The list of great Pistons players to experience far more agony than exhilaration in Salt Lake City includes Hall of Famers Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Dennis Rodman, Grant Hill and Ben Wallace. Cade Cunningham’s maiden voyage into the place that’s bedeviled more Pistons over history than any other NBA haunt puts him in exceptionally good company.
Cunningham gave Jazz fans an eyeful to confirm why the Pistons made him the No. 1 pick in last summer’s draft. His final numbers are impressive enough on their own: 25 points, six rebounds, five assists, two steals and three blocked shots.
But with something other than buzzard’s luck, they might have been spectacular. He created some terrific shots for himself in the second half but didn’t get any kind bounces and created enough equally desirable shots for teammates that the assists total could easily have been doubled. He also played a career-high 41 minutes and committed just two turnovers despite Utah clearly prioritizing making Cunningham get off the ball with traps and blitzes.
“I thought he did well,” Dwane Casey said after Utah held off the Pistons down the stretch for a 111-101 win. “There was a stretch when Cory (Joseph) was out of the game he struggled a little bit – tried to do just a little too much. But he had a heck of a night early.”
Cunningham scored 17 points in the first half and Casey wants to take a little off the rookie’s plate, but it’s tough to do with Jerami Grant out for more than a month to share the scoring burden and Killian Hayes missing his second straight game to take away someone to share the playmaking onus.
“I’ve got to do a better job of getting him off the ball,” Casey said. “Find another ballhandler. When we get Kelly (Olynyk) back, get his time up as a point five, allowing Cade to play off the ball a little more and that’ll take the pressure off Cade, because to bring the ball down the floor, create his own shot, that’s too much.”
For as impressive as Cunningham has been in establishing himself as the fulcrum of the Pistons offense so emphatically as a rookie, he’s equally adept at insightful self-evaluation. He has the gift, common to great leaders, of shouldering an outsized share of blame while distributing credit generously for team successes. Asked about his impact on defense with the three blocks and two steals, Cunningham pointed out his failures.
“I made a couple of good plays in passing lanes and off the ball defensively,” he began, before shifting to “there were too many times I got driven, catch and goes. I’m trying to rotate back and just beating me. Still got to get better on that end. The rest of the team was competing defensively. I was trying to make plays to help.”
Cunningham destroyed Utah in a win at Little Caesars Arena earlier this month, scoring a season-high 29 points with eight assists to lead the Pistons back from a 22-point deficit. The Jazz didn’t have defensive ace Rudy Gobert in that game, though.
“He’s an elite rim protector,” Cunningham said. “We knew that going in, but we’ve just got to stay aggressive and not switch up too much. If we get outside of ourselves trying to accommodate them, then we’re not playing our game.”
The Pistons got 16 points from Trey Lyles and 15 from Rodney McGruder – who’s totaled 49 on the first three games of the road trip and hit 5 of 7 triples at Utah – off the bench and 13 from Saddiq Bey. Bey had a wide-open corner three with a little more than a minute to play that would have pulled the Pistons within a point.
“Saddiq had a great look. Kelly had a heck of a pass out to the corner,” Casey said. “We get what we want offensively. We shot 42 percent from three and we like that. It’s just the foul differential was a huge difference.”
To be sure, the 24 fouls the Pistons committed to put Utah at the line for 34 free throws, leading to a 29-12 disparity in points at the line, continues a recent spike of fouls committed by the Pistons.
“Coach said in the locker room, we’re reaching too much, fouling too much,” Cunningham said. “We bail out guys reaching. We’re putting guys on the line too much. We can complain all we want about officiating, but we’re fouling. At the end of the day, we’ve got to make an adjustment and try to get better at that.”
“You can’t put a team on the line double what you’re attempting,” Casey said. “A lot of them were cheap fouls, reaching fouls. We were reaching the entire night and got ourselves in foul trouble.”
It was a far better showing than the Pistons have had many nights over the last half-century in Salt Lake City, but it ended the way the overwhelming majority of those games did. At least Cunningham, 20, figures to have a lot more shots at challenging history.
“He had a heck of a night going, creating his own shots off of nothing early,” Casey said. “But as the game went on, they turned up the pressure, it becomes tougher. You drive in, now there’s Gobert standing there. He kept us going there early in the game.”