A Sense of Doubt blog post #4079 - DETROIT PISTONS 60 WINS!! PLAYOFFS START TOMORROW
DEEEETROIT BASKETBALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
for the 60th time... PLAY IT pic.twitter.com/BcDzKMWoUL
— Detroit Pistons (@DetroitPistons) April 13, 2026
https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/shawn-windsor/2026/04/15/detroit-pistons-nba-playoff-odds-no-shock-for-disrespected-franchise/89615831007/
The historic turnaround is causing whiplash, and that whiplash is causing disrespect – the fuel for fans raised on Detroit sports.
The latest?
Few analysts view the Pistons as favorites to make the Finals this June, despite their No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. Worse, the sportsbooks overwhelmingly agree.
Among the teams with better odds than the Pistons' +500 mark (per DraftKings as of Tuesday, April 14) to win the East are the Boston Celtics (the 2-seed, at +155), the New York Knicks (the 3, at +450) and the Cleveland Cavaliers (the 4, at +330). Likewise, in the West, there's the top three seeds – the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs and Denver Nuggets – all with better odds to win the title.
That means the Pistons enter the playoffs with the seventh-best odds to win it all, and fourth-best in the East.
Fourth?
Even the most craven homer understands giving the Celtics leading odds – their core won a title just two summers ago, and is healthy once again – will begrudge the Cavs better odds after they were the East's top seed last season, added James Harden at this year's trade deadline and then humbled the Pistons a couple of times this season (including once while missing Harden).
But the Knicks?
After the Pistons were a missed foul call away from getting a seventh game in their playoff series last spring and then thrashed them three times this season?
There are other forces at work. Oversimplified narratives, for one. History, for another.
It's gotta be the poster, right?
'Bad Boys' forever
Maybe it was the sunglasses, and the image of the Bad Boys’ snarling frontcourt duo that brought tackling and hip-checking into vogue and helped end the overlapping reigns of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. The pretty boys. The coastal boys (never mind that they were from the Midwest).
The saviors of the league.
The Bad Boys weren’t just interlopers; they were symbols of a cultural shift in the NBA, and Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn were its poster boys, if you’ll pardon the pun. Folks of a certain age thought the Pistons played football. That stuck, thanks to Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson rewriting history in Chicago.
That narrative, like any great drama, got a reboot in the early 2000s, when those Pistons teams won with even less offense. And now, we're seemingly on the third go-round. History is sneaky like that – subconscious, even.
It’s true that some of the current Pistons welcome the ties to the franchise’s two greatest eras – the "Bad Boys" and "Goin' to Work" – and coach J.B. Bickerstaff doesn’t hide his love of defense and physicality, two skills that evoke those past champs.
But like the two title teams that came before it, this team’s talent for fending off buckets overshadows its talent for amassing them. These Pistons don’t shoot 3-pointers like Boston or Denver, but they are efficient and modern in other areas, with offensive smarts that are collectively underrated. And though these Pistons may not have a dominant No. 2 iso scorer, they have playmakers, and they move the ball.
Once again, they’re trying to win in a different way, or in a way from another era. At least it feels like that to some, which is one reason they’re almost nobody’s favorites in the East.
Pistons have questions to answer
It’s true the Pistons haven’t won a playoff series since the dawn of Twitter – all the way back in 2008. It’s also true they are young and mostly inexperienced, and that no sport asks so many of its champions to learn through failure first.
On the court, observers worry the Pistons’ offense will bog down despite the considerable shoulders of Cade Cuningham. Without a traditional second scorer, they say, the baskets will dry up, and the defense won’t be enough.
This isn’t the worst basketball logic. It’s also a cop-out, because the Pistons do have a second scorer – hey there, All-Star center Jalen Duren – he just doesn’t do his work in isolation. Lately, they’ve had a third scorer, too.
Of course, it’s reasonable to wonder if Duren and Daniss Jenkins can score in the playoffs as they did down the stretch while Cunningham was out with a collapsed lung. Then again, they only have to do it four times out of seven for the Pistons to remain a top-10 offense and advance.
Analysts aren’t thinking about that, though. They’re thinking about the scoring options in Boston, Cleveland and New York.
They’re right. Those squads have more traditional options for points, and better shooters overall. Yet the Pistons are the better defensive team, and the Thunder showed last season that defense can still win.
No, Cunningham isn’t the offensive force that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is for the Thunder. And, no, the Pistons don’t shoot like OKC, either. But their offensive ratings are separated by three-tenths of a point.
The Pistons had the second-best net rating, tied with San Antonio – a measure that accounts for offensive and defensive ratings – behind the Thunder, naturally. Does this mean the Pistons should be favored in the East?
Well, no. That would disrespect the Celtics’ championship core and what they’ve done this season despite playing the majority of the season without Jayson Tatum.
But, again, fourth?
Only three times in NBA history has a conference's top seed entered the playoffs with such low odds to make the Finals.
Of course this is fodder for Detroit vs. Everybody, fuel for the aggrieved locals congenitally inclined to add mass to the chip on the shoulder. Diss one team in the wake of a historic turnaround, and it’ll be taken personally and seen as a shot at our way of life.
That’s part of the charm.
It’s also part of what’ll feel so good if this latest iteration of the Pistons knocks off a couple of those East favorites. So, here’s to the sportsbooks and the outsiders – let the latest proxy war begin.
https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/shawn-windsor/2026/04/19/cade-cunningham-detroit-pistons-playoffs/89678479007/Cade Cunningham spent all year preparing for Pistons playoff run
Cade Cunningham knows now. Now that he has been there. He knows because he’s seen and heard and felt the NBA playoffs up close.
They all do, these young Detroit Pistons. Still, this postseason – how far they’ll go, how this season is remembered –starts with him.
The choices he makes. The shots he takes. The way he navigates when it all hangs in the balance.
Fair or not, these are the rules, unwritten though they are. In basketball, the best player authors the story and carries the weight after it's written.
A year ago, the Pistons star was new to this, to the NBA playoffs, to the intensity and physicality, to the pressure. He learned about all of it in the tough six-game first-round loss to the New York Knicks. Mostly, he learned what he had to do in the offseason to change it.
Here he is again, with the chance to show not only what he has learned, but how he has changed, as the playoffs so often demand.
The Orlando Magic are coming to town. And while they aren’t the Knicks, they’re brawny and bruising – exactly the kind of test Cunningham tried to prepare for last summer.
Cunningham knew he had plenty to add after last season ended.
A tighter handle, better decision-making, more fluid jumper. But ask him what he needed to work on the most, though, and he’ll tell you: His body.
He needed more muscle and endurance, more strength. He learned – the hard way – that without those, skills didn’t mean as much, no matter how much he worked on them, too.
Not in the fourth quarter of a playoff game, anyway. Not when the game is tied, the seconds are waning, and it’s all about catching that final breath.
Lesson learned in a New York minute
He was new to this then, to the intensity and pressure, to the physicality. And if he had to do it again, he’d almost certainly hurl himself into the thicket of bodies in the lane with more gusto and clarity.
As it was, after he’d called for Jalen Duren to come set a screen at the top of the key, he hesitated, then dribbled down the left side, a couple of Knicks in tow, before fading as he tossed up a tough lefty layup over length.
The ball caromed high and hard off the backboard, missing the rim entirely. The angle was brutal, but it didn’t have to be so difficult and wouldn't have been if he’d launched his body into the defender and had taken a straighter line to the rim.
That takes muscle, though, along with stamina and will. That also takes experience, and while even the great ones miss that end-of-game shot in the postseason far more than they make it, the shot comes easier after a few whiffs.
So, again, now he knows.
Now he understands just how physical the playoffs are going to be. And why he had to add weight and strength.
Those additions, by the way, were clear as air the day this season began, how he better absorbed contact and finished through contact. How he muscled through ball screens. How he stayed on his spots.
More than anything, said his coach, J.B. Bickerstaff, Cunningham knew how good he could be by changing his body in the offseason, in addition to improving his skill.
“With his size, skill set and added strength,” he said.
Yeah, that’s tantalizing, and a testament to his improvement since his arrival. For the great ones – or the near-great ones determined to be great – this is where the story is told. But this isn’t where it begins.
That came last spring after the painful end in Game 6, then began again in the summer, when Cunningham, Bickerstaff said, asked himself this:
“’OK, what's the next thing? What's the mental edge? What’s the physical edge?’ I think all the great ones go into every summer with that mindset, and that's what he chose.”
Now we get to see how those choices make a difference, and what he’ll do the next time the ball is in his hands with the season on the line, and he begins to attack the rim.
Because the choices he made after last year’s playoffs should help him take the better angle this time, and absorb the body blows and finish.
“I feel it all over the place," Cunningham said, describing the advantage his added strength gives him on the floor. "I'm at a weight now that used to feel very heavy for me. But now I feel great.”
Mitch Albom: Pistons have playoff edge – they already know who they are
My first Detroit Pistons playoff game was 40 years ago, in the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, which, a decade later, during the Summer Olympics, would see a bomb explode in the park next to it.
That playoff night, the Pistons sported Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, Isiah Thomas and Kelly Tripucka — and got trashed by a Hawks team that featured Dominique Wilkins, aka the Human Highlight Film, and Spud Webb, a guard who, by NBA standards, could fit in your pocket.
The Pistons lost that game, 140-122. They would lose Game 2 as well, then win Game 3 back home at the Pontiac Silverdome, before dropping Game 4 in double overtime by a single point.
Taken on its own, you’d not call that a successful postseason. Eliminated in the first round. Defeated in the closing seconds. Didn’t even get to a decisive Game 5.
But this year’s Pistons have something big in common with their 40-years-ago version.
There’s a springboard beneath their feet.
And it could see them soar.
Growing pains in the playoffs
The Pistons, in the old days, took this roadmap to an NBA title. The Chicago Bulls were next. Then the San Antonio Spurs followed suit. The reason it takes time to win a crown in this league is that losing builds character, character builds identity, and identity gets you over the top. Show me an NBA champion, and I’ll show you a team that has figured out who it is, what it does well, who is expected to do what, and who doesn’t care if they don’t get the ball (or the glory).
The Pistons' "Bad Boys" champions of 1989 and 1990 had an identity: They saw themselves as hard-nosed, physical defenders, with scoring punch from one of the best backcourts ever.
The Pistons' "Goin’ To Work" group that won it all in 2004 was equally blue-collared, with a chip on their shoulders from being cast off from previous teams. Their lack of a single superstar, in an era of teams with double superstars, became a winning ensemble formula.
Which brings us to these 2026 Pistons, who have forged an identity of their own, much of it through defeat. Last week, I asked coach J.B. Bickerstaff if losing in the first round to New York last year is motivation for this year’s run.
“I do think (that series) taught us some lessons,” he said. “It was unfortunate the way it ended for us, but ultimately it helped us get to where we are now.”
Where they are now is the No. 1 seed in the East, a 60-win season, and homecourt advantage all the way until the finals. But regular-season excellence is useless if you don’t have the right postseason mentality. And this is where the Pistons, defeated in six tough games by the Knicks in the previous playoffs, may have their greatest edge.
They thrive on turnaround.
From dark times, into the light
“I do believe (what happened) two seasons ago lit a fire under these guys that they haven't forgotten,” Bickerstaff said. “The way they felt they were treated, or talked about, the stuff that they'd gone through, how dark those days were. I believe that tied this group of guys together in a way that's unique and extremely special, and it lit a fire for them to show everyone who they really are and who they believe they can be.”
Exactly. And it’s those kinds of teams that tend to go furthest in the long grind that is the NBA playoffs. There’s a reason so many of the engineered superstar pairings in recent years never won a title (aka, wherever Kevin Durant or James Harden have gone). When the postseason slogs, you need more than stats. You need belief. You need someone stepping up if someone else slips. And you need defense.
Which perfectly describes the Pistons. They believed when others did not. They clearly step up (look at the 8-3 record when their biggest star, Cunningham, went out recently). And they play defense. Man, do they play defense.
Those Pistons of 40 years ago left the Silverdome floor dejected after Game 4, heading home too soon. But they also sensed that they were building something. That they were coming.
Cunningham and the vastly improved Duren inspire that same kind of emotion. Stewart adds the edge, like Mahorn did. Tobias Harris brings a veteran’s steady hand, the way Dantley did his first year in Detroit. Daniss Jenkins has burst into sudden significance, not unlike how Dennis Rodman did it.
Together, this year’s Pistons have the wins that make them a bona fide contender. But just as important, they have the losses, and the identity that, like a blade in a fire, gets sharpened as a result.
Oh. And one other similarity. Boston may very well be waiting should the Pistons make the Eastern Conference finals this time.
And we all know what that feels like.
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- Days ago: MOM = 3943 days ago & DAD = 597 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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