Luka Doncic spent his final game as a Dallas Maverick on the bench watching a coronation and a tribute act. Days after Cade Cunningham was named an all-star for the first time, Adam Silver came to Detroit to chat about the possibility of WNBA expansion, toast Cunningham, and join the besweatpantsed Laker-to-be in watching the newly minted all-star throw down a Doncic-esque 40-pointer.
Hitting that tally for the second time this month is impressive, but perhaps even more impressive was the decidedly ethical nature of Cunningham's big game. He needed just three free throws and as many three-pointers to get to 40. Anyone grousing about how every NBA team plays the same or complaining that old-school hoops is dead just needs to watch the way Cunningham operates.
Nominally a point guard, Cunningham capably performs all the shot creation and passing duties required of one, yet the language of positionality is totally unsuited to describing the way he actually plays. His game is burly, slow. He can burn defenders off the dribble—in the Mavericks game, he terrestrialized Daniel Gafford—but what really makes Cunningham special, and what has made the formerly moribund Pistons both feisty and cool, is his back-to-the-basket game.
The ideal Pistons halfcourt possession starts with Cunningham creating an advantage. Like the most skilled ball-handlers, he doesn't necessarily need a screen to get space; like the most physically punishing ball-handlers, he doesn't necessarily need space to have an advantage; and like the best passers, he needs only a minor advantage to lathe out an easy bucket for himself or a teammate. Doncic is perhaps the only other player in the league who ticks all three of those boxes, and like Doncic, Cunningham excels at bullying defenders.
The rise of help defense and five-out spacing have made the traditional post-up a craft in decline. Within today's prevailing constraints, punishing a guard 25 feet from the hoop while shooters and cutters stand ready to finish the possession is a far more effective application of the post-up's principles than spending eight seconds bashing against an entrenched big man while helpers swipe down on the ball. It takes rare vision and strength to be able consistently do so, and Cunningham sure can punish. Take the following possession, a well-defended drive from the top of the key conducted at one mile per hour that Cunningham turned into a shot at the rim because he was able to simply beat the shit out of Jaden Hardy.
Cunningham played as a big man until his junior year of high school, and it shows. Not only does he know how to establish and consolidate court-position, he has a super slick, ambidextrous jump-hook game, the ability to finish at the rim through and around bigs, and a sense for when to get vertical. Most NBA guards, especially of Cunningham's caliber (not that there are a ton of these), grow up with the ball in their hands at every level, then hit the pros and have to adjust to both more time off the ball and opponents who can match their physicality. Cade's process is almost the opposite, which perhaps is why he seems so comfortable. He learned how to do all the most demanding stuff after he'd already gotten good at everything else.
Doncic is the only player who plays like this, and while he's a better shooter and passer than Cunningham, the stylistic comparison holds. Both guys employ slow, relatively bruising styles. The Mavericks and Pistons are 28th and 29th respectively in passes per game; both prefer to get their half-court buckets less through team-wide motion than via their star creating one-on-one. Like Doncic, Cunningham doesn't really have a weakness, now that he's comfortable pulling the three-pointer when defenders duck screens. So much of what both Doncic and Cunningham do is suited to the hypermodern NBA, and their ersatz approximations of point guard duties are useful cases through which to consider the largely positionless NBA. At the same time, their games are also both pleasantly old-school, in the sense that they have Moves.
This is rarely stated explicitly by the basketball revanchist set, but the thing that made Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson et al. cool was that they had Moves. A feature of democratized five-out basketball is that it makes narrower demands of its participants: An offense can score without a guy Doing Moves—without, in the ideal case, anybody even needing to have Moves at all. Which is not to say that Moves no longer matter, merely that lowering the degree of difficulty through spacing and ball-distribution makes for cleaner, more reliable offense. Moves do still matter, though, and Cade has them; this little fake spin on Toumani Camara was particularly nasty.
The question, naturally, concerns how much any of this matters. One year after Detroit lost an NBA record-tying 28 straight games, the Pistons are 25-24, guaranteed to win more games this season than in any since Dwane Casey's debut campaign in 2018–19. They're in a three-way rock-fight for the sixth spot in the East, and seem certain to make the play-in. You can pick out three very clear areas of improvement: Former coach Monty Williams, who was ass, is gone, replaced by J.B. Bickerstaff; they play defense now and (relatedly) no longer give minutes to bozos like Killian Hayes and James Wiseman; and Cade finally has some adult teammates, with Malik Beasley and Tim Hardaway Jr. on the roster to hit the open threes that Cunningham manufactures.
But none of those things matter if Cunningham isn't playing like this. Now that Jaden Ivey is out for the season with a broken fibula, Cunningham is the only capable shot creator on the whole roster. As nice as it is to have veterans on the Pistons, they're only thriving in the light of their star.
