DETROIT — On Saturday afternoon on a court about 650 miles south of Little Caesars Arena in downtown Detroit, a lanky 18-year-old power forward from Maine put up 42 points, six rebounds and seven assists in a win for Duke over visiting Notre Dame to set the freshman scoring record in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Some good basketball players have come out of the ACC, Michael Jordan being one.
It takes a lot for a player who has been projected to be the first player taken in the 2025 NBA Draft to exceed expectations, but obliterating freshman records at a storied program like Duke (New Orleans Pelicans star Zion Williamson had the previous top mark with 35 points) is one way for Cooper Flagg to do it.
Back in snowy Detroit where the Pistons and the Toronto Raptors — two teams at various stages of the rebuilding process — were playing on Saturday night, Flagg’s performance had been noted.
RJ Barrett, who had one of the best freshman seasons in Duke history (with a personal best of 33 points in two different games) before being taken No. 3 overall in the 2019 draft, simply nodded in acknowledgement at the freshman’s feat. The Raptors guard/forward had worked out with Flagg this past summer at Montverde Academy, their shared high school alma mater in Florida. “He’s solid,” he said. “He just does everything well.”
Detroit Pistons general manager Trajan Langdon, another Duke alum, laughed when I asked him it was his freshman scoring record Flagg had broken. “My best was 23,” he said.
An informal survey of Raptors coaches and staff in attendance revealed that they too had been paying attention. “He’s the kind of guy who could be difference maker right away,” one said.
For the Raptors, Flagg represents hope, and the possibility — presuming the lottery balls fall the right way in June — that a season with exponentially more losses than wins will deliver a grand prize in the end.
But a more realistic path to improvement is one represented by the Pistons, who have been to rebuilding hell and may only now emerging on the other side: several years of misery leading to some faint signs of hope.
They were on display Saturday night as Detroit outlasted the Raptors down the stretch to pocket a 123-114 win. The game was tight throughout, with 16 lead changes and 10 ties.
The difference came in the final five minutes when the Raptors went over four minutes without a field goal, surrendering a 12-3 run to the Pistons in the process. Going 4-of-11 from the free-throw line in the fourth and 18-of-27 for the game also didn’t help. Otherwise, there were plenty of encouraging signs — shooting 16-of-38 from three (42 per cent), committing just 12 turnovers, and getting 38 points on 14-of-18 shooting (7-of-8 from three) from the bench trio of rookie Jamal Shead (10 points, five assists, two steals) and veterans Chris Boucher (14 points, all in the first half) and Bruce Brown (14 points, three assists, two steals). But the Raptors still fell short, losing their fifth straight game and for the 16th time in 17 games to fall to 8-31 on the season.
The Pistons won for the ninth time in their last 11 starts and are now 20-19 for the season and in eighth place in the Eastern Conference, just a game-and-a-half out of fourth and having home court in the first round, as improbable as that seems.
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Remember, it was just over 12 months ago when the Raptors were in Detroit having kicked off their rebuild by trading OG Anunoby, Precious Achiuwa and Malachi Flynn to the New York Knicks for Immanuel Quickley and Barrett. The Raptors arrived in Detroit short-handed and became the team that ended the Pistons’ 28-game losing streak.
The message from Detroit now is that even when things are bad, they don’t necessarily stay bad. No one was predicting this this kind of progress for Detroit when the season started, let alone when they were 3-35 on this day a year ago.
“I mean, it’s always tough. It definitely gets worse before it gets better,” said Raptors veteran Kelly Olynyk, who was with Detroit in the 2021-22 season as the Pistons’ rebuild was beginning with no end in sight. “My year here we weren’t great, we had some injuries. I was hurt for a little bit, Jerami Grant was hurt. Cade (Cunningham) was hurt his rookie year, and it wasn’t going well, but we were competing, and then (after that) it was a disaster for them. It was one of those things where, like, ‘are they ever gonna win a game?’ is what it felt like from working on the outside looking in.
“And then now they’ve built it up and, guys have a little more experience, and they bring in a couple more vets who play with those younger guys,” added Olynyk. “And, you know, you start to build that culture back up, and that those habits up. I mean, it takes what is that, three years, four years before you’re able to really kind of put plan together and put something together on the floor, so … it’s not going to happen overnight. We got to be a little bit patient, but it’ll come together and start to break.”
The Pistons did it in part by adding a trio of working-class veterans to bolster their youngsters. They delivered in a big way against the Raptors as Tobias Harris, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Malik Beasley combined to score 77 points on 23-of-40 shooting, including 13-of-18 from three. Who knows if the three of them will be able to help the Pistons be any better than simply a playoff team, or even be around when they are, but they’ve had an undeniable impact on a franchise that had played at a 20-win pace for five seasons since last qualifying for the post-season. In that context, having 20 wins by mid-January is a mini miracle.
Longer term, the Pistons’ fortunes will depend on how far fourth-year guard Cunningham can take them and who can help him along the way. They got unlucky when Jaden Ivey fractured his leg last month. Ivey is their other talented young guard who had been having a breakout season — it was his buzzer-beater that took down the Raptors last time they were in Detroit.
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Cunningham is Detroit’s version of Scottie Barnes, though with even higher expectations given he went No. 1 in the 2021 draft, where Barnes went fourth. Cunningham is delivering, though. He put up 23 points and 17 assists against the Raptors, which overshadowed his eight turnovers. He also did a good job defending Barnes.
“The team they had last year, they had a lot of losses, but they fought really hard,” said Barnes who played high school basketball with Cunningham at Montverde. “You could see that they had something and then in the off-season, made some acquisitions, got some more people, got better, and they’re winning games and he’s leading that.
“But (Cunningham) has always had that talent. He’s always a person that wants to win really bad. But even before that he was playing good. But you know, all that, it gets overshadowed if you’re not winning basketball games,” said Barnes, who finished with 16 points, 11 rebounds and three assists, two steals and two blocked shots against Detroit.
“Now they’re winning basketball games, people are starting to see it more, that’s what he does. He’s a winner, and he plays really hard, and he’s able to do everything out there: pass, rebound and be able to try to score and dominating games at the end of the game.”
It’s a process, obviously. The Pistons drafted Cunningham first overall in 2021, and they’re only nudging their nose above .500 now. Where it goes from here is still uncertain. They’ve fired two coaches and a general manager. You could make the argument that without their injection of veteran role players, the Pistons wouldn’t be far ahead of where they were at this time a year ago.
But for now, there’s hope in Detroit and that’s a big improvement from what was in its place the past four or five seasons. The losing certainly made new head coach JB Bickerstaff’s job easier. He had a receptive audience.
“We all go through what we go through, and it puts us in the place where we need to be sometimes,” said Bickerstaff. “And I think that what they’ve been through here, the changes that have happened, they wanted something more and something different. And there has yet to be one thing that I’ve asked of them that they’ve said no to. And I think their past experiences have opened them to that. As time goes on, we build trust, earn each other’s respect, and then it just gets better and better from there.”
The Raptors can take note and maintain hope. And keep an eye on the lanky kid at Duke, who could change things in a hurry.
