Brandon Jennings is settling in with the Detroit Pistons after a difficult offseason in which free agent interest was less enthusiastic than he had been expecting.

Jennings leads the Pistons in scoring and assists.

“The perception of me is totally wrong but maybe because I don’t open up as much,” said Jennings. “The people who do know me, I’m real cool, laid back. I just don’t open up to everybody. I just chill and stay in my lane. I think another thing is the summer just humbled me a lot overall. I took a lot of criticism this summer, saying teams didn’t want me, I wasn’t this caliber of player. I call it a humbling summer.”

The Milwaukee Bucks were uninterested in re-singing Jennings and agreed to a sign-and-trade with the Pistons for Brandon Knight.

“I had to look at the man in the mirror and ask myself if I was doing everything I was capable of doing,” he said. “There were a lot of distractions, a lot of things I was worried about that weren’t important. I will always love the game of basketball, but the perception was that I didn’t care and didn’t love the game, so I wanted to make sure this year people know I love playing the game. This is what I do.”

The impact of the Bucks is not loss on Jennings.

“I still have love for Milwaukee, that’s where I started my career,” he said. “They took a chance on me because I was a kid that went overseas and nobody knew me or knew I can play. I still got love for everything we did there. I’m not going to take all the full credit, but I brought a lot of spark to the city, going to the playoffs two years, just changing it a little bit, the [high-top fade] haircut, everything.”