Firing On All Cylinders: Cade Cunningham, the Detroit Pistons, and the 2026 Rise from 28 Straight Losses to the No. 1 Seed (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184947150)

In December of 2023, the Detroit Pistons lost their twenty-eighth game in a row, the longest single-season losing streak in the history of the NBA. In their own arena, the home crowd chanted at the owner to sell the team. The franchise finished 14 and 68, the worst record in its long history, and a generation of the city had grown up knowing the Pistons only as a punchline.

Two seasons later, the same franchise won sixty games and the number one seed in the Eastern Conference, and in the same building the same people chanted three letters at a twenty-four-year-old guard as if he were the best player alive. No team in the eighty-year history of the league had ever made that exact journey, from sixty losses in one winter to sixty wins two winters later.

This is the story of the climb between those two sounds. It is the story of a cornerstone who refused to leave, a front office that bet on patience while the rest of the league demanded stars, a coach who had been fired for a rebuild that worked, and a young core that clawed out of a three-games-to-one hole in the playoffs before colliding with the one weakness its identity could not hide.

Detroit did not rise by chasing the modern game. It rose by becoming, again, the thing it had always been when it was great: physical, defense-first, and together. This account is the story of the worst-to-first season that gave a basketball city back its team, and of how close the whole improbable thing came to never happening at all.

This is an independent, unauthorized work. It is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by the Detroit Pistons, the National Basketball Association, or any individual featured in it.