey never suited up again.”@ToTheBaha pic.twitter.com/EWC2fAP0X4
— Pistons Talk (@Pistons__Talk) January 13, 2026
That’s an extraordinary claim on two levels: first, because Singler was known publicly as a low-drama, professional, do-your-job type; second, because Maggette, nicknamed “Bad Porn” for the way he relentlessly got to the rim. was also a longtime vet who’d seen everything. If you’re looking for official breadcrumbs, you won’t find a tidy press release about a punch. What you can find is the timeline that makes Villanueva’s punchline feel less random than it sounds.
Maggette’s Pistons tenure effectively ended in mid-December of the 2012–13 season. He appeared in only 18 games total, and by late March, Sports Illustrated was already documenting how he had “slipped from Detroit’s rotation with no explanation,” noting that his last game came on December 15 and that he simply stopped playing after that point. The game-log record aligns with that arc: Maggette plays through mid-December, then flips into a long stretch of “Did Not Play / Inactive” listings afterward.
So Villanueva’s story lands in a factual corridor that’s real even if the alleged cause remains unverifiable: Maggette really did vanish from the nightly plan, and he really did not suit up again after that mid-December cutoff. Where the record gets murky is the why, the part that only a locker room can author.
That’s the thing about NBA teams at the bottom of the standings: the public explanation is always basketball. Rotations. Development. “We’re evaluating.” “We’re going with our best available options.” But the private reality can be mood, ego, hierarchy, a practice scuffle, a single moment that makes a coaching staff decide the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. The 2012–13 Pistons were a particularly ripe environment for that kind of volatility. Minutes at the wing were already crowded – Singler, Tayshaun Prince, Khris Middleton in his rookie year, plus vets and other reclamation projects all orbiting the same slice of court time. When roles are unclear, everything gets louder: the film sessions, the side conversations, the practice possessions that suddenly matter more than the games.
If Villanueva’s account is accurate, it also speaks to a very old NBA truth: sometimes discipline doesn’t show up as a suspension. Sometimes it’s subtler, and harsher. A player isn’t “punished” publicly; he’s simply removed from the organism. One day you’re active, the next day you’re not part of the plan, and the season keeps moving like you were never there. SI’s reporting from that time captured exactly that sense of bewilderment around Maggette’s disappearance, the kind that fuels rumors precisely because no one wants to say the quiet part out loud.
As for Singler, the alleged victim in Villanueva’s retelling, his Pistons years were mostly defined by utility, spacing, size, a willingness to play a role, until his career later drifted away from the league. That’s why the imagery in Villanueva’s line hits: the idea of Singler “going to sleep” in a pro locker room is so violently out of character with his public profile that it almost has to be either a real private incident or a myth that grew legs because it sounded too wild to invent.
