At the end of last NBA season, with the Detroit Pistons marred by a league-record 28-game losing streak, having won just 14 of their 82 games, star player Cade Cunningham’s days were constantly overcast.
“Losing that much, it makes the sky feel grayer than it is,” Cunningham told GQ.
The Pistons were dreadful. A punch line. Incapable of executing basic tasks like inbounding the ball. Last season’s team bore so little resemblance to the turn-of-the-century Pistons that made six straight Eastern Conference Finals that it almost felt like a different franchise entirely. If there was any silver lining to be found in the calamitous 2023–24 season, it was the fact that the top eight Pistons in minutes played were 23 or younger. “The cupboard wasn’t bare,” said head coach J.B. Bickerstaff. “You draft this many lottery picks, those guys have talent!”
Selling eventual success to disappointed fans of a rebuilding team can sometimes feel like promising rain in the desert. But this year brought a deluge: Cunningham made the leap into the NBA’s upper class, the cabal of young prospects started to come into their own, and the front office surrounded them all with steady-handed adults. Suddenly, the 2024–25 Detroit Pistons became one of the most feel-good stories in sports history, earning a spot back in the playoffs just a year after it seemed all hope was lost.
“I don’t know if any of us thought we’d arrive in this spot as quickly as we did,” Bickerstaff admitted. “But we knew if we had time, we’d get where we wanted to go.”
The Pistons not only pulled off the unthinkable—winning 44 games and qualifying for the postseason, becoming the first team ever to triple their win total from one year to the next—they did so in a way that captivated one of America’s most grizzled, hardened cities. Big Sean, the multiplatinum Detroit rapper who also serves as the Pistons’ director of creative innovation calls it “a great metaphor.”
“Nothing lasts forever, and what goes around comes around,” he said. “If you put the work in, it’s going to pay off at the right time—maybe not the right time according to you, but according to a bigger plan.”
If cultural cachet is the true signifier of a team’s impact, this year’s Pistons are in good shape from that alone. Cunningham’s name has been dropped in Sean’s lyrics, of course—“I got 500K right now on the money line, got me dapping up Cade at halftime”—but it also popped up in one of the more attention-grabbing bars of the year, in which Drake boasts about sleeping in the Pistons’ locker room and engaging in some extracurricular activities while wearing Cunningham’s shoes. Cunningham said he was chilling at home when a friend sent him the track, and will neither confirm nor deny Drizzy’s claim. “I’m not going to tell you what I think about it!” he laughed. “That’s hilarious, though.” (Big Sean chimed in to say that he enjoyed his own Cunningham rhyme a little more, and has more coming, but cannot refute that Drake’s is “definitely funny.”)