NEW YORK — Cade Cunningham knew what everyone else was thinking after the Detroit Pistons’ long-awaited playoff opener Saturday night ended with a fourth-quarter collapse at Madison Square Garden.

Maybe they weren’t ready for this, after all.

But even before tipoff for Game 2 on Monday night, Cunningham’s head coach says he knew what his All-Star guard was thinking.

“He had his mind made up what he was going out to do tonight,” J.B. Bickerstaff said.

He did it, all right. They all did. And after watching his team do something no other Pistons squad had done in nearly a generation — Monday’s 100-94 win over the New York Knicks was the franchise’s first playoff win since 2008, ending the longest drought in NBA history — it was telling how Bickerstaff treated the milestone.

“We did what we're supposed to do,” Bickerstaff shrugged, “and that was it.”

And perhaps that’s the message Cunningham and the rest of the Pistons delivered here in the so-called Mecca of hoops, silencing another raucous crowd — and some of their own critics in the process.

“To win a game on the road, to get home-court (advantage), was what we came here for,” Bickerstaff said. “We approached it with a business-type mentality, and we learned from the fourth quarter the other night. But we just did what we're supposed to do.”

Now that they have, this first-round series is far from over. Because the Pistons felt like they were the better team for nearly 40 minutes in Saturday’s loss, and they largely controlled Game 2 from start to finish, with Cunningham leading the way.

After a frustrating playoff debut that saw the Knicks effectively mug the Pistons’ All-Star guard, taking the ball out of his hands with constant double teams, Cunningham was the assailant Monday night.

He scored 20 of his team-high 33 points in the first half, attacking the paint repeatedly, getting to the free-throw line consistently and setting a tone that left little doubt about Detroit’s intentions. The Pistons weren’t just going to wait around for their playoff breakthrough. They were going to jump the line if they had to.

That was in line with the adjustments Bickerstaff and his coaching staff wanted to make after Game 1, too. The coach had talked Sunday about Cunningham’s teammates needing to screen harder on the ball and move better away from it to help their best player be at his best.

“And I thought the guys did a great job of helping him create that space tonight,” Bickerstaff said. “So by the time their trap was going to arrive, it was going to be late, and then there was separation and room for him to attack.”

And once he did, well, “he was elite as he always is,” his coach added. “I mean, he is a superstar, and he played the game tonight as a superstar. He did what he needed to do to help this team win. He understood how aggressive he needed to be on the offensive end of the floor.”

Cade takes matters into his own hands

Monday night, that meant taking matters into his own hands early and often. Or as Cunningham put it, "Start with being aggressive and seeing how they wanted to guard it from there."

He scored eight straight points for the Pistons in a first-quarter stretch, then nine in a row in the second to keep the Knicks from grabbing any real momentum. Cunningham scored in a variety of ways: straight-line drives, pull-up jumpers, baseline fadeaways as his teammates ran interference on his primary defender, OG Anunoby.

And then came that sequence in the middle of third, when Cunningham spun through another would-be double team off a ball screen and dropped in a floater to push Detroit’s lead to double digits. Soon after, he pounced on a loose ball near midcourt and started his own break, using a behind-the-back dribble to matador the Knicks’ Mikal Bridges before finishing it with an emphatic dunk.

After he did, Cunningham pointed to the seats along the baseline where former Knicks star Carmelo Anthony was in the middle of an in-game interview on the local TV broadcast. Anthony paused what he was saying and grinned in reply, game recognizing game.

Cunningham, who also grabbed 12 rebounds Monday, didn’t even record his first assist of the night until there was 5:02 left in the third quarter. He finished with only three, the last coming on an alley-oop to Jalen Duren with 2:01 left in a tense fourth quarter.

But this game wasn’t all about Cunningham. Far from it, actually, as a couple of the Pistons’ veterans once again reminded the more-experienced Knicks they’d also been here and done this before.

Tobias Harris came up huge again (15 points, 13 rebounds) and more than held his own defensively against the Knicks’ 7-foot mismatch, Karl-Anthony Towns, limiting him to just 10 points and six rebounds. And while the floor-spacing tandem of Tim Hardaway Jr. and Malik Beasley combined to go just 1 for 14 from 3 on Monday, reserve guard Dennis Schröder more than made up for that.

After the Knicks had tied the game at 94-all on a Josh Hart dunk with 1:15 left, Schröder buried a back-breaking 3-pointer that proved to be the winner with 56 seconds to go. That was his third of the night from deep, and Schröder, a late acquisition by the Pistons at the trade deadline, finished with 20 points in 29 minutes off the bench.

“I mean, he's played in so many big games,” Bickerstaff said. “And when you go back and watch his history, he's clutch in big games. We talked about it early on when he got here, he's just fearless. There's no moment, there's no crowd, there's no noise that's too big or that's going to rattle him.”

Likewise, there isn’t much that seems to rattle this Pistons team anymore. Saturday night’s implosion certainly didn’t appear to have any lingering effects. And neither did the absence of defensive anchor Isaiah Stewart, who left late in Game 1 after aggravating a knee injury and wasn’t able to play Monday.

That put the onus on Duren to shake off his own rough debut over the weekend. But the 21-year-old center responded with 12 points, 13 rebounds and three blocks in 37 minutes, while seldom-used vet Paul Reed contributed as well, finishing a team-high plus-13 in 11 energetic minutes.

They all played with force and fury Monday, and it showed in the disparity at the foul line, where the Pistons ended with a 34-19 advantage in free-throw attempts. Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau was none too pleased about that after the game, giving the New York tabloids plenty of back-page fodder for the next 48 hours.

"I don’t give a crap how they call a game," Thibodeau groused, "as long as it’s consistent on both sides.”

But that's the beauty of playoff basketball, when both sides are fully engaged and equally enraged. (Just ask Ausar Thompson, who fouled out courtesy of at least a couple Jalen Brunson flops Monday.) And this is the emotional rollercoaster Pistons fans have been waiting for what felt like an eternity to ride.

It'd been 6,174 days since the last Pistons playoff win, in case you'd lost count. And even though they'd all worked overtime for this win — Harris logged 43 minutes, Cunningham played 42 and Duren 37 in Game 2 — fatigue was of little concern as the Pistons headed home with that streak finally put to rest and this series all square.

“It’s a great feeling, man,” Cunningham said. “It feels good representing the city like we did tonight. It’s something that the city’s been waiting on for a long time, so we feel good about it and we’re ready to get back to the crib. … It’s gonna be a lot of fun. I’m excited to see it.”

After all, seeing is believing, right?

____

©2025 www.detroitnews.com. Visit at detroitnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.