Last year, the Detroit Pistons lost 28 straight games, a single season NBA record. For each of the last six years, they’ve failed to win more than 25 games. Regardless of how hard they try or which doomed coach frowns on the sidelines, when the Pistons play basketball, they’re basically guaranteed to score fewer points than they concede. They are, definitionally, non-winners.
Cade Cunningham, the Pistons’ star player and their best hope to escape the muck, is a winner. In his senior year of high school, he captained arguably the greatest high school team of all time, running up a 25-0 record with an average margin of victory of 39 points per game. During his sole year in college, he turned a mediocre Oklahoma State team into a force, leading them to their best NCAA Tournament seed of the last 20 years. By the time the Pistons took him with the No. 1 pick in 2021, it was no longer a question of whether he was the best player in his draft class, but whether he was the best prospect of the last four or five years.
Now, at the start of his fourth NBA season, Cunningham has been everything the Pistons could have hoped for, yet also not quite enough. For a player of his pedigree, Cunningham has an unusually subtle game—fellow top picks like Zion Williamson and Anthony Edwards produce sexier highlight reels in a week than Cunningham does in a year.
Instead, Cunningham finds success in quieter ways. At his best, he cruelly boils the frog. Through his understanding of angles and rhythm, he times his first step to wrong foot his man and then angles his drive to prevent a recovery; he creates a series of imperceptible advantages until it’s too late for the defense to respond.
This year, Cunningham has grown because the Pistons have finally decided to stop actively stunting his growth. To start the season, Cunningham is averaging 23.8 points, 7.2 rebounds and 8.5 assists, all career highs. Even if the Pistons are still an unquestionably bad team, they now occupy a normal valence of badness; Tobias Harris, Malik Beasley and Tim Hardaway Jr. aren’t exactly world-beaters, but they’re also not Killian Hayes.
The fact is, as gifted and promise-filled as Cunningham is, he’s curiously ill-suited to be a franchise cornerstone. He can encourage good basketball, but can’t single-handedly guarantee it. Although he’s garnered comparisons to Luka Doncic and James Harden, those similarities are more in form than function. If Doncic and Harden can impose their vision on any lineup in any game, Cunningham is more pragmatic: he’ll make the right play, not try to hunt for the best one. When the paint is partitioned off by lurking big men, he will shoot the available midrange jumper, even if probing for a paint touch would be preferable; when he’s swarmed by help defenders, he’ll dump the ball to a teammate, even if that teammate sucks.
To help Cunningham reach his potential, the Pistons need to collapse the distance between the possible and the necessary; the right play and the best play need to become one and the same. By providing better spacing around Cunningham, the Pistons have begun to more closely align those incentives.
As such, Cunningham has been able to access meatier areas of the court and has become a more efficient scorer as a result. For the first time in his career, more than half of his field goal attempts have come within 10 feet of the rim. To be sure, Cunningham doesn’t draw enough fouls or shoot enough threes to be an elite scorer himself (let alone sustain an elite offense on his own), but Detroiters can finally imagine a world where that rosy outcome is possible.
In short, the Pistons look like an actual NBA team rather than the elaborate humiliation ritual that they represented last year. Although the team is an odd mish-mash of aging mercenaries and still-unripe youngsters, it has the general outline of a team that can rise from the East’s execrable lower-class to snag a Play-In spot. The Pistons do the standard things that NBA teams do—they have shooters who demand to be guarded; they have a coherent defensive gameplan. Occasionally, they even win! Through 13 games, the Pistons have already won five times—last year, the Pistons didn’t win their fifth game until January 24th.
While this is Cunningham’s fourth year in the NBA, it’s his first truly meaningful one. Until now, his gifts were wasted on a roster that was neither willing nor able to accept them, the equivalent of trying to teach simile and metaphor to elementary schoolers who are still sound-spelling their way through the Magic School Bus. The overwhelming badness of the Pistons to this point, blotted out Cunningham’s understated brilliance. Any small creases of space that he created for himself vanished because opposing defenses had him so firmly in their crosshares; his insightful passes were squandered by teammates who couldn’t convert them into assists.
This unique dynamic has made the Pistons one of the most interesting teams in the league, an ontological chicken-or-the-egg thought experiment into whether the player makes the team or the team makes the player. If Cunningham blossoms into an All-NBA force, it’ll be because Detroit provided the sunlight and fertile soil. If Detroit’s rebuild fails, it’ll be because they chose an oddly finicky and particular base as their foundation. With Cunningham in tow, Detroit has their most exciting young player in a generation, even if he’s not the one-man cure-all that they hoped for. There’s no doubt that Cunningham can rescue them, as long as they can rescue themselves first.
More from our The Realest Series
• Jayson Tatum and the Boston Celtics
• Jaylen Williams and the Oklahoma City Thunder
• Tyrese Maxey and the Philadelphia 76ers
• Julius Randle and the New York Knicks
• Michael Porter Jr. and the Denver Nuggets
• Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks
• Rob Dillingham and the Minnesota Timberwolves
• Doc Rivers and the Milwaukee Bucks
• Devin Booker and the Phoenix Suns
• Jonathan Kuminga and the Golden State Warriors
• D'Angelo Russell and the Los Angeles Lakers
• Ja Morant and the Memphis Grizzlies
• Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat
• Evan Mobley and the Cleveland Cavaliers
• Paolo Banchero and the Orlando Magic
• Brandon Ingram and the New Orleans Pelicans
• Tyrese Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers
• DeMar DeRozan and the Sacramento Kings
• Amen Thompson and the Houston Rockets
• Trae Young and the Atlanta Hawks
• Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs