It took Cade Cunningham a minute to figure out the NBA as a rookie. For a different set of reasons, it might take him another minute to figure out his place in it this season.
As he eventually and emphatically proved last season, bending the learning curve is one of Cunningham’s super powers. He’ll figure it out. Fast. But as his uneven preseason showed, there is some figuring out to do.
Cunningham averaged 10.5 points and shot 31 percent over four Pistons preseason games and if it sometimes looked as if he was caught between looking to establish himself as the fulcrum of his team’s offense and making sure all of his teammates found their niche within that offense, well, that’s because he was.
“Yeah. We’ve got new pieces around me, new guys that are just now getting into the flow of it,” Cunningham said Sunday, the preseason in the rear-view mirror and Wednesday’s start of his second season bearing down fast. “So I definitely wanted to have the offense moving and just have the ball moving – not just playing with me and me trying to be aggressive the whole time.
“I think it’s a balance effect. Me being aggressive opens up a lot of things for the team, as well. I learned that from the preseason and I’m ready to keep moving forward.”
Cunningham’s rookie season got a belated start when he missed all of training camp with an ankle injury and then he missed his first 18 3-point shots when he parachuted into the middle of regular-season games. When Jerami Grant was sidelined for nearly two months with a thumb injury, Cunningham began to find his footing – and the offense began a transition that figures to see Cunningham at the controls for the generation of Pistons basketball ahead.
Now it’s a matter of learning a new set of teammates, including the backcourt partner the Pistons expect to complement Cunningham ideally – and vice versa – and to be at his side for this next generation, Jaden Ivey. The two have become inseparable workout partners, drilling at the same basket together after every practice.
“I feel pretty good about us,” Cunningham said. “I’m excited to continue to grow our relationship and grow our chemistry.”
Ivey’s speed has had the broad impact the Pistons anticipated, but his playmaking proficiency has been one of the revelations of camp.
“He plays the right way,” Cunningham said. “He can definitely get to the rim whenever he wants, but he makes the right pass almost every time. He wants to get his teammates involved, so it helps me. It helps the rest of our guys that are ready to finish plays.”
The Pistons have four players who can fill the role of primary ballhandler on the roster – Cunningham, Ivey, Killian Hayes and Cory Joseph and only the latter is older than 21. On a team with 10 players 24 or younger, so many players are still in the early stages of development and trying to find their way. It shouldn’t register as a surprise that it’s going to take all of them time to mesh – and time for Cunningham to fine tune his role as the pilot.
He wanted to step lightly in preseason and let his identity as leader of the band develop organically. He envisions he’ll be more assertive as the regular season arrives.
“I would almost call it passive,” he said. “I feel I wasn’t aggressive enough in the preseason, but it’s a good time to feel out the game. I definitely learned a lot in preseason and I’m ready to take the next step going into the season.”
“I saw it,” Dwane Casey said. “I trust Cade.”
Casey saw progress in how Cunningham was quicker to get off the ball when teams aggressively sent a second defender his way, as Oklahoma City and Memphis did last week.
“I would say last year it would have flustered him,” Casey said. “That’s the difference of a year of understanding what he’s supposed to be doing.”
Arguably the single biggest reason Pistons general manager Troy Weaver settled on Cunningham with the No. 1 pick in 2021 was his ability to knit together the abilities of teammates into a coherent offense. “A human connector,” Weaver called him at the time.
Injuries – to Alec Burks, Nerlens Noel, Hamidou Diallo, Isaiah Livers, Bojan Bogdanovic, Marvin Bagley III and Kevin Knox – compounded Cunningham’s challenge of figuring out a new mix of players in a condensed preseason. It won’t all come together in Wednesday’s season opener, perhaps, but Cunningham – buoyed by his rookie success and the way he responded to early adversity – goes into his second season confident in how it all plays out.
“At the end of the day, I’m a basketball player,” he said. “I can step on the court and play basketball, play my game. It’s the preseason and it was just about trying to figure out what our identity was going to be offensively and just as a team. Being the point guard, it’s kind of on my shoulders to move the ball and move the offense. But me being aggressive also opens up a lot of things for us. So I’ve got to be aggressive.”