The Detroit Pistons won Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series Tuesday night against the Cleveland Cavaliers, 111–101. The home team took control in the first quarter, smashing and bashing their way into the paint and forcing the involvement of the game's referees. The Pistons responded to a lot of fun and zippy off-ball stuff from the Cavaliers by running fast and having large shoulders, and it worked: Detroit took 12 free throws in the first quarter to Cleveland's two; that plus Cleveland's cold shooting on a scavenger's diet of looks put the road team into a 16-point hole, and the rest of the game featured the higher seed big-brothering the lower, most of the way to the finish line.
The video that you will encounter further down the page comes by way of ESPN, and it describes "a BATTLE" (complete with crossing swords) between Detroit's Cade Cunningham and Cleveland's James Harden. It's a fool who looks for restraint and reliability in YouTube headlines, but this was in no way a battle. Cunningham was terrific. He has that quality of seeming to always make the right play, so that even when his shots aren't falling—he missed six of his seven two-point attempts in the first half—good things are always happening around him. Importantly, his game and his shoulders have both matured to the point that the right play, for him, is virtually never to meekly pitch the ball to a teammate and then to go hide in a corner someplace. He can be directly involved in the action every time up the floor, as a shooter or passer or screener. In the second half, when the Cavaliers made a sudden run, Cunningham grabbed control of the game with assists on three straight Detroit possessions, all of them leading to dunks; he then whipped around and screened for a teammate for a clean rhythm jumper; he then drove directly into Donovan Mitchell, shoved him down into the paint, and rose up over him for a bucket of his own.
Harden had his moments. He also kicked the ball around the gym quite a lot and missed six of his seven three-point attempts, and did a lot of that thing where his brain seems to blow a fuse if he beats his primary defender and defensive help does not immediately rush out at him, surrendering a bunch of passing lanes. And history has taught jaded hoops fans that when Harden's shot is off and he's flailing around in the midrange, it's a lot harder to accept the other parts of the Harden package.
In the first half, after a missed shot was rebounded by Detroit, Harden lunged and whipped his cape theatrically, putting himself behind the play, pretty obviously so that he could avoid having to run with Detroit's Ausar Thompson, whose dazzling athleticism makes Harden look approximately 90 years old. Later, and for similar reasons, he exaggeratedly bailed on a defensive switch that would've had him guarding Jalen Duren in the paint. In the second half, he simply declined to participate in a Cleveland possession where they otherwise would've had a numerical advantage in semi-transition. In the fourth quarter, with the shot clock running low and Detroit trying to salvage a possession, a flat-footed Harden was roasted on a crossover by, of all people, Tobias Harris.
Cunningham's whole deal as a primary playmaker has a way of making Harden and Mitchell look small and silly by comparison. He can do all of the same isolation stuff to create threes and driving angles, but he's much bigger and stronger than Mitchell and much quicker and more comfortable in floater range than Harden, and has an even easier time working the dark arts for whistles. A really striking number of times in this game, the Cavs would spend the first half of a possession hunting down Duncan Robinson, but would then lose the second half of the possession to Mitchell stringing together loose and repetitive dribble moves without really getting anywhere. Then the Pistons would get possession—too often from a Cleveland turnover—and Cunningham would swing the ball, flow into a handoff, square up his shoulders to the cup, and immediately convert that into an advantage, pulling in helpers and yanking the defense out of shape. These sequences were not flattering to Cleveland's stars; it got to the point where a deeply dreaded Dennis Schröder started to seem like a better option for the visitors, for his simple straight-line attacking.
Some part of that pretty glaring difference in ease of movement comes down to defensive personnel. The Cavaliers do not have a Thompson-level perimeter defender, or anything even close, and so the Pistons did not devote time, movement, and energy to escaping any particular matchup. Also, it's hard not to notice how much more vulnerable Cleveland's secondary ball-handlers are against playoff-caliber point-of-attack defense. Sam Merrill, Max Strus, and Keon Ellis are fine pros, but especially in the first half it was a RED ALERT type of situation whenever those guys had to dribble the ball at all in anything but a transition scenario. The Cavaliers really do perform a lot of very slick and cool screening and cutting stuff, but it takes on a sort of ragged, frenzied desperation when they simply cannot trust three-fifths of their guys on the court to do anything with the ball other than shoot it. The Pistons seemed to pounce on this vulnerability, and through three quarters pressured the Cavs into 16 turnovers, from which they converted 27 points.
While I am not optimistic that Cunningham vs. Harden will ever become a BATTLE, I do have some hope that the Cavaliers will strike back, or at least have the juice to make it a competitive series. For one thing, they tied up the regular-season series at two games apiece, and each of the final three games was decided by four or fewer points. For another, Detroit benefited by two quarter-ending buzzer-beaters Tuesday; neither felt like a decisive bucket in the moment, but those six points mattered quite a lot when Cleveland seemed to grab the momentum in the fourth quarter.
Importantly—and this is an eye-test kind of thing, so feel free to tell me to GO to HELL—Cleveland's two main tall guys, Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley, seemed uncharacteristically frazzled and butter-fingery in the first half, and Allen suffered from a couple of soft bailout-type whistles that forced him to the pine early and limited him to just 18 minutes of action. He's generally a careful defender, and the Cavs have been a whopping 23 points better by net rating in these playoffs when he is on the court. Cleveland had to play smaller than they'd like Tuesday, and they had to give 10 minutes to Thomas Bryant. If Detroit can't play Allen off the court again in Game 2, the short-roll stuff that is the delightful chugging heart of Cleveland's offense has all of its parts in place, and the Pistons will have fewer of those opportunities to overwhelm some wide-eyed secondary doofus handling a live grenade after Mitchell's latest improv routine fails to un-ass a playoff defense.
Each of these teams faced brushes with fraudulence in the first round. The Pistons needed seven games to dump an Orlando squad that couldn't fucking wait to fire its own head coach, and Cleveland needed seven games to advance past a Raptors team that I will have forgotten, entirely, down to the very fact of the franchise's existence, before lunchtime today. Whoever advances, these two teams can do plenty for the dignity of the Eastern Conference by continuing to bring out the best in one another. Game 1 was a good start.
