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Let it hurt. Let it sting like hairspray in their eyes. Let it haunt their sleep for weeks to come. Then maybe next time the Detroit Pistons get a Game 7 at home to advance to the Eastern Conference finals, they won’t play as if they’re chasing a bus that left without them.
In their worst defensive effort of the 2026 NBA playoffs, at the biggest moment of the entire season, the Pistons let the Cleveland Cavaliers whip them in the scoring game, the passing game, the rebounding game, the assists game and the coaching game. Cleveland did everything but pull the Pistons’ pants down.
Possession after possession, the Cavs fed their big men, who ate up the Pistons. Layups. Soft bankers. Lob passes. Endless free throws. Detroit was late to 3-pointers; the Cavs swished them. Detroit was late to 50-50 balls; the Cavs swiped them.
CARLOS MONARREZ: It's a hard truth, but this Pistons season was a disappointment
Cade Cunningham couldn’t hit a trey. Tobias Harris couldn’t hit a basket. Isaiah Stewart kept hitting the other team. The Cavs went ahead by 20 in the first half – and in the second half they really poured it on.
“We’ve got to find our competitive spirit right now!” coach J.B. Bickerstaff urged his team during a timeout midway through the third quarter of Game 7 on Sunday, May 17. “We’ve been this position before! And every time we find ourselves in this position, we find our way out of it!”
Not this time. Detroit fell into a rabbit hole, then a crater. And let’s be honest. If your coach has to implore you to find your “competitive spirit” in a Game 7, there’s something missing.
It’s called desperation. Cleveland had it. Detroit did not. The Cavs laid it on and laid it in. Their 20-point lead turned to 25, 30 and 35. A 35-point-lead? On Detroit’s court?
By the end, Cleveland fans, many of whom were bused in by team owner Dan Gilbert, were cheering louder than Pistons fans. But then, what did Detroit have to cheer about? There was not one bright spot on the night, unless you count the final buzzer, which mercifully ended this mess.
SHAWN WINDSOR: Pistons didn't show up for Game 7, and that's what stings the most
By that point, the arena was half empty, the season was over, and the Pistons looked shell-shocked.
Let it hurt.
“I’m not going to forget this,” Ausar Thompson said quietly, sitting by his locker after Detroit’s amazing season came down like a light rig crashing on stage during a Broadway finale. “We let them hit us first, which we don’t normally doy. … They came out on fire. They came out crashing and being physical. We don’t want to put ourselves in a position to match that. We want them to have to try and match it.”
He’s right. But the Cavs beat the Pistons to every square like a kid cheating at checkers. They won the rebound battle, the turnover battle, the assists battle, the steals battle. I hate to point this out, but if the Cavs had made their free throws, they would have won by 47 points.
Everyone knows the Pistons are better than what they displayed in this 125-94 beatdown. But you are what you do in sports, and this Game 7 magnified the known weaknesses of this Detroit roster, like the lack of scoring options besides Cunningham, and the serious problem with Jalen Duren’s consistency.
It also revealed something we hadn’t seen before. The defense, which the Pistons and their coaches talk about incessantly as their calling card, is apparently not automatic when the stakes are high; it still must be cranked up from the heart.
On Sunday night, it was too meek for the moment. There is no excuse for that. Defense isn’t a 3-pointer that rims in and out. It’s effort. And the effort was not there.
“That game,” Cunningham said afterwards, “sucked.”
Well, yeah.
Here, briefly, were some signature moments from this season-ending clunker, before the fourth quarter turned into a YMCA scrimmage:
How about Donovan Mitchell, left undefended in the final seconds of the first quarter, lining up a monster 3 and banking it home, then making a celebration that, sadly, he got to do over and over? Or Tobias Harris driving and missing, pulling up and missing, trying 3s and missing – 0-for-6 on the night?
Or Duren throwing a bounce pass to nobody, and watching helplessly as Allen took him to school. Or Thompson chucking up an airball, and getting called for a technical foul between periods!
Or Cade, with a meager 13 points in the so-far biggest game of his career, missing all seven of his 3-point shots? Or Stewart fouling one guy, then fouling another guy on the first guy’s free throws?
OK. I’ll stop before you throw up.
This was an ugly end to a great season. And, as I said, it should hurt, it must hurt, because if it doesn’t, no lessons will be learned, and there are many lessons to be gleaned from this.
Duncan Robinson, after the game, said it best. As the only Piston to have played in an NBA Finals, he answered the question of progression from making the playoffs to winning in the playoffs this way:
“There is a level of pain that comes with experiencing these types of losses that, I think, if channeled the right way, can be invaluable. I mean the team we played tonight is a pretty good example of that.
“The sense of urgency that [Cleveland] came in with – obviously when you look down that roster, [it] has been through some pain. They’d lost at this stage of the season in the past, and they played like it tonight.“
Exactly. While we in Detroit were busy predicting a Game 7 victory based on the Pistons’ homecourt advantage and love of defense, we overlooked that guys such as Mitchell, Allen, and Evan Mobley had reached this point many times before and were sick of it being their finish line. Remember, last season, the Cavs were just like the Pistons – a No. 1 seed with a killer record (64-18.) They got knocked out in the second round by Indiana.
“Even last year, when we lost …” Mitchell said Sunday night, “we had our goals set on getting to the Finals. And [now] we’re just one step closer.
“But yeah, it’s almost a decade of running into the same issue.”
Mitchell, the heartbeat of the Cavs, had never gone past the second round in eight consecutive tries with Utah and Cleveland. On Sunday night, he amassed 26 points, six rebounds and eight assists to make sure this wouldn’t be the ninth. Allen and Mobley added 23 and 21 points respectively. No one on Detroit even broke 18 points.
Bottom line? The Pistons were hoping to take the next step.
The Cavs insisted on it.
Let it sting.
Because if it hurts badly enough, they will do something about it. That goes for every player this offseason. And it goes for the front office.
Trajan Langdon, the Pistons’ president of basketball operations, rolled the dice at February's trade deadline, doing very little and wanting to see how far the obviously special chemistry of this team could take it.
The answer: very far in the regular season, only so far in the playoffs. Teams that you beat because they don’t go all out from October to March hunker down in April. And the points you count on from your stifling defense need to be made up for when, in the postseason, the other teams take better care of the ball and have better players to defend you.
Sure, Detroit has great chemistry. But the time for protecting that at all costs has passed. They have to tweak their roster. They simply can’t go into another postseason just praying that someone besides Cunningham puts up offensive numbers.
Decisions must be made about Duren, a restricted free agent, and Harris and Kevin Huerter, both unrestricted free agents. All three decisions will involve major money, and Langdon must decide if that’s where he wants to invest his dollars, now that he’s seen what the postseason demands.
The shadow of Game 7 hangs over Bickerstaff as well. It’s not a coincidence that the veteran coach has never been past the second round of the playoffs. He too may have to learn certain passkeys to the next level. That includes not taking criticism of his team personally. When a reporter asked him if he felt the season was a disappointment, given the way it ended, Bickerstaff's voice rose in tone:
“It’s not a disappointment at all,” he said. “Not ever will I be disappointed in these guys. These guys every single day gave us what they got. …. It’s a loss and it’s a tough loss, but that adjective will never be used on this group. …
“I don’t think we fell short of anything. I don’t like the direction of your question, I’ll be honest with you. These guys have improved massively and have done a great job.
“Anything other than positivity towards this group is unacceptable.”
Well, first of all, coaches and players don’t get to dictate what’s acceptable from the outside. People will think what they’re going to think. And many people, right or wrong, will think a No. 1 seed, 60-win season season that ended with a dud – the conference finals only 48 minutes away – is a disappointment.
But I get where Bickerstaff is coming from. He wants attention paid to growth, and there has been enormous growth, from Cunningham's development into a bona fide superstar, to a defense so suffocating even fans in the stands have a hard time breathing, to the startling rise of Daniss Jenkins and the gritty contributions of Paul Reed.
But the Pistons must learn that every playoff game should be ride-or-die, and it’s the ones you let slip away (like Games 3 and 5 in this series) that sink your chances more than the ones where you get trampled (like Game 7).
Yes, the Pistons have gone from 14 wins two years ago to the playoffs last year to the second round this year. And if you study NBA history, you see that this tiered approach to a championship is common. This year’s Eastern Conference finalists, the Cavs and Knicks, have been knocking on the door longer than Detroit.
But that doesn’t mean laying an egg at home in Game 7 isn’t a letdown. It not only is. It must be.
“I’m not forgetting it,” Thompson repeated. “That series felt personal.”
Seven straight games against the same opponent? A tough, annoying, oft-flopping (that’s you, James Harden) opponent that has superstar talent and deadly shooting “others”? One that lives just down the highway? Yes, it’s personal. The Cavs came into Little Caesars Arena on Sunday night and went home with all the pizza.
And as nice as it was for Detroiters to see Gilbert – Cavs owner but a lifelong Michigander – sitting in the tunnel greeting his players one by one and congratulating them, with a phalanx of Cleveland fans echoing their praise, that’s a scene that no Piston player should ever want to see again.
So let it hurt. Let it sting. Let it throb like a hangover headache every hour until they next pick up a basketball.
Because that’s the only way you ensure it doesn’t happen again.
And the only way anything good comes out of this.
Contact Mitch Albom: [email protected]. Check out the latest updates on his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow @mitchalbom on x.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Pistons pain in Game 7 loss is all that will make them better
Continue reading...
In their worst defensive effort of the 2026 NBA playoffs, at the biggest moment of the entire season, the Pistons let the Cleveland Cavaliers whip them in the scoring game, the passing game, the rebounding game, the assists game and the coaching game. Cleveland did everything but pull the Pistons’ pants down.
Possession after possession, the Cavs fed their big men, who ate up the Pistons. Layups. Soft bankers. Lob passes. Endless free throws. Detroit was late to 3-pointers; the Cavs swished them. Detroit was late to 50-50 balls; the Cavs swiped them.
CARLOS MONARREZ: It's a hard truth, but this Pistons season was a disappointment
Cade Cunningham couldn’t hit a trey. Tobias Harris couldn’t hit a basket. Isaiah Stewart kept hitting the other team. The Cavs went ahead by 20 in the first half – and in the second half they really poured it on.
“We’ve got to find our competitive spirit right now!” coach J.B. Bickerstaff urged his team during a timeout midway through the third quarter of Game 7 on Sunday, May 17. “We’ve been this position before! And every time we find ourselves in this position, we find our way out of it!”
Not this time. Detroit fell into a rabbit hole, then a crater. And let’s be honest. If your coach has to implore you to find your “competitive spirit” in a Game 7, there’s something missing.
It’s called desperation. Cleveland had it. Detroit did not. The Cavs laid it on and laid it in. Their 20-point lead turned to 25, 30 and 35. A 35-point-lead? On Detroit’s court?
By the end, Cleveland fans, many of whom were bused in by team owner Dan Gilbert, were cheering louder than Pistons fans. But then, what did Detroit have to cheer about? There was not one bright spot on the night, unless you count the final buzzer, which mercifully ended this mess.
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SHAWN WINDSOR: Pistons didn't show up for Game 7, and that's what stings the most
By that point, the arena was half empty, the season was over, and the Pistons looked shell-shocked.
Let it hurt.
Defense is effort, and that was missing in Game 7
“I’m not going to forget this,” Ausar Thompson said quietly, sitting by his locker after Detroit’s amazing season came down like a light rig crashing on stage during a Broadway finale. “We let them hit us first, which we don’t normally doy. … They came out on fire. They came out crashing and being physical. We don’t want to put ourselves in a position to match that. We want them to have to try and match it.”
He’s right. But the Cavs beat the Pistons to every square like a kid cheating at checkers. They won the rebound battle, the turnover battle, the assists battle, the steals battle. I hate to point this out, but if the Cavs had made their free throws, they would have won by 47 points.
Everyone knows the Pistons are better than what they displayed in this 125-94 beatdown. But you are what you do in sports, and this Game 7 magnified the known weaknesses of this Detroit roster, like the lack of scoring options besides Cunningham, and the serious problem with Jalen Duren’s consistency.
It also revealed something we hadn’t seen before. The defense, which the Pistons and their coaches talk about incessantly as their calling card, is apparently not automatic when the stakes are high; it still must be cranked up from the heart.
On Sunday night, it was too meek for the moment. There is no excuse for that. Defense isn’t a 3-pointer that rims in and out. It’s effort. And the effort was not there.
“That game,” Cunningham said afterwards, “sucked.”
Well, yeah.
An ugly end to a great season
You must be registered for see images attach
Here, briefly, were some signature moments from this season-ending clunker, before the fourth quarter turned into a YMCA scrimmage:
How about Donovan Mitchell, left undefended in the final seconds of the first quarter, lining up a monster 3 and banking it home, then making a celebration that, sadly, he got to do over and over? Or Tobias Harris driving and missing, pulling up and missing, trying 3s and missing – 0-for-6 on the night?
Or Duren throwing a bounce pass to nobody, and watching helplessly as Allen took him to school. Or Thompson chucking up an airball, and getting called for a technical foul between periods!
Or Cade, with a meager 13 points in the so-far biggest game of his career, missing all seven of his 3-point shots? Or Stewart fouling one guy, then fouling another guy on the first guy’s free throws?
OK. I’ll stop before you throw up.
This was an ugly end to a great season. And, as I said, it should hurt, it must hurt, because if it doesn’t, no lessons will be learned, and there are many lessons to be gleaned from this.
Duncan Robinson, after the game, said it best. As the only Piston to have played in an NBA Finals, he answered the question of progression from making the playoffs to winning in the playoffs this way:
“There is a level of pain that comes with experiencing these types of losses that, I think, if channeled the right way, can be invaluable. I mean the team we played tonight is a pretty good example of that.
“The sense of urgency that [Cleveland] came in with – obviously when you look down that roster, [it] has been through some pain. They’d lost at this stage of the season in the past, and they played like it tonight.“
Exactly. While we in Detroit were busy predicting a Game 7 victory based on the Pistons’ homecourt advantage and love of defense, we overlooked that guys such as Mitchell, Allen, and Evan Mobley had reached this point many times before and were sick of it being their finish line. Remember, last season, the Cavs were just like the Pistons – a No. 1 seed with a killer record (64-18.) They got knocked out in the second round by Indiana.
“Even last year, when we lost …” Mitchell said Sunday night, “we had our goals set on getting to the Finals. And [now] we’re just one step closer.
“But yeah, it’s almost a decade of running into the same issue.”
Mitchell, the heartbeat of the Cavs, had never gone past the second round in eight consecutive tries with Utah and Cleveland. On Sunday night, he amassed 26 points, six rebounds and eight assists to make sure this wouldn’t be the ninth. Allen and Mobley added 23 and 21 points respectively. No one on Detroit even broke 18 points.
Bottom line? The Pistons were hoping to take the next step.
The Cavs insisted on it.
Let it sting.
Chemistry isn't enough
You must be registered for see images attach
Because if it hurts badly enough, they will do something about it. That goes for every player this offseason. And it goes for the front office.
Trajan Langdon, the Pistons’ president of basketball operations, rolled the dice at February's trade deadline, doing very little and wanting to see how far the obviously special chemistry of this team could take it.
The answer: very far in the regular season, only so far in the playoffs. Teams that you beat because they don’t go all out from October to March hunker down in April. And the points you count on from your stifling defense need to be made up for when, in the postseason, the other teams take better care of the ball and have better players to defend you.
Sure, Detroit has great chemistry. But the time for protecting that at all costs has passed. They have to tweak their roster. They simply can’t go into another postseason just praying that someone besides Cunningham puts up offensive numbers.
Decisions must be made about Duren, a restricted free agent, and Harris and Kevin Huerter, both unrestricted free agents. All three decisions will involve major money, and Langdon must decide if that’s where he wants to invest his dollars, now that he’s seen what the postseason demands.
The shadow of Game 7 hangs over Bickerstaff as well. It’s not a coincidence that the veteran coach has never been past the second round of the playoffs. He too may have to learn certain passkeys to the next level. That includes not taking criticism of his team personally. When a reporter asked him if he felt the season was a disappointment, given the way it ended, Bickerstaff's voice rose in tone:
“It’s not a disappointment at all,” he said. “Not ever will I be disappointed in these guys. These guys every single day gave us what they got. …. It’s a loss and it’s a tough loss, but that adjective will never be used on this group. …
“I don’t think we fell short of anything. I don’t like the direction of your question, I’ll be honest with you. These guys have improved massively and have done a great job.
“Anything other than positivity towards this group is unacceptable.”
Well, first of all, coaches and players don’t get to dictate what’s acceptable from the outside. People will think what they’re going to think. And many people, right or wrong, will think a No. 1 seed, 60-win season season that ended with a dud – the conference finals only 48 minutes away – is a disappointment.
But I get where Bickerstaff is coming from. He wants attention paid to growth, and there has been enormous growth, from Cunningham's development into a bona fide superstar, to a defense so suffocating even fans in the stands have a hard time breathing, to the startling rise of Daniss Jenkins and the gritty contributions of Paul Reed.
But the Pistons must learn that every playoff game should be ride-or-die, and it’s the ones you let slip away (like Games 3 and 5 in this series) that sink your chances more than the ones where you get trampled (like Game 7).
Yes, the Pistons have gone from 14 wins two years ago to the playoffs last year to the second round this year. And if you study NBA history, you see that this tiered approach to a championship is common. This year’s Eastern Conference finalists, the Cavs and Knicks, have been knocking on the door longer than Detroit.
But that doesn’t mean laying an egg at home in Game 7 isn’t a letdown. It not only is. It must be.
“I’m not forgetting it,” Thompson repeated. “That series felt personal.”
Seven straight games against the same opponent? A tough, annoying, oft-flopping (that’s you, James Harden) opponent that has superstar talent and deadly shooting “others”? One that lives just down the highway? Yes, it’s personal. The Cavs came into Little Caesars Arena on Sunday night and went home with all the pizza.
And as nice as it was for Detroiters to see Gilbert – Cavs owner but a lifelong Michigander – sitting in the tunnel greeting his players one by one and congratulating them, with a phalanx of Cleveland fans echoing their praise, that’s a scene that no Piston player should ever want to see again.
So let it hurt. Let it sting. Let it throb like a hangover headache every hour until they next pick up a basketball.
Because that’s the only way you ensure it doesn’t happen again.
And the only way anything good comes out of this.
Contact Mitch Albom: [email protected]. Check out the latest updates on his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow @mitchalbom on x.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Pistons pain in Game 7 loss is all that will make them better
Continue reading...
