For those of us who have been following and covering the Detroit Pistons over recent years, this season seems like a dream.
I’m not going to lie, it was a slog to watch and cover this team the last six seasons, as we spent more time talking about the future than the present, looking at lottery odds and dreaming of a day we wouldn’t, a day that seemed years away at best.
The future is finally here and the Pistons are fighting for a playoff spot with Cade Cunningham having a season that will garner All-NBA consideration.
Just like the fans, the Pistons’ star was having the same doubts, which he revealed in a recent long-form interview with The Ringer, which you can read in its entirety here.
It was an interesting deep-dive into the mind of star who had started to question himself after all of the negativity that surrounded him and his team for the first three years of his career.
Cade Cunningham was never a bust
One part of the interview that really stuck out to me was that Cunningham was starting to hear the whispers that he was a “bust.”
That’s a word that gets used far too often in the NBA by fans who have no patience, who overreact to every moment and don’t look at the big picture.
Few players are superstars in their first years in the league, as they haven’t even stopped growing and I don’t think the average fan realizes how monumental the leap to the NBA really is.
This is especially true when you are a top pick, immediately called the franchise guy, yet land on a team that is usually terrible and not ready to compete for anything.
Imagine being told to, “save our franchise,” but not being given the tools to do it, all while trying to figure out the NBA game yourself.
Most players don’t start hitting their peak until at least age 25, as we’ve seen again and again in the NBA, so for Cunningham to be on the cusp of an All-NBA team at age 23 means he is still well ahead of schedule and the best is likely yet to come.
It’s wild that Cunningham was losing sleep over NBA trolls calling him a “bust,” when he was never anything close to that. It wasn’t fair, but that’s the nature of social media, which has no nuance and tends to reward the extremes of everything when it comes to engagement, a problem that is getting worse.
Cunningham has shown he was the right choice with the #1 pick and even the lunatics on Facebook have stopped with their nonsense (iykyk, a welcome reprieve).
If you want a four-letter word to describe Cade now, “star” comes to mind and it’s clear by the way he is playing that he knows it too.