Jalen Brunson, the thumping aorta of the New York Knicks, took the ball and went to work on Ausar Thompson. The score was tied. The clock was dying. The series was on the line. And the crowd was on its feet, roaring like the inside of a jet engine.
Dribble. Dribble. Brunson let the seconds tick off. Eighteen. Fifteen. Twelve. Thompson stayed with the shorter guard, glued to his body, dancing with his shadow. Dribble. Dribble. Down to 10 seconds now. …
Moments earlier, the two men had squared off this same way, and Thompson won the battle, denying Brunson even the hint of forward progress, a battering ram across a narrow bridge, poking the ball away for a shot clock violation.
But that was that possession. This was a bigger one. Dribble. Dribble. Eight seconds left. Brunson revved up, a plane starting down the runway, then gathered speed, darting to his left, Thompson matching him step for step. …
And then.
Brunson leaned into Thompson and changed direction so hard the floor was bleeding. His through-the-legs crossover left Ausar in another zip code. With the Pistons best defender trying to get his feet back under him, Brunson had nothing but open air between him and a 3-point dagger.
He let it fly, and it chewed the net on its way through. Brunson kissed three of his fingers.
And the 2025 playoffs kissed Detroit goodbye.
“Will that play stay with you for a while?” someone asked Thompson in the aftermath of the heartbreaking 116-113 loss in Game 6 that eliminated the Pistons from the postseason in the first round.
“Nah,” Thompson said, wistfully. “I’m probably not gonna watch it for a little bit.”
Understandable. If you don’t look, it won’t hurt so much.
But if doesn’t hurt, you won’t get better.
Eyes on the prize? Eyes on the demise.
Tough love needed
Look. This needs to be said, and it is said with kindness and appreciation. After the game, everyone from the coaches to the fans to the TV announcers were saluting the Pistons effort, their passion, their renewed spirit. J.B Bickerstaff choked up paying tribute to his players. His players gushed right back. Media lauded the new winning style that has energized this too-dormant basketball town.
“I could not be more proud of this group of guys …” Bickerstaff said. “They gave me a renewed sense of purpose in this profession.”
Malik Beasly added: “In my nine years in the NBA, I’ve never had this much fun coming to the gym.”
That’s great stuff. Special and rare. But let’s put on our big boy shorts and add what needs to be said right now.
This loss is not OK.
This Game 6 exit, this 4-2 series defeat, is many things. Admirable. Gutsy. Heroic. Reflecting a new maturity. But it’s not OK. It can’t be OK. It can’t be acceptable, or it will always be as far as this team gets.
You want to win, you gotta expect to win. The Pistons should know this, and the fans should know it, too. They remember how season-ending losses to Boston forged the Bad Boys the way fire forges a blade. There was no advancing until those demons were cut at the throat.
Same holds for this group. Losing to the Knicks in six brutally tough games – the last five of which decided by a total of 15 points – hurts Detroit terribly, but it should hurt. It should sting like ocean water on a leg wound.
Because a few plays here or there, a few moments of deeper concentration, smarter passing, tighter defense, and the Pistons win this thing, almost handily.
Heck, they had leads in the fourth quarter in three of their four losses, but blew Game 1 by allowing a 21-0 run, dropped Game 4 on a no-call on their final shot, and lost Game 6 by going without a basket for the final 2:35.
Eyes on the prize? Eyes on the demise. Sure, Brunson was off the charts in Game 6. He made body-bending moves you couldn’t replicate with a marionette. He found ways to hang in the air for soft floaters, or to spin like a dervish under the rim until a ray of light provided a lay-up. He got fatigued and had his share of misses, but when he was most needed, he was there and delivered. He scored eight of New York’s final 11 points.
Then again, he is 28, and has been through these fires. Cunningham, the Pistons answer to Brunson, is five years younger and a newcomer to the postseason.
“What’s the biggest thing you learned from your first playoffs?” Cunningham was asked after the game.
“Attention to detail,” he correctly answered. “How much each possession matters.”
The early ones matter a lot.
The late ones matter more.
Food for thought
So as spring turns to summer, and the Pistons don their off-season clothes, it’s not just Ausar Thompson who should let himself be haunted by Brunson’s final play, which shed him like a snake’s dead skin.
Beasley also should think about the pass that went off his hands in the final seconds that could have been a tying 3-pointer.
The whole team should think about the missed chances and missed block-outs that allowed the Knicks to end the game on an 11-1 run.
And Cunningham, the brilliant, sparking maestro on the rise, should be haunted by his two missed layup attempts and his turnover during that stretch. He should be haunted by going 0-for-8 on 3-pointers all night. Where was the superstar takeover?
Comes the crown, comes the weight. Dispassionate basketball fans – the ones who don’t care about revitalized ticket sales or that Ben Wallace and Isiah Thomas were in the stands – will look at the box score and note that on the biggest night, the Knicks’ superstar, Brunson, went for 40 points with the killer 3-pointer, while the Pistons’ superstar, Cunningham, went for 23 points on 9-for-22 shooting, missed his last two shots, and didn’t hit a trey all night.
That’s not being mean.
That’s being motivating.
“You feel this pain (of losing) and it fuels you over the summer,” Trajan Langdan, the team’s GM, said in the hallway outside the Pistons locker room.
The he added: “The pain is important.”
Cade should pull that pain in close. It will make him even better.
Which should scare the rest of the league.
It has to taste bad
Now, none of this diminishes what the Pistons did accomplish. Going from 14 wins to a bona fide playoff team in a single season is truly remarkable. Above that, these guys genuinely like each other. They love their coach. They play unselfish basketball. They represent the city well.
Even in a mere six games, they reignited a passion for hoops in Detroit that has been absent for too long. And they introduced themselves magnificently to those late to their success, with Cunningham’s gliding offense and Thompson’s lockdown defense and Beasley, Tim Hardaway, Jr. and Tobias Harris’ 3-point shooting and Jalen Duren’s developing big-man game.
We got to know them better and better each night through this series, like new houseguests who keep coming to the kitchen for another meal. Familiarity, in this case, breeds enthusiasm.
But they have to be bothered by this defeat. They have to hate the taste of it. They have to believe that fate got it wrong, it read the map sideways, that it was the Pistons, not the Knicks, who were supposed to move on.
You believe that, and you begin to manifest it.
“You don’t get playoff experience until you get playoff experience,” Bickersatff correctly said.
And Cunningham, before he left for the summer, added this:
“We proved to ourselves that what we have in the room works and can be very successful in the NBA. At the same time, we proved to the rest of the league that when they come play Detroit, it’s gonna be a dog fight. You’re gonna have to play all 48.
“If you get up early on, we’re gonna find a way back into the game and give ourselves a shot to win. … Our room has grown a ton.”
All true. The have grown up, Now they need to grow out. Out of the “great effort” and “proud of how far you’ve come” stage and into the “we don’t just want to win, we demand it!” stage
When that happens, Thompson somehow won’t go for that juke in that final moment. When that happens, Cunningham will hit those closing layups. When that happens, the Pistons will grab fourth-quarter leads they don’t even think about relinquishing.
And at that point, eyes on the demise will have served its purpose.
The prize will be all they see.
It’s coming. Sooner than we thought. That’s the good news of a bad news night.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow him @mitchalbom.
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