The streak finally ended at twenty-nine losses, with a two-point-win over the Toronto Raptors. Then the Pistons lost another seven straight. They finished the season with just fourteen wins. Weaver and Williams, who was still owed about sixty million dollars on his contract, were fired, and the roster that Weaver had assembled to support the young core was overhauled. But the core—Cunningham, Jalen Duren, Isaiah Stewart, Jaden Ivey, and Ausar Thompson—was kept intact. This was a risk. Each player, on his own, had something to recommend him: Stewart was an old-fashioned bruiser who could also shoot threes; Thompson had élite athleticism; Ivey could explode to the basket; and Duren was a dominant rebounder and showed some promise in the pick-and-roll. They were all under twenty-five years old. But they didn’t fit together like modern, offense-oriented N.B.A. teams, which tend to be built around outside shooting. If these Pistons were going to win, they would have to do so differently.
Two years after that historic losing streak, Detroit has the best winning percentage in the N.B.A., a smidge ahead of the defending-champion Oklahoma City Thunder. The turnaround didn’t quite happen overnight; last season, the Pistons finished with forty-four wins, becoming the first team in N.B.A. history to triple their previous season’s win total. Still, it’s hard to overstate the speed and the degree of the improvement. These Pistons have already equalled those forty-four wins, and they have six weeks to go.
What makes the turnaround even more striking is how it happened—or how it didn’t. They didn’t lose on purpose, Philadelphia-style, in order to maximize their chances at high draft picks. They didn’t spend years engaged in careful, actuarial planning, executing canny, future-oriented trades, in the matter of Oklahoma City’s front office. They didn’t sign or trade for a superstar. The Pistons made major roster changes deeper in the rotation, and have added a few important role players, including Tobias Harris and Duncan Robinson. But, with the exception of Ivey, who was traded a few weeks ago to the Chicago Bulls, most of the key figures on the team now are the same guys who lost sixty-eight games two years ago.
The coach is new, and deserves a good deal of the credit. J. B. Bickerstaff has a track record of turning bad teams into good ones, and a reputation for being hands-on. He likes old-school, defense-first, big-man basketball, which is what the Pistons play. There was a natural legacy to build on in Detroit—not only the Bad Boys of the nineteen-eighties and early nineties but also the bullying team that won the title in 2004. The Pistons had a talented but terrible defense during their fourteen-win season. They needed a good coach, but it wouldn’t have worked if the players hadn’t also transformed themselves.
Thompson has become a top shot blocker among wings and a menace in the passing lanes. Duren, the team’s starting center, is now one of the league’s best rim protectors and, at twenty-two, an All-Star. Stewart, who appears undersized at six feet eight but has a seven-foot-five wingspan, has focussed his game on defending the paint, and his ability to keep offenses from scoring there allows the team’s perimeter defenders to take more risks, creating more turnovers, and letting the Pistons get out and run.
Stewart has a nickname: Beef Stew. Its origins have something to do with his documented passion for cooking oxtail, but it fits because he likes beef, as in grievances. He’s always up for a good mid-game brawl. (Stewart is about to end a seven-game suspension for leaving the bench to join a scrum between the Pistons and the Charlotte Hornets, when he was still in his warmups, with ice packs strapped to his knees.) The Pistons lean into their physicality on offense as well as defense: they take charges, lower shoulders, make contact and play through it. Other teams wheel the ball around the arc, but the Pistons punish opponents at the rim. Their three-point shooting is among the league’s worst, but accounts of the N.B.A.’s three-point revolution sometimes obscure an important fact: the paint is still the most efficient place to score. You just have to get the ball there. That’s what Cunningham does.
