Cade Cunningham knows now. Now that he has been there. He knows because he’s seen and heard and felt the NBA playoffs up close.
They all do, these young Detroit Pistons. Still, this postseason – how far they’ll go, how this season is remembered –starts with him.
The choices he makes. The shots he takes. The way he navigates when it all hangs in the balance.
Fair or not, these are the rules, unwritten though they are. In basketball, the best player authors the story and carries the weight after it’s written.
So here Cunningham stands again, set to lead his top-seeded team into the playoffs, back after missing almost a month because of a collapsed lung, in search of the rhythm that brought him into the MVP conversation.
A year ago, the Pistons star was new to this, to the NBA playoffs, to the intensity and physicality, to the pressure. He learned about all of it in the tough six-game first-round loss to the New York Knicks. Mostly, he learned what he had to do in the offseason to change it.
Here he is again, with the chance to show not only what he has learned, but how he has changed, as the playoffs so often demand.
The Orlando Magic are coming to town. And while they aren’t the Knicks, they’re brawny and bruising – exactly the kind of test Cunningham tried to prepare for last summer.
Cunningham knew he had plenty to add after last season ended.
A tighter handle, better decision-making, more fluid jumper. But ask him what he needed to work on the most, though, and he’ll tell you: His body.
“Playoff basketball is about physicality,” he said Friday, April 17. “The intentionality behind everything, how much everything means. … Obviously, coming off a tough loss last year, (there was) a chip on our shoulder to get better − body-wise, skill set-wise.”
He needed more muscle and endurance, more strength. He learned – the hard way – that without those, skills didn’t mean as much, no matter how much he worked on them, too.
Not in the fourth quarter of a playoff game, anyway. Not when the game is tied, the seconds are waning, and it’s all about catching that final breath.
Lesson learned in a New York minute
Cunningham was in just such a place a year ago at Little Caesars Arena, the ball in his hands with 35 seconds to go, and the score knotted against the New York Knicks. A win would send the series back to Madison Square Garden for Game 7. A loss would end the season.
He was new to this then, to the intensity and pressure, to the physicality. And if he had to do it again, he’d almost certainly hurl himself into the thicket of bodies in the lane with more gusto and clarity.
As it was, after he’d called for Jalen Duren to come set a screen at the top of the key, he hesitated, then dribbled down the left side, a couple of Knicks in tow, before fading as he tossed up a tough lefty layup over length.
The ball caromed high and hard off the backboard, missing the rim entirely. The angle was brutal, but it didn’t have to be so difficult and wouldn’t have been if he’d launched his body into the defender and had taken a straighter line to the rim.
That takes muscle, though, along with stamina and will. That also takes experience, and while even the great ones miss that end-of-game shot in the postseason far more than they make it, the shot comes easier after a few whiffs.
So, again, now he knows.
Now he understands just how physical the playoffs are going to be. And why he had to add weight and strength.
Those additions, by the way, were clear as air the day this season began, how he better absorbed contact and finished through contact. How he muscled through ball screens. How he stayed on his spots.
More than anything, said his coach, J.B. Bickerstaff, Cunningham knew how good he could be by changing his body in the offseason, in addition to improving his skill.
“With his size, skill set and added strength,” he said.
Yeah, that’s tantalizing, and a testament to his improvement since his arrival. For the great ones – or the near-great ones determined to be great – this is where the story is told. But this isn’t where it begins.
That came last spring after the painful end in Game 6, then began again in the summer, when Cunningham, Bickerstaff said, asked himself this:
“’OK, what’s the next thing? What’s the mental edge? What’s the physical edge?’ I think all the great ones go into every summer with that mindset, and that’s what he chose.”
Now we get to see how those choices make a difference, and what he’ll do the next time the ball is in his hands with the season on the line, and he begins to attack the rim.
Because the choices he made after last year’s playoffs should help him take the better angle this time, and absorb the body blows and finish.
“I feel it all over the place,” Cunningham said, describing the advantage his added strength gives him on the floor. “I’m at a weight now that used to feel very heavy for me. But now I feel great.”
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Cade Cunningham and Pistons are ready for their NBA playoff moment
Reporting by Shawn Windsor, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
