Hello There, Old Friend

Reflections on the 2024-25 Detroit Pistons

May 10, 2025

The Detroit Pistons are the first sports team I remember being a fan of. I was raised around all four of the Detroit teams but the Pistons were the first one to make memories as I began to watch sports. 2004-2005 was that range I’m referring to, a window when the Tigers were still subpar and the Millen era Lions were a level of terrible that needs no explanation. The Red Wings were elite in 2004, though their playoff run ended in the second round, and then the ‘05 NHL lockout hit at the very time that six year old me was embracing my curiosity in sports. While the Red Wings were sitting at home and not playing in 04-05, the Pistons were defending their NBA title with a run all the way to the NBA Finals.

I think Game 7 of that series is the first sporting event I consciously remember happening.1 It was on too late for me to have watched it, but I still can recall feeling the devastation when my dad told me the next morning that the Spurs had won Game 7 and thus the NBA Championship. The Goin’ to Work Pistons were my first formative moments of being a diehard sports fan of a team, beginning just before the ‘06 Tigers and the deep playoff runs that ‘07-09 Red Wings made. I remember the fake Ben Wallace afros you could buy at stores, the player posters, the thunder sticks getting passed out at playoff games at the Palace, and, of course, The Final Countdown paired with Mason’s player intros.

I knew all the players, Big Ben, Sheed, Rip, Chauncey, Tayshaun, Antonio McDyess, Lindsey Hunter, Jason Maxiell, Carlos Delfino, the year Chris Webber was on the team. When I visited my baby brother in the hospital, I was wearing a Rip Hamilton jersey. Watching those Pistons teams taught me so much of what it’s like to be a sports fan, the heroes and villains, the highs and lows, and the playoff heartbreak. The LeBron performance in the 2007 ECF Game 5 is one of those moments burned into my mind.

What defined the Pistons of those years was the certainty. They were always good, year after year one of the top teams in the NBA. Six straight Eastern Conference Finals appearances will do that. The team won 50+ games seven consecutive years and had a stable, consistent cast of starters who played in All-Star Games and made winning plays in big moments. Alongside the Red Wings I grew to know, you could always bank on the Pistons being a fun watch on a Tuesday night in winter.

And then at some point it ended. Everyone with a shred of Pistons knowledge knows the point which it all began to collapse, the Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson trade in November 2008. If I was older when it happened, I likely would be able to recount to you all the events of that 08-09 season that saw the Pistons finish sub-.500 and limp into the playoffs as a sacrificial lamb #8 seed. I would be able to remember how my interest waned and when I made the decision to stop watching the Pistons regularly. But being 9 years old at the time, I can’t vividly describe it.

Instead, the Pistons just sort of faded away. Their uncompetitive sweep at the hands of the Cavaliers sent the team into a full-on rebuild after Iverson and Rasheed Wallace left in free agency. They were replaced by Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva, players that ignorant me was initially excited for but ultimately proved to be two signings that resulted in the team winning only 27 games in 2009-10. I didn’t stop watching basketball, as the next few years were some of my favorite years watching the NBA (mostly hate-watching the LeBron Heat). But the Pistons left my life like a slowly forgotten distant relative, any sports-watching of local teams during the winter months focusing on the Red Wings and increasingly, college hoops.

[Detroit News]

The Pistons’ rebuild moved along without much success in the early part of the 2010s. I was intrigued by young Andre Drummond and tuned in just long enough to see that the returns on the Josh Smith signing were a good reason to tune back out. Stan Van Gundy’s hiring and the subsequent decision to waive Smith and acquire Brandon Jennings created a period of fun basketball where I was back into the Pistons. The 2015-16 season was the franchise’s first winning season in eight years and they played some enjoyable playoff games, though it again ended in a sweep vs. Cleveland. The upside of that core was fairly limited but I hoped that we could see at least a semi-competitive team within a few years.

Nope. The Pistons moved backwards in 2016-17, then traded for Blake Griffin the following season. Blake willed a bad Pistons roster to another #8 seed in 2018-19 in a final selfless act of heroism, just so Detroit could be swept out again. I didn’t watch much of those late 2010s Pistons teams because I was busy in college and a team of wayward vets with little future upside whose ceiling is a .500 record isn’t all that enticing. 2019-20 saw the poorly built roster crumble and then came another rebuild.

I was happy at that point, knowing it would be a painful few years of losing but the team seemed committed to a full tank, not interested in making the same mistake of the Joe Dumars rebuild, always picking 7th-9th, rather than top 5.2 I thought that new GM Troy Weaver seemed like he was plucked from a decent tree. A draft evaluator from the OKC Thunder appeared to be a good resumé. The years of basketball that went by were uniformly horrible on the court but it was all for those precious draft picks. The returns on the 2020 Draft class weren’t great but then it all paid off in 2021, as the team struck gold in the draft lottery and landed sure-#1 pick Cade Cunningham. At long last, the Pistons would have their young centerpiece star.

I was pumped that lottery night, knowing it would still be a few years before the Pistons were good but I had seen Cade at Oklahoma State and knew he would be very good, provided they could build a team around him. But as the next few years went by, the team didn’t arrive. Cade was solid as a rookie on a bad team and then missed nearly his entire second season with a surgery to get his shins fixed, which seemed like a cover for Weaver getting to tank the team again. The Pistons entered the hyped Victor Wembanyama lottery in 2023 with the best odds (still weren’t good odds) to land the phenom… and so they fell to 5th.

That disappointment aside, Ausar Thompson was another talented prospect to put next to Cade and the combo of Jaden Ivey and Jalen Duren from the 2022 Draft. The Pistons went out that summer and made a pricey coaching hire to acquire a recent NBA Coach of the Year winner in Monty Williams. Now they had a true young “core” and a seemingly legit coach. The team appeared poised to take a step forward and I was ready to finally start watching the Pistons regularly again as fall 2023 arrived.

So much for that. The season actually started well, the Pistons winning 2 of their first 3 games. They were 2-2 on the year and leading a bad Portland team by a lot in game #5 before collapsing in the second half en route to an ugly home loss. Little did we know that was the 2nd of what would become an NBA record 28-game losing streak that made the Pistons the punch-line of sports. Ironically, the losing streak made me watch the Pistons more, to see if the streak would go on another game as it approached the record in late December. There was plenty of dark humor in it, including the ever-shrinking Wingstop logo on the score graphics tweeted by the team, as well as the George Constanza Trying To Get Fired By The Yankees nature of Monty Williams’ coaching malpractice. But as grimly funny as it was, it was a pathetic chapter.

In some ways, the losing streak was a necessary moment for everyone to take a step back and realize how far a historic and once-proud NBA franchise had fallen. The streak ended but the losing didn’t, the Pistons falling to 8-49 in late February before finishing the year 6-19 in the final 25 once the games became unserious as the season wound down. Their 14-68 final record was the worst in franchise history and despite the promise of some of the young players, the Pistons franchise seemed utterly lost. All the hope from lottery night 2021 that I would get a playoff contending Pistons team back in my life in the 2020s was gone from me.

[AP Photo/Carlos Osorio]

As the 2024-25 Pistons season rolled around, again there was a dark impulse to watch the team. The franchise had fired Troy Weaver and Monty Williams, a tandem of incompetent roster construction and despicable coaching effort that combined to drive the Pistons into the 68-loss disaster that was 2023-24. In that way came the upsetting desire to put on the early season Pistons games: “well it can’t be worse than last year”. I was interested to see what the team could do with a new coach leading them and a roster with a few more competitive veterans like Tobias Harris, Tim Hardaway Jr., and Malik Beasley.

The season started as 2023-24 had finished, four more losses to open the campaign and ultimately a 1-5 record with a grisly point differential in the first 9 days of the season. But then they started to win some, beating LeBron’s Lakers and clawing out heart-stopping wins over Atlanta and Miami in mid-November. Their contests were competitive and 15 games in, the team had improved to 7-8. Already 44% of the way to last year’s win total!

The Pistons of the fall were a regular bad team. Which, compared to the prior season, was a huge improvement and cause for modest celebration. Cade Cunningham’s maturation into a very good player was the brightest spot, but Jaden Ivey’s improved three-point stroke was exciting too. Looking at the decrepit Eastern Conference standings, I realized the Pistons had a legitimate path to the play-in even as a bad team and that began to be my hope for the season as mid-December approached.

Little did I know that the fall period of cautious optimism would be the “bad” part of the season, which would improve after a humiliating performance at home on December 19 against Utah. The Pistons let the Jazz drop 48 on them in the first quarter, leading to one of only 17 games that Utah won all season. It was a really disappointing effort that seemed to spur some sort of change, because the Pistons went on the road for a West Coast swing and ripped off three solid wins over Phoenix, the Lakers, and most thrillingly, Sacramento. The last game, on Boxing Day, saw the Pistons rally in furious fashion late and win it on an Ivey four-point play with 1 second to go. The Pistons lost to Denver to finish 14-18 in calendar 2024, already matching their entire win total from 2023-24.

With a soft schedule coming up, I dreamed of seeing the Pistons hit .500 and they would do so, but not in the way we expected. On January 1, Jaden Ivey was lost for the season to a traumatic leg injury against the Orlando Magic, a terrible blow just as vibes for the team were so high. My thoughts on what could happen next were dour, as Ivey was the Pistons’ only quality offensive creator besides Cade.

Yet thanks to a rapidly improving defense via the return of Ausar Thompson from blood clot absence, the Pistons rattled off seven wins in eight to begin January, hitting 21-19 at the 40 game mark. The NBA world was beginning to catch on and Cade Cunningham’s All-Star case began to seem inevitable. For me, this was when Pistons games became must-watch TV if I didn’t have anything going on.

January saw the Pistons progress from “bad” to mediocre. My hope was still merely to make the play-in, as the team was still rather up and down, but they weren’t bad anymore. After the calendar flipped to February, the Pistons lost a pair of heartbreaking games to Atlanta and Cleveland but then embarked on what would become their longest winning streak in 17 years. Aided by the trade deadline pickup of backup PG Dennis Schröder, the Pistons dispatched five bad opponents in a row to get going before knocking off the Hawks on the road, the Clippers at home, and then ultimately, the vaunted Celtics at home.

That win over Boston, to make it an eight-game win streak, felt like the moment when everyone in the Detroit market began to realize how special this team was. Each night they continued to grow and improve. Cade had gotten so much of the focus but the love started to be spread, to the defensive intensity of Ausar Thompson, to the blossoming passing of Jalen Duren, to the rim protection greatness of Isaiah Stewart, and even the bench hustle of Ron Holland. Malik Beasley continued to rain threes at a historic clip for a reserve and Schröder salvaged Detroit’s bench minutes to help them win games with regularity.

No longer were they mediocre, hoping to play-in. No, they were now a good basketball team. Their efficiency numbers since late December were nearly top 5 in the league and they had been winning at a 50+ wins per 82 pace over that span. Their overall record now sat at 33-26 and with Orlando, Atlanta, and Miami fading, a path to a top six seed and was very clear. The goal was no longer play-in, it was playoffs.

The Pistons would do that. The final 23 games of the season they played at roughly .500 as the team began to seemingly load manage Cade Cunningham over a nagging injury late in the year and dropped a number of winnable games once it became clear that the playoffs were a lock. Along the way we got a few more great moments, the upset of Cleveland without Cade being the highest high, but breakout games for Holland and Marcus Sasser in Cade’s absence will also stick in the memory.

When it was all said and done the Pistons had finished 44-38, the first team in NBA history to triple their previous win total in one year between two 82-game seasons. Their 30 win improvement over the prior season was also the 6th-largest winning% increase year over year in NBA history, and the only one of those six not spurred on by the acquisition of a Hall of Fame player in the preceding offseason.3 It was the first winning season for the franchise in nine years and as the #6 seed in the playoffs, the Pistons were finally in a playoff series they had a chance to be competitive in, against an opponent they’d matched up well against in the regular season.

[YouTube thumbnail]

Going into the first round series against the New York Knicks, the Pistons had reason to be hopeful. As mentioned, they played the Knicks well in the regular season, winning three of four matchups. The Knicks lean heavily on their starters and a Pistons team that likes to run in transition provided the opportunity to perhaps wear the Knicks down over the course of a long series. New York certainly had more star power and established talent, but the Pistons played hard together as a group.

The NBA Playoffs are a much different beast than the regular season and we saw that in Game 1, as the Pistons cruised along through the first three quarters, heading to the fourth with a decent lead. They were not ready for the intensity to be turned up to 100 by the Knicks defense and the home crowd gobbled them up, as bad shots and turnovers combined with easy buckets for New York spent the Pistons into a tailspin. An avalanche of points by the Knicks turned a eight-point Piston lead into an eleven point Knick victory in the span of one quarter.

They didn’t just lose Game 1, they also lost Stewart to a knee injury, depriving the team of both their emotional soul and their best defensive center, whose matchup with Karl-Anthony Towns seemed like it would be crucial for the Pistons’ path to victory in the series. But following the theme of this team all year long, they responded. The Pistons shook the crushing blow off and led Game 2 nearly wire-to-wire, stomaching yet another late New York charge to emerge with a victory thanks to a clutch three from Schröder in the final minute. The series would be tied leaving MSG and headed back to LCA, the first Piston playoff victory since late May 2008.

The Knicks threw their best punch in Game 3 and the Pistons played catch up all game, eventually falling short by just two points. A sluggish first half to begin Game 4 gave way to a dominant third quarter that again put the Pistons in a strong position to snatch a playoff win. They led by four with 90 seconds to play but a pair of outrageous Towns shots catapulted the Knicks to a one point lead. The Pistons’ final possession saw Tim Hardaway Jr. obviously fouled while shooting a three with a second to go, but the referees did not blow the whistle. Final score: 94-93 Knicks.

Many young teams in the Pistons’ shoes, down 3-1 going on the road and coming off a devastating loss, would have folded up and laid down. Not this team. They dug in and improbably won Game 5 in Manhattan, Cade Cunningham’s best game of the series and a playoff coming out party for Ausar Thompson, who locked up NY star Jalen Brunson to send the series back to Detroit for at least one more game. The Knicks responded just as they did to their earlier loss in the series, throwing a great punch in the first half of Game 6, but somehow trailed at halftime after a rotten close to the half. They got back on track in the 3rd quarter and carried an 11 point lead to the 4th.

The Pistons had one more surge in them, Thompson again bottling up Brunson in the 4th, allowing the Pistons to shoot ahead with a prolonged run. This time they led by seven with only three minutes to go. But then came the Knicks one last time, Brunson re-emerging to make a couple big shots with Thompson on the bench and then shaking Thompson to drill the game-winning 3. The Pistons drew up a brilliant play that schemed Beasley open for a potential tying triple, but Beasley fumbled Cunningham’s pass and just like that, the season was over. Man.

As the series came to a close and we got the concluding quotes, there was much praise to go around. Brunson complemented Thompson’s defense and the Knicks were generally effusive in their praise of the young Pistons. The consensus from Knicks fans online was “whewwww, thank god we are done playing that team 😅”. Other observers gave Detroit their flowers with the general sentiment of “they’ll be back, this is just the beginning”.

You could say that the Pistons got great respect in the handshake line, this being the one case where you can savor that bittersweet moral victory.4 The Pistons were agonizingly close to pulling off a defining upset, a correct call at the end of Game 4 (or KAT missing either of his two clutch shots) and a slightly better course of play at the end of Game 6 and bingo. Yet it’s also hard to be too devastated, not just when you compare the expectations at the start of the season when the Pistons’ over/under for wins was set at 25.5, but when you think about the matchup of this series.

If you’d told me before the series that Isaiah Stewart would play only 18 minutes the entire series, I might’ve predicted a Knicks sweep. When you look at these two rosters, most people would take four or five Knicks players before they’d take a second Piston besides Cade. The Knicks are a team with plenty of playoff experience and a pricey lineup of a number of notable players. They don’t have first round picks this year or in 2027, 2029, or 2031 because of what it took to put this team together. The Pistons weren’t anywhere close to this stage of their hypothetical contention window. It likely just wasn’t their time yet.5

The only thing that irks me a bit is the Pistons weren’t able to win a home playoff game in this series and their starts in all three home games were subpar. That’s something I will hope to see fixed next year. But if you had said before the season that my main gripe at the end of the 2024-25 Detroit Pistons series is they were unable to pull out any of three narrow defeats at home in a tightly contested first round playoff series against the New York Knicks, you would’ve put me in a cell at Arkham Asylum between the Joker and Harley Quinn.

[AP Photo/Duane Burleson]

As the season comes to a close, my enduring memory of the 2024-25 Pistons is the unadulterated fun of it all. A season that began with macabre “can’t be worse than last year!” curiosity ended with hope and optimism. The journey between both places was the fun. The fun of continually improving expectations. The fun of watching young players grow and begin to come into their own. They play hard, defend well, always respond to adversity, run the floor with athleticism, and threw down a ton of dunks. What’s not to love?

There was also the fun of scratching out a marquee win over a team like the Lakers or the Knicks or the Cavs. The fun of watching your team’s centerpiece begin to get talked about like a star of the game, or just watching national media remember your team exists.

Or really, watching most people in the Detroit market remember your team exists. I’m not going to claim I was the most faithful Piston fan of all time, as I laid out in this piece. After all, this is the first time in 3.5 years of me posting stuff on this blog that I’ve written about the Pistons. There are many other people who spent the last few years wasting night after night watching every game of this team. But somehow I was still more plugged in with the Pistons than so many others in this region, even during the dark times. To so many corners of the Detroit sports scene, the Pistons may not have even existed and it’s been that way for a long time.

It’s funny how we got to see two miracle seasons play out in the span of less than 12 months to make the broader market remember that a team exists. First it was the Tigers’ 31-11 Linsanity run to the 2024 playoffs that flipped 0.2% playoff odds into a berth. Then came the Pistons, completing the single greatest one-year turnaround in NBA history to go from 14 wins to a promising playoff team through mostly internal growth. In both cases, these teams made the Detroit market remember they existed and more than that, remember what it was like to have a legitimately good Tigers/Pistons team in the market.

Which is also a deeply personal experience. Just as the 2024 Tigers brought a tear to my eye and transported me back to a childhood love and belief in this baseball team, the Pistons stretched back even further. To my first moments as a sports fan, the heartbreak of Robert Horry, D-Wade, and LeBron long since gone, but also the certainty of knowing that every night they were playing, the Pistons would be an enjoyable watch. It was like seeing an old friend again for the first time in a long, long time. We got a small glimpse of each other in 2015-16 during the Andre Drummond years, but it was over all too quickly.

This time feels different. Part of it may be that this team also found the soul of the Pistons, the Bad Boy/Goin’ to Work identity of hated, trash-talking defensive junkyard dawgs that the Drummond years never could. The larger part is the youth of the team, the hope that many of these players are just scratching the surface of what they can be. Cade Cunningham is the most polished of the core but even he has room to grow, improving his 3 point shot, cutting down on turnovers, learning to shoulder the minutes workload that comes with being a star in both the regular season and playoffs, and becoming a better finisher in the clutch.

Beyond that, there’s Jalen Duren. Can he harness his passing ability to become a diverse offensive weapon? Can he add a mid-range jumper or a floater to open up his driving possibilities? And can he learn to better defend stretch 5s? We can do this same thing with Ausar Thompson: he needs to learn to better manage his fouls so he grows to play 30+ minutes consistently. He also needs to get a better handle to prevent turnovers against intense defenses and improve as a free throw shooter.

That’s not even to mention Jaden Ivey, who missed this whole second-half run and playoffs. He was scoring 17.6 points per game on 40.9% from three before injury at age 22. We didn’t see a single game this year where the Pistons started with a lineup of Cunningham, Ivey, Thompson, Tobias Harris, and Duren, which in theory was supposed to be the optimal lineup. That’s why I’d like to see the team maintain a solid veteran cast while running back this young core because there’s so much we still have yet to learn about this group. The Pistons were one of the youngest teams in the NBA this season… why not give them time to mature and develop, rather than rushing into a risky trade for a perceived “star”?

No matter what happens, I am incredibly excited for next season. Arguably the biggest bummer I felt at the end of last week’s game was not that the Pistons didn’t get to play in Game 7 or face Boston, but that it would be 5ish months before we get to see these young pups play basketball again. Whatever comes next probably won’t be as much fun because the only way you can really top the bliss of the “young team massively outperforms expectations” season is by winning an NBA championship, which is awfully hard to do and wouldn’t be happening for a few years anyway.

What this team gave us was hope, something once missing from all four Detroit teams not that long ago, and missing from this Pistons team for nearly 20 years. Hope can drive a man insane, but it can also drive a man to turn on the TV every other night to watch the local team play basketball. That’s what this Pistons team did for me and so many others in the Detroit market. Next year we will see if this group can spread their wings and fly a little further. For now, we have the joy of watching them fly this far to carry us for the whole summer.

[CONTENT NOTE: I may do a post in a few weeks sharing specific thoughts on the performances of individual Pistons from this season, but TBD on that. This piece was more about the narrative of a Cinderella season.]

I may have a vague memory of the ECF against Miami, but it’s hard for me to keep straight whether my separate Pistons/Heat memories are the 05 series or the one a year later

Unfortunately, the Holland/Yzerman Red Wings rebuild found inspiration in the early 2010s Joe Dumars rebuild strategy of draft position

Even if Ron Holland II makes the Hall of Fame 20 years from now, it still won’t really count because Holland was the 8th or 9th man in the rotation. Previous instances were things like “rookie Larry Bird” or “signed Steve Nash in free agency”

Take notes, Sheldon Keefe.

The Knicks’ performance against Boston so far makes it sting a little more but the Pistons’ lack of playoff experience to me means Detroit’s playoff ceiling was pretty limited no matter what