The Detroit Pistons have the top defensive rating in the Eastern Conference (109.0).
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DETROIT — It was hard to hear Mason over the din of the crowd celebrating another successful Pistons night at Little Caesar’s Arena Monday night as the team’s victory song — Gmac Cash’s “Pistons Won Again” — blared in the background. But Mason, Detroit’s legendary PA announcer, intoned solemnly into his microphone.
“There will be no burning of Laker jerseys outside of the building or in the parking lot. Take ’em back home,” he said.
There were more than a few fans of the visiting team wearing Forum Blue and Gold Monday. But the Pistons sent ’em home sad, breaking the Lakers’ nine-game win streak with a 113-110 win. It was the latest data point showing that this Detroit team, playing without its league MVP candidate, Cade Cunningham, and its heart-and-soul big man, Isaiah Stewart, is a fully-formed championship contender. Detroit has been the best team in the East all season and is closing in on the conference’s top seed with two-plus weeks left in the regular season.
That this has happened a little more than two years since the Pistons set a single-season NBA record with 28 straight losses en route to a 14-68 season with an entirely new front office and coaching staff, is … well, “amazing” would be a cliché.
How about a remarkably rapid reinvention?
The alliteration is fitting for a city that has had to make itself over, too, after losing a few hundred thousand more jobs from its primary financial driver (pun unintended) — the automative industry — in the last few years, while also juggling the bruising impact of tariffs, Chinese automaker inroads in the United States and other disruptors to the once-impregnable business. Detroit remains a work in progress, adding tech and other jobs throughout the region to try and stem the job losses from the Big Three. It’s far from out of the woods.
The city’s pro basketball team, though, reaches eagerly into the past.
It’s leaning into the defense-first ethos of the Pistons’ championship teams. Like the team which shocked the Lakers to win the 2004 title behind NBA Finals MVP Chauncey Billups, reached the seventh game of the ’05 finals against the Spurs and made six straight Eastern Conference finals, its backbone a wall of Wallaces — Ben and Rasheed. Along with small forward Tayshaun Prince, they made the seemingly impossible on defense happen with regularity.
(The team’s late, beloved longtime owner, Bill Davidson, had noted the 8-to-1 odds favoring the Lakers going into the ’04 finals, At his team’s victory parade 10 days later, Davidson said, “in the last two weeks, there’s been a lot of b——t going on in this country.”)
The fabled Bad Boys of the late ’80s, led by Hall of Famers Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars, were, of course, first with their take-no-prisoners defense, going up to the line of acceptable physicality — and then, often, obliterating it, scrapping and fighting their way to back-to-back titles in 1989 and 1990,beating Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the playoffs more than they were beaten by them.
The game is different today, and most of that kind of play has been legislated out of the game.
But this year’s Pistons can get down, too, if you want.
Under coach J.B. Bickerstaff, the Pistons have become a multi-effort defensive beast. They’re currently second in the league in defensive rating this season, and first in Dunks & Threes’ team defensive EPM. Two years ago, they were 26th in team defensive EPM.
They also lead the league in fouls per game, at 22.2.
Third-year center Jalen Duren, Cunningham, wing Ausar Thompson, Stewart and guard Marcus Sasser are all that remain from that chaotic ’23-’24 campaign, which led to the dismissals of both coach Monty Williams and GM Troy Weaver. Sasser is the only one of the playing quintet who’s turned 25. They’re the spine upon which this latest version of, as Mason puts it nightly, “Deeeeeeetroit Basketball” has been built.
Thompson leads the league in defensive EPM, while also at the top of the league in steals per 100 possessions. Monday, he picked up Luka Dončić, who’s been on an epic offensive heater of late, all over the floor, and helped turn off his water after Dončić scored 17 first-quarter points. Second-year wing Ron Holland II, in fewer than 17 minutes per game, is nonetheless in the 97th percentile league-wide in defensive EPM. Stewart is sixth in the league in blocks per game. All of them are irritants, in the best sense of that word. They annoy teams. They frustrate teams.
And now, they’re beating teams.
“I think it fits the Pistons’ culture, like the Pistons’ history,” Duren said. “Obviously, the Goin’ to Work team, and the Bad Boys early on, I think it just fits the mold. And I don’t think that was something, people probably think we were trying to copy that.
“But I’m going to go back to the character of the team. When you add those types of guys, who like to play that way, it’s just (not) a coincidence. And it all came together.”
Cunningham, the first pick in the 2021 draft, has become a killer, averaging 24.5 points, 9.9 assists and 5.6 rebounds. But Cunningham’s chances at MVP or All-NBA First Team are teetering after suffering a collapsed lung following a collision with Wizards guard Tre Johnson in Washington last week, which has Cunningham shelved indefinitely. The team hopes he’ll be back for the playoffs.
Moreover, the injury has left Cunningham stuck at 61 games played with nine games left to play. He would have to play at least 20 minutes in four of the team’s final games to qualify under the league’s 65-games played minimum criteria for its major postseason awards.
Whether or not Cunningham gets that hardware, or the bruising, fearless Stewart winds up as Sixth Man of the Year (that award is not subject to the 65-game minimum), the Pistons have managed to continue winning without them. Just as they kept coming in to practice while they were getting pantsed on the court, night after night, two years ago.
“We just stuck with it, came into work every day,” Duren said. “And we believed in ourselves. When the world didn’t believe in us, they were clowning us, they were saying we weren’t going to be good enough, it was going to take years, 10 years, we believed in what we had in this locker room, and the core that we were building.”
Weaver, now in New Orleans, drafted or traded for each of the remaining five core players noted above, amid withering criticism for other moves that didn’t work out as well. Rebuilding teams have misses along with their hits. But Weaver got the two biggest positions right — point guard and center. And the quintet as a group had a toughness that allowed the franchise’s new leadership, starting with president of basketball operations Trajan Langdon and the new coaching staff, to hit the ground running.
After getting the job in May of 2024, Langdon spoke with every one of the returning players, to see if they understood the level of care needed to get better.
“They were looking forward to the challenge, but they weren’t defeated,” Langdon says. “It was, ‘We want to turn this around,’ not ‘I want out.’”
Langdon also had to replace Williams, who’d been hired with great fanfare in the summer of 2023, at a ginormous cost — $78 million over six years. Owner Tom Gores took out a big ol’ fork and knife and ate the remaining $65 million the team owed Williams.
Langdon quickly hired Bickerstaff, who’d led the Cavs back from irrelevance to contention over four seasons, but was dismissed after Cleveland went out early for a second straight season in the playoffs in 2024. Still, the Cavaliers improved significantly defensively during his four full seasons as head coach.
To be sure, some of the jump was because of Cleveland drafting Evan Mobley third in the 2021 draft. But the Cavs still got better on D every season. They were good in three-big frontcourt lineups, with Lauri Markkanen at the three. Langdon saw similarities between the Cavs’ and Pistons’ organizations, and Bickerstaff had just turned Cleveland around.
Bickerstaff found commonality with the young core he was inheriting.
“For me, the attitude they had, in the first conversations with them, let me know what they were about,” Bickerstaff said last week. “Talking to them, and their awareness, and the confidence that they still had in themselves, even though they had gone through so many tough times.”
Even during the Pistons’ two-month long losing streak in 2023, while there were lots and lots of blowout losses, Detroit was also competitive in several games. The Pistons lost by two at Milwaukee; by eight at Cleveland; by four at home to Denver. They lost by six at New York and by six in overtime at Boston. Cunningham was in his third season, Duren in his second and Thompson was a rookie. Their budding talents didn’t match their experience.
“We knew we couldn’t make the playoffs early, so at that point, it’s like, ‘How are we going to build to become winners at one point?’” Thompson said. “Although we have a different coach now, as individuals, maybe we’d pick up full-court. Maybe we’d practice more serious.”
Bad teams have to start from scratch, especially on defense. You may start with something as simple as who the low man is on each defensive possession. There’s a humility necessary to begin building a step at a time. But, quickly — again — the Pistons have come to understand what Bickerstaff wants. Duren has grown exponentially on D, both in voice and deed.
“(Bickerstaff has) established a culture,” Duren said. “He established an expectation for how he wanted us to play, and what he wanted the team to look like. And we just tried to follow that to the best of our ability. We hadn’t known or seen too much winning, or didn’t even know how to win too many games in the NBA.
“So when he came in, as a proven coach, he kind of fit the characteristics of the guys in the locker room, first and foremost. And from there, it just kind of took off.”
Bickerstaff recalled road wins in Indiana and New York early last season as real signs of growth. Detroit wound up improving by 30 games last season, earning the sixth seed in the East. The Pistons then won twice in Madison Square Garden in their first-round series against the Knicks before succumbing in six hard games — played mostly without Stewart, who was dealing with knee inflammation.
They were learning.
“What we saw is our guys started to be able to get stops on command,” Bickerstaff said. “So if it’s a six-point game in our favor, our guys would get three stops in a row. And then we would score on two of those three (offensive possessions), and now it’s a 10-point game, or whatever it may be. And that’s where the separation comes.”
This season, Detroit’s received meaningful production so far from its depth pieces, even after losing free agent Malik Beasley, who finished second in Sixth Man of the Year voting last season, after shooting 42 percent on 3s. Beasley, though, was one of several players investigated for ties to sports gambling last offseason, though he has yet to be charged with any crime and, according to his attorney in August 2025, was not a target of a federal gambling investigation. But a reported three-year, $42 million deal on the table with Detroit last summer was never finalized.
The Pistons acquired Duncan Robinson from Miami to try and make up some of their 3-point losses, and doubled down further at the trade deadline in February by sending former first-rounder Jaden Ivey to the Bulls in a deal for veteran Kevin Huerter. Veteran forward Tobias Harris is in his second tour with the team. The Pistons picked up center Paul Reed off waivers in 2024, and he’s been a solid backup for Duren over 100 games.
Monday, second-year guard Daniss Jenkins, a former two-way player who’s decided to become Vinnie Johnson 2.0, continued his remarkable rise after going undrafted out of St. John’s in 2024.
Jenkins grinded through with Detroit’s G League team last season, making the league’s All-Rookie team. That earned him a shot with the Pistons’ summer league team in Vegas last July, and he hasn’t looked back, forcing his way into Bickerstaff’s rotation with clutch shots all season.
Monday, with Cunningham still out, Jenkins got on the ball and made his bones, en route to a career-high 30 points on 11-of-18 shooting, including 4-of-5 on 3s. With Duren dominating the middle as he has all season, the Pistons held off Dončić and LeBron James down the stretch for another quality win.
Most players come into the NBA with confidence, but it’s almost always based on what they did in high school or college. They’re often denuded when they get to the pros, humbled. Jenkins kept his armor even when he’s struggled shooting this season, trusting the work he’s put in.
“These guys believe they’re supposed to be here,” veteran Caris LeVert said. “I think that’s the most impressive part. They believe — we believe — we’re the best team in the league. We believe we’re the best team in the East. We believe we should be winning these games. That’s been the mentality all season.”
“Whoever we play, we feel like we should win the game. Sometimes that bites us in the ass, but most times, it’s good for us.”
The playoffs will show how far Detroit has come. The Celtics, with Jayson Tatum back, are again formidable. The Knicks brought Mike Brown in to coach to make them less predictable in the postseason. The Cavaliers went all-in by trading for James Harden. Philly looks like it’s finally getting its real team back together. The Hawks and Raptors have been feisty all season. And the Pistons haven’t passed any postseason tests yet.
So they will lean into leaning into their opponents. And swiping at them. And shoving them. And irritating them. And making it as difficult as possible to score.
“I think that’s just how the Pistons are gonna win,” Thompson said. “I think it’s defense first. That’s what makes the Pistons the Pistons. That’s what the team is built off of. And that’s how they got their three rings.”
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David Aldridge is a senior columnist for The Athletic. He has worked for nearly 30 years covering the NBA and other sports for Turner, ESPN, and the Washington Post. In 2016, he received the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and the Legacy Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. He lives in Washington, D.C. Follow David Aldridge on X @davidaldridgedc.