Cade Cunningham was supposed to be the answer in Game 7. Instead, he became the question. The Pistons’ franchise guard finished with 13 points on 5-of-16 shooting, missed all seven of his three-point attempts, and basically vanished in the second half of a 125-94 home blowout against Cleveland.
Pistons fans are not handling it well. They are not supposed to.
For most of the night, Cunningham looked tentative, hesitant, and uninterested in punishing a Cavaliers defense that kept loading up on him. He didn’t score from the field after early in the second half. The only point he scored in the closing stretch came on a single technical free throw with 5:51 left, and by then the game was already over.
This is the part where Detroit fans deserve to be angry. Cunningham is the highest paid player on the roster. He is the supposed face of the rebuild. He just signed his max extension. In Game 6 he poured in 21 points and helped force this Game 7 in the first place. Then he showed up in the biggest game of his career and disappeared.
Social media did what social media does. Pistons fans piled on him by the second quarter, and they did not stop. Many were already calling Detroit the worst No. 1 seed in NBA history before the final buzzer.
That last point is the painful one. The Pistons earned the top seed in the East fair and square this season. They beat good teams. They racked up wins. They had home-court advantage in every series and used it well enough to push Cleveland to Game 7. Then they coughed up the deciding game on their own floor by 31 points, with their franchise guard turning in one of the worst playoff performances of his career.
It is reasonable to expect more from Cunningham. He is 24 years old, he just earned his first All-Star nod, and he has had two full playoff series to figure out how teams want to defend him. Cleveland’s plan was simple. Trap him in the pick and roll. Force him to give the ball up. Make someone else beat them.
Cunningham never solved it. The Cavaliers turned Detroit’s offense into a series of dribble handoffs and contested mid-range jumpers. Cade did not punish them at the rim, he did not punish them from three, and he did not punish them with playmaking either.
What now? Detroit is going to spend the entire offseason answering questions about whether Cunningham can be a true number-one option on a contender. The fan base will be ruthless. Talk radio will eat. Stephen A. Smith already has the segment locked in.
Cade Cunningham can survive this if he wants to. Plenty of stars have ugly playoff exits and come back better. But the Pistons made him their guy. They paid him like their guy. He has to play like their guy in Game 7 next time. He didn’t this time, and Detroit fans are going to remember.
The good news is that this team is young. The bad news is that they are also wasting some prime development years if their best player keeps shrinking in the moment.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
