So a couple days ago, I was lucky enough to write about the Cleveland Cavaliers and their surge back to the top of the league.
Yes, yes. Good for them. Whatever.
Something interesting popped out to me when I was looking at stats for their current win streak: the Pistons were right there next to them for this whole recent stretch.
In fact, the Detroit Pistons are 10-1 in their last 11 games. And they’re not just winning, they are winning handily. Since their 10-1 stretch began, the Pistons have a point differential of plus-15.8 per 100 possessions. That’s the differential of a near 72-win team. That is only behind Cleveland.
Also, in that stretch, the Pistons had the fifth-best offense in the league and the No. 1 tippy-top best defense. This is, for the most part, a fairly young team. Defense takes time to get used to in the NBA. Frankly, their being in first really shouldn’t be possible.
But it’s happening. I see the big bright “1” next to their name.
This stretch is, of course, quite cherry-picked. In that span, the Pistons only played three games against teams with a top-10 league-wide point differential (that is to say, the arguable ten best teams). Against those teams, the Pistons were 2-1 with a plus-2.5 differential. Compare that to Cleveland, who went 4-0 and had a point differential of plus-19.1. The Cavs actually had a better differential than usual when playing the top teams.
The Cavs and the Pistons are not in the same class.
However, you have to play the teams in front of you. The Pistons really super beat those teams. Enough to prove that they are no longer bottom dwellers of the East. And more.
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Let’s contextualize the Detroit Pistons some
The 2024-25 Pistons already have more wins than the prior two seasons combined. We just started March. That’s just silly.
The team is on pace for their best net rating since the 2007-08 season. I had only failed out of college once at that point. That team was the last run of the “Go to Work” Pistons, culminating in their final trip to the Eastern Conference Finals.
An entire generation and a half of players have come in and left the league in that period of time. The most to show for postseason success in this gap were getting swept out of the first round. Twice.
Sure, the net rating for the current season is just a plus-1.8 instead of the plus-8.5 from 17 years ago, but the Pistons have only had one team finish the season above .500 since that point. This is worth celebrating.
Speaking of, they’ve already surpassed my last most recent favorite Pistons team to become my new most recent favorite Pistons team. I love Andre Drummond, KCP, and Tobias Harris, but I love Cade Cunningham, Beef Stew, and Tobias Harris.
They are not looking at a particularly easy schedule the rest of the way, but they’re not super unlucky either. It’s mid, basically. The difficulty of their remaining schedule ranks at 16 in the league, per tankathon. They can really control their own destiny if they play to their current standard.
Somehow, despite having the sixth-best record in the league, they have the fourth-best record in their division? Central Division excellence. You love to see it.
All right, so what exactly happened here? How good are they?
Well … pretty good!
Signs of life began back when the year flipped to 2025. Coming out of 2024, the Pistons were 14-18 with the 10th-best record in the East. At the time, they were giving up three more points a game than they were scoring.
This is still better than the previous few seasons in that they weren’t in dead last starting Killian Hayes. I’m a Pistons fan. That type of performance would have been fine with me for the year. Fight for the play-in, show the young guys some meaningful games, and hope Cade Cunningham becomes an All-Star. The first true step in a rebuild.
From Jan. 1, 2025, on, it’s been much, much more than that. 30 games feel like a significant sample size in an NBA season. In the new year, the Pistons have gone 21-9 with a plus-7.0 differential. That ranks fifth in the league per Cleaning the Glass.
In this time, the Pistons have a 13th-ranked offense but, once again, the top-ranked defense. You’d love to be top ten in both, but if you’re running the league on one half of the floor, just being average on the other end is enough. This is the stuff of a nearly-58-win team.
Just for fun, let’s compare this to where they were for the first 30 games of 2024. The Pistons went 7-23, had a net rating of -7.0, and had the absolute worst defense in the league. A turnaround of 14 net points and going from last to first in defense is just … it’s wild.
They are also doing this without one of their most promising young players in Jaden Ivey. Ivey had been shooting a clear career-best in his third year at .409 before breaking his fibula on Jan. 1. He was also very fun.
I hesitate to say this stretch would be going much better with Ivey in the lineup, however. While having the best year of his career, the Pistons were still generally losing his minutes in most lineups. The biggest regret of his absence is less what he could have contributed and more about what he could have learned while playing two months of true, winning basketball. Ah well.
But enough about the past. What about the future? Can the Pistons do more than just make the playoffs? Once again, it’s worth checking their success against the best teams in the league. Since the number 2025 started showing up on calendars or whatever, they’ve gone 5-3 with a plus-1.4 net rating. Only seven teams in the league performed positively against the very best. The Pistons were one of them.
There’s also the fact that offenses tend to shift to more half-court sets in the playoffs. The Pistons, over this 30-game stretch, had the 14th best half-court offense. That is solid, especially for a younger team. On the other side of the ball, their half-court defense is, once again, on the top of the mountain. Like the average of Jalen Duren’s and Cade Cunningham’s jersey numbers.
I cannot overstate just how cool this is. This stretch is not only a massive departure from the Detroit Pistons norm over the last decade and a half, it actually seems solid. Sustainable.
There’s still plenty of time for bad things to happen, but for now, I think it’s best to appreciate this stretch. 21-9 is definitely preferable to last year’s 1-29.