Early in the season the Detroit Pistons were already widely considered the “best story in basketball.” With less than two months left before the playoffs, they now have the best record in the Eastern Conference to go with it.
And it often doesn’t even feel close. The Pistons have now pummeled the New York Knicks in all three of their scheduled games this season by an average of 28 points, utterly dominating the team that eliminated them last year and offering a potential preview of this year’s conference finals and the belt they hope to deliver when they get there.
It’s worth remembering, and impossible to forget, that just two years ago Detroit was in the middle of this season’s evil twin. In February 2024, the Pistons were well into a historically bad year, clinching the worst single-season losing streak in NBA history and finishing with a 14-68 record. Fans were chanting “sell the team” in the middle of games and cursing this as the “Sad Boy” Pistons era. The wreckage waiting at the merciful end of that season looked like it might go on forever.
Instead, the opposite has happened. This year’s Pistons have only lost two games in a row twice, largely thanks to immaculate team chemistry and a defense that never takes nights off, where they rank first in blocks and steals. And now, serious comparisons are being made to the original Bad Boys and Goin’ to Work Pistons on account of the team’s physicality and, as they’ve shown, their willingness to take that physicality as far as anyone wants to go.
“I love an underdog story,” Sierra Burden, a hometown fan who’s been closely watching this season, tells Metro Times. “The Pistons had to claw their way to the top.”
The story of how that happened has several origins: Shrewd management and a new head coach everyone believes in. A couple of superstars-in-waiting coming to life. Some veterans who can still get buckets, and a cast of energetic, fearless young players.
With the playoffs now in sight, the Pistons are not only the “best story in basketball,” they are exactly who they appear to be: a serious title contender.
As point guard Cade Cunningham has put it, “We trying to get to the finals and win the finals.”
From zero to hero
Perhaps what made that ’24 season feel uniquely cursed is knowing that it could have gone differently.
The Pistons had just signed recent Coach of the Year Monty Williams to a record-breaking six-year, $78.5 million contract. Cunningham, the 2021 No. 1 draft pick, was finally ready to play consistent basketball after being sidelined by injuries, and co-stars like Jalen Duren, Jaden Ivey, and Isaiah Stewart formed a core of raw talent around the team’s rising star.
“You might not believe me but I always knew we were good,” Duren told veteran sports journalist Zach Lowe on his podcast. “The core guys that we had… I was like, we got something here. It’s just a matter of putting it together.”
This is, in fact, believable because it is exactly what many fans were saying at the time. The Pistons may not have been playoff-ready, but they weren’t that bad. After all, opponents weren’t totally dismantling them. They were losing close, competitive games where they unraveled right at the end.
The next season would be different. To start the 2024-2025 run, Trajan Langdon was hired as the president of basketball operations. Instead of taking a big swing at reinvention, he made the wise decision to stick with the young core drafted by Troy Weaver, while adding badly needed shooting and veteran experience. Then J.B. Bickerstaff replaced Williams, building a sense of camaraderie and purpose unrivaled in the league.
With badly needed new lifeblood, the organization built on principles any longtime Pistons fan would recognize: Ferocious defense, selfless team ball, and calm under fire with the clock running out.
“When you come into a new team, you wanna study the history of the team,” Bickerstaff said in a December interview. “What the fan base, you know, has embraced and what the fan base loved about their team. And when you come to Detroit, it’s obvious.”
And it paid off. The team went 44-38 and finished 6th in the Eastern Conference, making it to the playoffs for the first time in six years before getting knocked out by the New York Knicks in a six-game dog fight.
When they returned at the start of this season, everyone knew they’d be good. But few predicted they’d be staring up at the mountaintop and saying “we can get there.”
“Dawg Pound”
It would be too difficult, and inaccurate, to attribute the team’s success to any one thing. But if you listen to the players and coaches, they all point to the team’s camaraderie as the river that everything else sets sail on.
Following a 10th straight win earlier in the season, Pistons forward Isaiah Stewart praised “how connected we are, how hungry we are, and how bad we want it. We think we can win any game, any given day we step on that court.”
Before a Philadelphia game last November, Bickerstaff singled out team chemistry as “the foundation of everything that we do. How we treat one another, how we care about one another, how we root for one another is a genuine thing with our guys.”
The engine for that chemistry, Bickerstaff explained in a Ringer feature, is the team’s leader and MVP-candidate, Cunningham. “If you look around him, his teammates get better,” Bickerstaff says. And this is what makes Cunningham a star: “It’s not just the numbers he puts up,” Bickerstaff adds. “It’s the impact that he has on his teammates and the people that he brings along with him.”
The stats tell the story. Other than his elite control of the game’s tempo and ability to grind defenses down until an opening reveals itself, Cunningham’s greatest talent is putting his teammates in position to be heroes themselves. He ranks second in assists this season at 9.6 per game, a number that wouldn’t be possible without believing in his teammates ability to rise to any occasion.
For instance, Burden recalls the game against the Wizards back in November. Down by three with 1.9 seconds left in regulation, “Cade passed Daniss Jenkins the ball and he had to immediately make his shot to put us into overtime,” she says. At the time, Jenkins was on a two-way contract with the Pistons G League team and was eager to show what he could do. “It speaks to the trust Cade has in role players” like Jenkins, Burden adds.
Or take Cunningham and Duren, one of the NBA’s most prolific and thrilling assist duos. Their pick-and-roll is arguably the best in the league and when it’s all said and done, Duren catching a lob from Cunningham may be the defining image of this era of Pistons basketball, the kind of image immortalized on T-shirts and posters taped to children’s bedroom walls. “I feel like I threw it to the moon and he still found it,” Cunningham said of one he threw to Duren against Atlanta. “I don’t think you have that type of chemistry without being cool off the court and having a connection in real life.”
Together, they’ve climbed farther and faster than anyone predicted — both Duren’s rise as an All-Star and Cunningham’s explosion into superstardom, including two All-Star selections of his own and what’s likely to be a string of All-NBA appearances.
That chemistry is also evident on defense, where several trap doors await opposing teams. Ausar Thompson is incredible for many reasons. Near the top of that list is the fact that he may be the last person anyone in the league wants to see waiting for them on the other side of half court. And down in the paint, Stewart, Duren, and Paul Reed basically run a no-fly zone, where players risk slamming into the type of defensive wall oldheads will tell you, with tears in their eyes, reminds them of the game they fell in love with.
Chemistry, to echo Burden, is an expression of trust. Trust that Reed will fill the gaps when Stewart and Duren, the team’s key big men, get suspended for brawling in Charlotte. Trust that Duncan Robinson, one of the league’s great snipers from deep, will eventually find his rhythm. Trust that Jenkins, as Burden puts it, will “come into the game and instantly change the dynamic.” Trust that whoever has to deal with Ron Holland Jr. is in for a long night. Trust that vets like Caris LeVert and Tobias Harris will provide the experience and offensive punch that every contender needs. And they have. They all have.
And of course there’s the chemistry that doesn’t show up on a stat line. The vibes you can’t quantify but everyone knows the value of.
“This is one of the most well-blended teams I’ve ever worked for,” Major Taylor, the Pistons’ social media director, tells Metro Times. As he sees it, his team is responsible for making “the world see this team how we see them.” And among the first things you see is that “the team camaraderie is crazy.”
Like Holland Jr. carrying a giant speaker into the hallway before every game, the players dancing and hyping each other up before facing whatever the crowd has to offer. Or in the post-game rituals. After every win, the players flood back into the hallway and toward the locker room. The team’s camera waits for them there, and like clockwork, one of the players will look into the lens and say some version of “play the song” — the song being “Pistons Won Again” by Detroit rapper Gmac Cash.
Or my favorite recent example. In an early February blowout over the Brooklyn Nets, Javonte Green and Holland Jr. use a pause in the game to dribble the ball off their heads as casually as friends at a park. It is a small moment, but an illuminating one: using a break in regular gameplay to actually play, and to do so without thinking twice about it, is a clue that the vibes are as immaculate as people say. That the players are as devoted to winning as they are to enjoying its fruits with the guys alongside them.
“We call it the ‘Dawg Pound,’” Jalen Duren said after a November win against Utah. “We’ve got all dogs on the team. We’ve got all guys that are super passionate about the game, who want to win, who want to see the next man succeed.”
Great expectations
Just two years after making the worst kind of sports history, it would be easy to cast this season as a massive success if the Pistons won a playoff series or two. And in the end, it might be. After all, Detroit hasn’t seen the second round since 2008, and there is still a feeling among observers that the team is one or two pieces away from being a real championship contender.
But ultimately, if you are a player, this runs the risk of bumping up against your knowledge of what you are capable of accomplishing with the tools you have. And when you have defied expectations so spectacularly it is not unreasonable to believe that you are capable of overcoming a couple more when we’ve seen that on any given night, your best can outmatch anyone else’s.
“I think we’re the top team in the East,” Cunningham said in a recent GQ feature. “It’s going to be a dogfight to get to the top of it, but we right there. We got all the dogs we need.”
Based on the beatdowns they’ve given to every corner of the league, it is hard to disagree. Just like it is hard to imagine that any team, especially in the Eastern Conference, wants to see the Pistons in a seven-game playoff series.
“What the hell are we playing for? What are we here for?” Duren replied to Lowe when asked about their aspirations for the season.
“We all got the same goal, that’s to win a championship,” he said, adding, “That’s what we’re here to do.”
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This article appears in March 4-17, 2026.
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