A quarter remains of a season the Pistons won’t be commemorating with celebratory reunions 10, 20 or 30 years from now. But they’ve made it their mission to make this last quarter of a season that got sideways on them the springboard for seasons ahead worth memorializing.
They got it off to a heady start with Thursday’s 118-112 win over a Brooklyn Nets team desperate for wins to bolster a playoff run. Cade Cunningham and Jaden Ivey combined for 66 points, Jalen Duren and Isaiah Stewart led a mashing of Brooklyn’s frontcourt to the tune of a 50-29 rebounding advantage and Ausar Thompson got the better of one of the NBA’s top wings over the 43 minutes he matched eyeball to eyeball with Mikal Bridges, limiting him to 13 points and a single rebound grabbed in the final half-minute.
“You want to try to finish the season well,” Monty Williams said before the game. “I commend our guys, the way they come in every day – tough loss, on the road, at home – they just come in with that attitude. We’ve talked about running through the tape and they’ve all adopted that.”
Williams famously coached Phoenix to an 8-0 record in the Orlando bubble to close the pandemic-interrupted 2019-20 season when the Suns held a 26-38 record as the NBA hit the pause button in March. The following season ended with the Suns in the NBA Finals. He knows, more than any of his players could possibly grasp, how critical these last five-plus weeks of a season that’s thrown beanballs of adversity at the Pistons can be to lay a foundation for 2024-25 and beyond.
Through that lens, the final quarter of the season couldn’t have begun more encouragingly. One hundred points – a nice, round number – is what Williams’ starting lineup contributed, all five players 22 or younger. They’re the heart of Troy Weaver’s restoration, each a first-round pick from the four drafts Weaver has overseen.
The Pistons get to take some big swings this summer to augment their collective skills. They’ll get another premium draft pick and take more than $60 million in cap space, more than any of their peers, into a marketplace that is expected to see at least a handful of teams shedding desirable players to duck luxury taxes or prevent the roster-altering handcuffs as set by the new collective bargaining agreement.
And that’s going to be huge. The Pistons could add a half a rotation to the mix this summer to augment the core that includes those five young starters plus Marcus Sasser and the two prizes of trade-deadline dealing, Simone Fontecchio and Quentin Grimes. It’s conceivable they come to training camp next fall with a legitimate 20-point scorer to slot in next to Cunningham and Ivey and two or three other NBA veterans with gilded resumes to ratchet up the competition level across the board.
But the final quarter of the season is for those already here to put their best foot forward, individually but also collectively. Not only will that bring the off-season blueprint into sharp focus, it will give those essential building blocks something to put in the experience bank to draw on in all those critical moments when basketball games are won or lost – the moments that have been cruelly unkind to them, as they are to pretty much every team with primary ballhandlers as young as the Pistons take to battle. This is the chance to win games when games are there to be won, as Thursday’s was.
And that was the best part about the season’s final quarter’s open. The Nets led by five late in the third quarter after getting buried by 18 points early in the game. The Pistons, bedeviled by turnovers all season as young teams usually are, had averaged just 10 over their last three games but ruptured for 22 against Brooklyn. Yet in the cauldron of the fourth quarter, when it mattered, Cunningham and Ivey scored 13 points apiece and made a succession of big shots to keep Brooklyn from ever having a chance to tie or take the lead. When Cunningham rested to open the quarter, Ivey was brilliant; when Cunningham returned, they harmonized spectacularly.
“Coach talked about it a lot,” said Ivey, who broke out of a shooting slump to hit 6 of 9 3-pointers and make all eight of his free throws, four in the fourth quarter. “Having that stamina, late game when you’re tired, that preparation we do in practice, being able to maintain in those tough moments. Fourth quarter, you’ve got to push through when you’re tired and really lock into details.”
It's the toughest thing for young teams to master and no team in the NBA is younger than the Pistons in any meaningful way given the minutes they play and the roles they occupy. The Pistons have lost how many games this season because of a bad three-, four- or five-minute stretch unraveling otherwise solid work. Coaches see small plays amid those stretches that can turn momentum. Williams saw one in the third quarter, a Cunningham offensive rebound.
“Cade made play after play,” he said. “The play I loved was the offensive rebound, out of his area, in the third quarter. That was a momentum-changing play for us. Just a number of guys stepped up. A big win for us.”
Big in the moment, sure, because it gives the Pistons a chance to stack positive experiences atop one another to make the final quarter of the season the launching pad for their future. Big for their present, bigger for the possibilities it speaks to for their future.