featured-image
DETROIT, MICHIGAN - MARCH 19: The Detroit Pistons huddle before the game against the Miami Heat at Little Caesars Arena on March 19, 2023 in Detroit, Michigan. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and or using this photograph, User is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. (Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images)(Nic Antaya)

What today’s Pistons miss most: Cunningham’s ‘human connector’ traits

Marvin Bagley III scored 31 points on Tuesday for the Pistons a game after James Wiseman went for 22 points and 13 rebounds. Just before his bout with COVID-19 a few weeks ago, Jaden Ivey had a two-game stretch where he averaged 19.5 points and 12.5 assists. A few games after that, Killian Hayes had his own two-game stretch where he averaged 13.5 points and 12.0 assists. Just after that, Jalen Duren returned from missing six games with ankle woes to average 14 points and 11 rebounds over a two-game sample in barely 20 minutes a game off the bench.

A long way of saying this: The Pistons have a lot of very young, very intriguing pieces.

Six prominent players on the roster are 21 or younger. Four more, including Bagley and Isaiah Livers, are 24 or less. The Pistons could be competing at any of the NCAA’s four regional sites this weekend and they wouldn’t throw the average age of the other participants’ rosters out of whack. They could field younger starting lineups, in fact, than most.

But what the Pistons boast in individual bursts of brilliance they lack in form. Troy Weaver has done a remarkable job of accumulating the sheer number of young players with potential after inheriting an aging roster with little trade appeal and Dwane Casey and his staff have done yeoman’s work at developing that talent.

Now it needs to be knit together.

And what echoes are the words Weaver uttered in July 2021 after drafting Cade Cunningham with the first overall No. 1 pick the Pistons possessed in 51 years: “A human connector, on the floor, off the floor,” Weaver said of Cunningham.

Cunningham in a vacuum wouldn’t have turned the 16-57 Pistons record around. But Cunningham in reality would have rounded off so many of the rough edges that make it so tricky for the Pistons to navigate 48 minutes of an NBA game without shredding their ability to put a positive outcome within their grasp.

His absence since the season’s first 12 games cracked a door for others, Ivey and Hayes most significantly, to shoulder more of the team-running responsibilities and that should, in fact, benefit the Pistons in the future better weather the games Cunningham might miss or the ones where foul trouble limits him.

But what really will benefit the Pistons next season when Cunningham returns is the domino effect of his presence on teammates up and down the roster. By the home stretch of Cunningham’s rookie season, he was emphatically putting on display the common traits that elevate great talents into giants of the game – rising to the moment, carrying a team for long stretches consistently, accentuating the strengths of teammates and covering for weaknesses.

It would have been a blow to even a veteran team to lose a player with those qualities, but it was thoroughly disorienting for a team as young and made up of so many still finding their way as this iteration of the Pistons. An orchestra composed of musical prodigies will produce a symphony of dissonance without an accomplished conductor. Cade Cunningham is that guy for these Pistons.

It would have been one thing to lose Cunningham for the season’s final 70 games, but the Pistons have been beset by injuries up and down the roster that robbed Casey of any chance to establish consistency. Every team endures some amount of injuries in today’s NBA, of course. Veteran teams can plug and play without catastrophic results as long as those injuries don’t reach a breaking point. Not teams with the profile of these Pistons, though.

From a thousand yards, it appears as if Weaver’s “restoration” went sideways this season. But add Cunningham, another top-five lottery pick and the benefits of $30 million in cap space to the existing pieces and take another look. When the Pistons get their human connector back, this puzzle of impressive assorted pieces has every chance to come together very quickly.