Cade Cunningham stuffed the box score on Friday night, in a healthy bounce back from a mini-slump. The Detroit Pistons guard looked confident in his command of the offense and posted 20 points, eight assists, and five rebounds in Cleveland, roughly matching his season averages so far.
It was the kind of versatile performance that demonstrates why so many NBA observers believe in Cunningham’s breakout potential. In its annual “25 under 25” ranking this month, ESPN placed Cunningham sixth among all young NBA players—ahead of four players who have already been All-Stars (Zion Williamson, Darius Garland, LaMelo Ball, and Jaren Jackson Jr.) and plenty of others on that path (Tyrese Maxey, Evan Mobley, Chet Holmgren, Paolo Banchero, and more).
Cunningham has a prodigious pedigree as a no. 1 recruit and no. 1 pick. He produces regular highlights, full of tough finishes and stepback 3s and nifty dimes to teammates. He records stellar surface stats—21 points and seven assists per game this season—despite being just 22 years old with 90 career games and playing on a roster essentially devoid of offensive flair.
In fact, Cunningham is on track to become only the 13th player in NBA history to average at least 18 points, five rebounds, and five assists per game through his first three seasons. Most of the other players on this list are NBA royalty:
Players With 18-Plus Points, Five-Plus Rebounds, and Five-Plus Assists per Game Through Three Seasons
Talk to his coach and teammates, and they all join the chorus in praising the young guard’s preternatural talent. “He uses his body to get where he wants on the court,” fellow lottery pick Jaden Ivey said. “He can read the floor really well, get everybody involved, shoot the basketball. He’s got the whole package.”
But there’s a twist in this story, a snag in the standard hero’s journey from no. 1 pick to franchise savior. Despite all those factors in Cunningham’s favor, advanced stats loathe the guy. Here are Cunningham’s ranks among the 30 qualified players with the highest usage rates this season, across a range of important value and efficiency stats:
Cade Cunningham’s Ranks Among 30 Highest-Usage Players
Why do these metrics so thoroughly disparage the Pistons guard? That same performance against the Cavaliers on Friday can help explain the reason. En route to his 20 points, Cunningham took 21 shots. He didn’t attempt any free throws. And he committed four turnovers to extend his league lead in the negative statistical category.
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Detroit hasn’t won a playoff game since George W. Bush was president, and over the past half decade, it has 27 fewer wins than any other NBA team. Now that Cade has returned from the shin injury that cost him all but 12 games last season, the Pistons desperately need him to brighten into the star they expected when they won the 2021 lottery. They handed Cunningham the reins to the franchise right away; they even effectively unretired legendary coach Chuck Daly’s no. 2 jersey so that Cunningham could wear his favorite number. And he’s rewarded them with the most valuable of sports emotions—hope—while showing flashes of why he deserves that level of hype and renown.
But what to make of the advanced stats that doubt Cunningham’s promise? Are they picking up on something intractable in his game, or are they merely the expected results for a young player leading an overmatched roster? And what do those answers mean for Cunningham’s future and his team’s?
Cunningham’s most severe problem is that he’s much more of a volume scorer than an efficient one. He needs a lot of shots to get to his impressive point totals—30 points on 27 attempts, 30 more points on 27 more attempts, 26 points on 24 attempts. And Cade’s inefficiency has been the norm throughout his NBA career, rather than a small-sample aberration.
As the past decade of basketball evolution demonstrates, there are three ways to score efficiently in the NBA (layups, 3s, and free throws) versus one way to score inefficiently (via the midrange). But look at Cade’s shot chart this season—he’s decent from only the midrange and below average at the rim, from floater range, and beyond the arc.
“Inefficiency” might sound like an analytics buzzword, but it matters a great deal. Cunningham’s true shooting percentage means he’s scored 50 fewer points than expected this season given his volume, per Basketball-Reference, which is the second-worst figure leaguewide. For reference, Nikola Jokic has 41 more points than expected—meaning Cunningham has cost the Pistons more points with his shooting than Jokic has added to the Nuggets.
Or, put more simply: Cade ranks ninth among qualified players in shot attempts per game, but he’s 34th in points.
The problem starts at the hoop. In his career, Cunningham has converted just 53 percent of his shot attempts at the rim, according to an analysis of Synergy tracking data, which ranks 98th among 104 players with at least 500 attempts since he entered the league.
To better understand this issue, I watched tape of every shot Cunningham has attempted around the basket, and a few themes emerged. A lack of elite explosiveness means he rarely dunks in half-court possessions—even though he’s capable of throwing down a windmill in transition—which often leaves him taking contorted, contested layups against the league’s best rim protectors.
Cunningham deserves credit for not being afraid to challenge opposing bigs, but he gets stuffed a lot. Opponents have blocked 25 Cunningham shots this season, the most in the league.
Cunningham also struggles when forced to finish with his left hand. He’s already missed several key late-game layups this season when going to his left.
His 3-point stroke hasn’t been much better, despite the occasional hot streak. In its “25 under 25” ranking earlier this month, ESPN declared that Cunningham had “improved his shooting range and accuracy from behind the arc”—but that was more a sign not to trust 3-point percentages early in the season than a sign that Cunningham’s shot had improved. Cade made 44 percent of his 3s in his first five games (15 for 34), but he’s at 23 percent (12 for 52) since.
For his career, Cunningham is only a 31 percent 3-point shooter. That ranks 139th among 140 players with at least 500 attempts since he entered the league, ahead of only Russell Westbrook (30.6 percent). He’s subpar at both catch-and-shoot 3s and pull-ups, when guarded and wide open.
Cade Cunningham’s Career 3-Pointers
And finally, Cade doesn’t generate many free points at the line. Cunningham is an excellent free throw shooter, but he’s attempting only 3.6 per game this season (2.9 for his career), which is lower than the figure for almost every other high-usage scorer.
All of those deficiencies are surprises given Cunningham’s appearance and track record. He’s 6-foot-6, well-built, and strong—but he struggles to finish at the rim. His shooting form looks smooth, and he hit 40 percent of his 3s in college—but he can’t knock them down in the NBA. He’s a jumbo guard like Luka Doncic, who’s averaged 8.2 free throw attempts per game in his career—but Cade doesn’t get to the line even half that frequently.
That dissonance means Cunningham could improve with more seasoning, but he isn’t even showing glimpses of efficient scoring yet. Dating back to the start of last season, Cunningham has played 26 games, and he’s exceeded the league average for true shooting percentage in only one of them.
Even accounting for the difficulty of his shots, Cunningham misses at a higher rate than the average player. He fares worse in actual effective field goal percentage than in expected eFG%, per Second Spectrum, which tracks shot quality based on factors like location and defender distance.
Cade Cunningham’s Shot Quality and Accuracy
Compounding Cunningham’s scoring inefficiency is his proclivity for turnovers. He leads the NBA in both missed shots and turnovers this season, as he’s averaging 4.8 giveaways per game—a persistent concern, as Cunningham also suffered from elevated turnover rates in his first two NBA seasons and in college.
All those factors mean that Cunningham’s player value metrics aren’t just poor, but historically horrible for such a high-volume handler.
Stathead tracks 260 qualified players who posted a usage rate of at least 30 percent in a season before 2023-24. The worst player efficiency rating for any player on that list is 14.9, from Ben Gordon as a rookie and 37-year-old Kobe Bryant in his final shot-happy season. But Cunningham is at a ghastly 10.2 this season. He’s a tremendous outlier in the wrong direction.
First-year Pistons coach Monty Williams believes that Cunningham’s high usage rate—while partly the by-product of injuries around him—isn’t a concern weighing down the young guard. “Cade’s a guy that can handle that load,” he asserted before the Pistons’ recent loss in Chicago.
But compared to other players with his pedigree, the early results for Cade underwhelm. Cunningham’s career PER is just 12.7. Only seven other no. 1 picks in the lottery era have had a PER below 15 (the league average) after their second or third seasons. (We’re looking at both to give Cunningham some leeway for missing so much time due to injury.)
- Pervis Ellison
- Kenyon Martin
- Kwame Brown
- Andrea Bargnani
- Markelle Fultz
- Michael Olowokandi
- Anthony Bennett
For those who believe that Cunningham can still mature into a perennial All-NBA candidate, that’s not an encouraging list of comps.
The obvious rejoinder to all those unsightly stats is that Cunningham isn’t in the proper position to excel. Mired in an 11-game losing streak, the 2-12 Pistons have one of the least talented rosters in the NBA, especially on offense, which means opponents can concentrate their coverages against the still-inexperienced point guard.
It’s hard to know just how much to discount Cade’s poor metrics, given that context. For instance, the Pistons are using Cunningham as if he’s a pick-and-roll maestro, but the team is scoring just 0.84 points per play when he’s the pick-and-roll ball handler, according to Synergy. That figure ranks 42nd among 44 players with at least 100 plays. Is that because Cunningham isn’t skilled in the pick-and-roll or because of the lack of talent around him?
Or consider Cunningham’s terrible turnover total. Williams observes that many of them “happen in a crowd. And when he doesn’t try to play in the crowd or pass in the crowd, he typically finds the right guy.”
But Cunningham often finds himself stuck in a crowd because of the roster and rotation decisions around him. With Bojan Bogdanovic injured to start this season, Williams has started Cunningham alongside Killian Hayes, rookie Ausar Thompson, and two big men. Hayes is the NBA’s worst shooter since he entered the league, and Thompson, for all his defensive and rebounding strengths, has connected on just 14 percent of his 3-point tries.
Once the Pistons surround Cade with more threatening teammates and space the floor around him, the thinking goes, he will be able to better optimize his skill set. Williams has been reluctant to shake up his defensively oriented perimeter rotation so far this season, but he could pair Cade in the backcourt with Ivey or rookie Marcus Sasser, both of whom are much better scorers than Hayes. (Ivey started in another Pistons loss on Sunday, with Hayes out due to a shoulder injury.)
“I have to do a better job of allowing [Cunningham] to play in more space,” Williams said last week. “Think I gotta change up the combinations with him on the floor so the paint isn’t as crowded. I think that’s going to free him up to see a lot more clearly.”
Yet there’s no guarantee that more space will cure Cade’s ails. Teammate quality wasn’t so acute a problem before this season, for instance: In his abbreviated sophomore campaign, Cunningham was just as inefficient despite playing most often with Bogdanovic, Ivey, Saddiq Bey, and Isaiah Stewart, all of whom can make a jump shot; as a rookie, he played regularly with Jerami Grant. And just swapping in a better offensive wing for Hayes probably won’t be a panacea, as Cunningham has actually scored less efficiently when playing without him this season, per PBP Stats.
Cade Cunningham With and Without Killian Hayes
Moreover, the excuse of playing with below-average teammates should also apply to most high draft picks—that’s why their teams are in a position to draft them in the first place. Most highly drafted guards must create good looks even though they receive the brunt of the defense’s attention. And even in that context, Cunningham lags behind the expected learning curve for a top pick.
This graph, which was made on the DARKO app, shows the career trajectories of Cunningham and other guards who were recent top-three picks. The x-axis is player age, and the y-axis is the offensive component of the advanced stat daily plus-minus, which estimates how many points a given player improves his team’s offense, per 100 possessions. By this metric, Cunningham ranks as only an average offensive player, and he falls well behind his highly drafted peers at the same age.
And with regard to the Luka comparison—which has lingered since before Cunningham was drafted—well, by just his second season, Doncic was already a first-team All-NBA selection averaging 29 points, nine rebounds, and nine assists per game. One look at this comparison graph should put an end to any legitimate comparisons between the two jumbo guards.
That’s an issue of expectations more than anything: If falling short of Luka’s lofty standard was a damning indictment, then 99 percent of the league’s player pool would be in trouble. Cunningham should still be a good NBA player for a long time, as long as he finds the right role for his talents.
The question, though, is just what that role is and whether it’s already time—before he’s played even 100 games—to alter the perception of Cunningham’s realistic ceiling. The advanced stats suggest he just might not be the kind of player who can single-handedly elevate an entire offense and command a 30 percent usage rate.
Looking at Cunningham’s predraft profiles, there was something of a scouts vs. stats debate back then too, even if most draftniks believed Cunningham deserved to go no. 1. On the one hand, The Athletic’s Sam Vecenie said that Cunningham’s upside was “a top-five player in the league.” ESPN’s Mike Schmitz—now the Blazers’ assistant general manager—raved that Cunningham was one of the top no. 1 picks of the past decade and said he projected as “an All-Star in his first two or three years in the NBA” and “one of the young faces of the NBA for years to come.”
On the other hand, Kevin Pelton’s statistical projections for ESPN placed Cunningham “on the low end for recent no. 1 picks” because in college, he had more turnovers than assists and shot just 46 percent on 2-pointers. The Athletic’s John Hollinger—the creator of PER—worried that those concerns meant a Cunningham pick was “not the home run some make it out to be” and that he projected as “much more of a secondary creator … rather than the guy you play on the ball for 60 trips a game.”
Two-plus years later, Hollinger’s assessment looks more accurate. Despite spotty results thus far, Cunningham’s 3-point accuracy should improve; he has a career 84 percent mark from the free throw line, which suggests untapped shooting potential. When he’s not turning the ball over, Cunningham is already an advanced passer, with a particular knack for finding cutters from all angles.
Reduce his tremendous offensive burden, and Cunningham should develop into a strong playmaker and secondary scorer who’s big enough to avoid being hunted on the defensive end, like a hopefully healthier version of Lonzo Ball.
John Wall is a higher-end comp: another no. 1 pick who was never the most efficient scorer. (He was also much faster than Cunningham and generated many more free throws.) Wall had an enviable career: He made five All-Star teams, received one third-team All-NBA nod, and earned more than $275 million in career salary. Yet his teams also never won 50 games in a regular season or reached the conference finals, and he never profiled as the best player on a title contender.
The issue for the Pistons is that Cade isn’t supposed to be a secondary connector piece—he’s supposed to be the guy. He was their first no. 1 pick since Hall of Famer Bob Lanier back in 1970; it’s only natural that he should be the no. 1 option too. The Pistons won’t ever have a better chance to find their next franchise leader.
But the bar to become the top scorer and playmaker for a true contender is absurdly high. Look at our Top 100 Players in the NBA—there are maybe a dozen such stars scattered throughout the league. And since 1980, only one team has won the title without a recent first-team All-NBA honoree. (Granted, that team was the Pistons, in 2003-04.)
Can Cunningham ever vault that high up the NBA’s pecking order, given his inefficient, turnover-prone start? It’s possible. But if the Pistons ever construct a playoff-caliber offense, he seems less likely to occupy that big, starry no. 1 role. Rather than follow his draft number, Cunningham might have to settle for his jersey number and be a no. 2 option instead.
