Cade Cunningham couldn’t sleep. No matter how much he’d try to relax and unwind after games, he’d toss and turn in his bed into the early morning.
2 a.m. …
3 a.m. …
“Mind racing,” Cunningham says.
It was midway through the 2023-24 season, and the third-year point guard was enduring the worst season of his professional career. The Detroit Pistons dropped game after game. Eventually, they tied the NBA’s all-time losing streak at 28 straight. The losses were more than demoralizing—they were humiliating.
And on many of these nights, when he would return home from the arena and climb into bed, he couldn’t let go of the game he had just played, recalling it in painstaking detail. He’d dwell on what he could have done better, picking apart his mistakes. He would later learn that many NBA players struggle to sleep after night games. But during these nights, Cunningham was in the midst of a particularly bad spell of sleeplessness.
As the no. 1 pick in the 2021 draft, Cunningham was supposed to lead Detroit back to its glory days, like the ’80s Bad Boys that ruled the East, or the 2003-04 squad that dethroned the Lakers. During last season’s epic losing streak, Cunningham had the ball in his hands for most of each of those games; he shouldered much of the blame. And he felt a palpable gloominess each time he walked into the Pistons practice facility on those dreary winter days. “It was such a dark cloud over the whole building,” he says. “It was sad in here. Everybody was feeling it.”
It wasn’t how anyone envisioned Cunningham’s career unfolding. The Pistons lost a lot of games in his rookie season, finishing second to last in the East, and he sat out most of his second season after undergoing surgery for a left shin injury, missing out on a chance to develop into the star he wanted to be. Then came the losing streak in year three.
Losing 28 straight games was gutting, and he was worried about his future in Detroit. And on these sleepless nights, he’d pick up his phone, open Twitter, and begin scrolling. “I see all this stuff about me,” he says.
Cade can’t lead an NBA team.
Cade’s a bust.
That four-letter word—bust—cut especially deep. Negative thoughts swirled. He began to question himself, his confidence. Am I trippin’? he’d think.
“I kind of allowed the ‘bust’ and like, ‘Oh he’s whatever,’ to be like, ‘I really am playing bad right now,’ or, ‘I really might not be who I thought,’” he says.
4 a.m. …
5 a.m. …
Sometimes he’d still be awake, restless, at 6 a.m., with morning practice just a few hours away. “Running on fumes a lot,” Cunningham says.
The burden of losing and the stress of not living up to expectations weighed on him. Point guards arguably have the toughest job in the NBA. But being a point guard charged with leading a historic franchise back into contention, and feeling like a disappointment to the city that had welcomed him? On some nights, it was almost too much to bear.
Especially since he had been such an electrifying player in college. He’d take over in the second half of games for Oklahoma State, seemingly scoring at will, a consensus first-team All-American. And even before that, he had been the nation’s top recruit, taking home the 2020 Naismith High School Boys Player of the Year trophy while playing for Montverde Academy in Florida.
“In the basketball world, it just seemed like it was smooth sailing for him from 5 years old all the way to … he’s the no. 1 pick,” says Cannen Cunningham, his older brother. “And it just seemed like a little bit too picture-perfect.”
He’s already endured more in the NBA than he ever could have imagined. And during the record-tying losing streak in year three, Cade wrestled with doubts that had been haunting him since he arrived in Detroit. He battled more internal obstacles than he’s previously shared. “I don’t really talk about this stuff,” he says, sitting on the sideline of Detroit’s practice facility on an afternoon in mid-February.
He’d rather let his play speak for itself. And it has spoken volumes this season: Cunningham has at last blossomed into a bona fide star and is Detroit’s indisputable leader. He was selected as an All-Star reserve for the first time, and is averaging 25.7 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 9.5 assists while shooting 45.9 percent from the field and 36.3 percent from 3-point range in 54 games. His 9.5 assists per game ranks third in the NBA and is the best mark by a Piston since Isiah Thomas in 1986-87.
On Wednesday night, he dropped 21 points with 11 assists in Detroit’s 117-97 win over the Boston Celtics. It was the Pistons’ eighth consecutive win—and the first time Detroit has had a winning streak that long since 2008.
On the court, Cunningham looks calm. Confident. Poised. He often surveys the court with control, lulling his defender to sleep for a beat, then zooming by in a blink to find an open teammate or score himself. He’s found a way to affect the game from all angles, and ranks third in the league with eight triple-doubles, behind just LeBron James and Nikola Jokic.
Most importantly, the gloom that permeated Detroit has lifted. The Pistons are one of the league’s biggest surprises, and at 33-26, they’re a likely playoff team in the East. Beginning with the hiring of a new president of basketball operations in Trajan Langdon and head coach in J.B. Bickerstaff in the 2024 offseason, Detroit’s rebuild from its 14-68 record a season ago is accelerating faster than many had anticipated. “[He] has been instrumental in our team’s resurgence and has been the driving force behind our forward momentum,” Pistons owner Tom Gores said in a statement to The Ringer. “His dedication to elevating his game and realizing his potential as an All Star has been remarkable.”
Cunningham’s evolution as a player, as a leader, is a big reason. “He makes the big shot, he makes the big play, he’s not afraid to try to do it and step up,” Langdon says. “He wants to guard the better players and he wants the ball in different situations, whether it’s to create for a teammate or make a shot himself … always being ready when the team needs him.”
Cunningham is playing with a joy that many who know him best weren’t sure would return. That spirit has rubbed off on his teammates. The team chemistry is “unmatched,” guard Malik Beasley says, and is a reason for the team’s newfound success. “A lot of people that’s outside of this building alone didn’t believe in us,” Beasley says. “And we’re in here talking about playoff discussions.”
That chemistry starts with Cunningham. He’s taken the wisdom he’s gained from his own struggles to become an even better leader. His teammates say he has a unique ability to connect with anyone—managing different personalities, making sure each person knows they are valued. That they’re seen. That their role matters. “If you look around him, his teammates get better,” Bickerstaff says. “And that’s extremely unique that a superstar, or a young superstar in particular who’s coming into his own, has the ability to not just do his own thing, but then to impact those around him and make those around him better. And that to me is why Cade is an All-Star. It’s not just the numbers he puts up, it’s the impact that he has on his teammates and the people that he brings along with him.”
Many of those teammates, like fifth-year center Isaiah Stewart, have been there with Cunningham through those three difficult seasons. Everyone was on the same page at this season’s start: new year, new staff, new mindset. “It shows how resilient Cade is, how determined he is, and he worked himself right up to the All-Star,” Stewart says. “No matter what the critics or whoever was saying about him, he stayed true to himself.”
But he had to learn to define himself on his own terms. To learn what true confidence is. Cunningham is opening up now, sharing what he has gone through. Resilience, to him, now means “maintaining yourself in trying times,” he says. He had to trust that everything he wanted to be, everything he wanted to achieve, was going to come.
All his life, Cannen says, Cade “had extraordinary confidence, but probably because the outcomes were always favorable. And once it got ugly,” Cannen says, “it was a catalyst moment. I kind of see it as a blessing, that he was given a chance to doubt himself for once. And then as he slowly earned more and more success, he could more genuinely believe that he really was the man, as he was kind of, not masquerading before, but he thought he was the man before and then he got tested and had to actually investigate that. And I think he feels it more deeply now.”
Finally Cade is sleeping after games, no longer scrolling. “You can get through it,” Cunningham says. “You don’t have to allow what people think of you or what is creeping through your mind to control who you really are.”
That took time to learn. “It’s hard,” he says. “It took a while.” That process began long before last season’s losing streak. It began when he first came to the NBA.
He arrived in Detroit shouldering a large burden. He wasn’t simply being asked to learn a new playbook and work with new teammates and adjust to the speed and physicality of the NBA game, he also had the pressure of being expected to leap into superstardom right away. He couldn’t afford to be slow to adapt. The franchise’s turnaround depended on him. He wanted that responsibility. Took pride in it. “I was trying to perform,” he says. “I was first picked. I want to live up to expectations and everything. That was the first time I had heard about imposter syndrome.”
Essentially, imposter syndrome is when successful people across all walks of life experience persistent self-doubt, and, according to the Journal of Mental Health and Clinical Psychology, the “fear of being exposed as a fraud or imposter.”
All his life, he says, he has been sure of himself. He’s had to be; the point guard has to convey confidence so that his teammates will follow. An ankle injury right before his first NBA training camp would lead him to question himself. He missed the first two weeks of the season. The timing of the injury was difficult, as it happened just after he started to feel that he was getting the hang of things. “I had to get back going, and the season was going, and it was my first time in the NBA,” he says. “That was a lot going through my mind at once.”
Though it’s an abstract concept, the more he learned about it the more it resonated with him. “It’s real,” Cunningham says. The more he thought about it, the more real it seemed. “That was the first time that I was like, ‘Hey, am I going to be as great as I thought I was going to be?’”
Detroit finished a disappointing 23-59 in his rookie season. Cunningham averaged 17.4 points, 5.6 assists, 5.5 rebounds, and 1.2 steals per game and became the youngest player in franchise history to record a triple-double. He finished third in voting for rookie of the year, behind Toronto’s Scottie Barnes and Cleveland’s Evan Mobley.
“Not winning Rookie of the Year was kind of devastating,” says Cannen Cunningham. “I think Scottie had a great year and Mobley had a great year, so not to [take] away from anybody else, but that was kind of, from my perspective, that seemed like the first major setback that I really had witnessed him have as a basketball player. And obviously they’d lost a lot of games that year, and that was tough because he had never lost before in his life. But to still miss out on the award … [It] shook him up a little bit.”
It’s not just the numbers he puts up, it’s the impact that he has on his teammates and the people that he brings along with him.J.B. Bickerstaff
After that letdown, Cunningham spent even more hours in the gym, determined to come back a better player. “It was a test for me,” he says. “It made me re-establish my work ethic in the NBA, of making sure that I was going to get where I was going to go.” Any optimism he had heading into his second season quickly turned into disappointment when Cunningham suffered a shin injury 12 games in and sat the rest of the season while recovering from surgery. “I was challenged again,” he says. The injury only exacerbated the doubts that were still lingering in the back of his mind. And now, he was essentially powerless to bridge the gap between the player he had been as a rookie and who he wanted to become.
Still, he was determined to not let negative thoughts consume him, and tried to reassure himself that through hard work, he’d be able to become the player and leader Detroit drafted. When he couldn’t play in games, he focused on what he could control. Pushing himself in rehab. Thinking more positively. Encouraging teammates from the bench. Leaning on the support of his parents, Keith and Carrie, and his two siblings. Focusing on his progress, no matter how minuscule, especially after he was eventually cleared for on-court drills. “Finding the small victories, and really appreciating them, celebrating them,” he says, “whether it’s making five more shots in this workout than I did yesterday.”
Still, he yearned to be out on the court with his teammates, including promising young players Jaden Ivey and Jalen Duren. “I just wanted to be out there and continue to grow our chemistry so bad,” Cunningham says. “I’m watching them compete in every game and I just want to help with something, but you can’t.”
He viewed this time on the injured list as a test of his leadership. He was learning that his voice had to be his greatest superpower. This wasn’t a time, his coaches would remind him, to stay quiet. Being consistent in how he spoke to the team while he was out would prove to his teammates just how invested he was.
Still, he couldn’t help but contemplate his future in Detroit as another brutally disappointing season wore on without him and the Pistons finished with an NBA-worst record of 17-65. “Being hurt for such a long time, I’m thinking about the front office,” Cunningham says, “and I know that there’s so many days where they could change their mind on how they feel about you, and so I was constantly thinking about that.”
He took comfort in his Christian faith, and tried to not let his worries consume him, and to not get too far ahead of himself. “Making sure that I was where my feet were, in the moment all the time, and knowing that everything is going to be cool at the end of the day, whether I got traded or whether I got back with this team or whatever happened, I was going to be fine,” he says. “I was going to work my way through it.”
In a way, he didn’t have a choice. His injury forced him to take things day by day, given the long, grueling nature of rehab. “You have to,” Cunningham says, “or else you’ll lose your mind.”
And while he worked his way back physically, he also was working hard on the mental side of the game—and dealing with his own doubts. But nothing would test him like what was to come in year three.
It was December 21, 2023, and Cannen Cunningham had never seen his younger brother as distraught as he was that night. The camera caught Cade tearing up as he walked off the court after another loss–the 25th straight–and Cannen was floored. “He can be a bit stoic. He’s easy to talk to and relate to and all that type of stuff, but vulnerability is not really his thing,” Cannen says.
That night, some fans chanted “Sell the team.” Then the streak continued to balloon. 26 games ... 27 games … the misery felt unending.
Each loss was more demoralizing than the last, and players had to answer questions from reporters on what went wrong. Cunningham couldn’t hide, he couldn’t deflect. Unlike most people, who can fail in the comfort of their own homes and endure the resulting shame in private, the failures of Cunningham and his teammates were on full display. Losses are shared, but the point guard shoulders a different responsibility. Cunningham was the no. 1 overall pick; the player that the franchise had pinned its hopes on—and he couldn’t win a ballgame.
And he couldn’t sleep. He kept scrolling on his phone, as nights turned to mornings, reading the criticism, reading posts from fans who once cheered him now calling him a bust. How quickly, he noticed, opinion could change. Once he was almost universally praised, and now, some questioned whether he belonged in the NBA at all. He tried to stay above the noise, whether that meant playing as hard as he could or encouraging his teammates or being a consistent voice in the locker room. He never publicly lashed out. Never blamed his teammates. Never demanded a trade. He wasn’t going to quit on his team. He didn’t see himself playing anywhere else. “There’s no going to find greener grass,” he says. “Just water your grass before anything.”
His brother, himself a former college basketball player who is now coaching AAU ball, would remind him that “The only way out is through.” “You just got to kind of push through the ugliness until you see a little sunlight again,” Cannen Cunningham says.
It was a trying time. But Cunningham focused on gratitude for what he did have: A family that supported him. Wealth. Living his dream of playing in the NBA.
Cunningham knew that as the player who has his hands on the ball most, it was important that his energy stay consistent for each minute he was on the floor, no matter the score. “I wasn’t going to give up on anybody,” he says. “People really came to work every day through it, which I don’t think a lot of teams would have. I don’t think a lot of NBA players would be able to go through what we went through for that whole season.”
Rock bottom came in December 2023. Cunningham scored 41 points against the Nets, but it wasn’t enough, as Detroit lost its 27th straight game, setting a new record for the longest losing streak in a single season in league history. As if things couldn’t get worse, the next game, playing Boston on the road, it seemed like Detroit might finally snap the streak. The Pistons were up by 21 points against the best team in the league. It was a must-win moment. And yet, as determined as Cunningham and his teammates were to steal that game, some part of him deep down knew that his team would somehow find a way to lose.
And they did lose, 128-122 in overtime. “Everybody was sick,” he says. “To get that win, I mean, we would’ve beat the best team in the league. Maybe we would’ve been able to run some games off after. … It would have been momentum.” It was a crushing blow. “Another reminder, like, ‘Nah. Y’all don’t win games.’”
As difficult as things were, Cunningham believed in his teammates, many of them also young and brimming with potential. He remembers telling a reporter he didn’t believe they were as bad as their record would indicate. “And I really felt that way looking in the locker room. The talent in here is not the talent of a team that can only win two games.”
Detroit finally snapped the streak one game later, defeating Toronto by two points. Then Detroit lost its next seven games. It was more disappointment, but he remembered the promises he made as a rookie to bring “Detroit basketball back,” he says. “I felt like I was supposed to come to Detroit,” he says. “I got so much love once I got here, and I wanted to be a part of something like that.”
There’s no going to find greener grass. Just water your grass before anything.Cade Cunningham
“It was some hard years, but I couldn’t just go back on what I said,” he says. “If anything, now I have even more reason to have to do that. I have to at least invest my whole self to it.”
He had to find a way to take the negativity he heard from random fans online or from basketball pundits on TV and turn it into something positive. “I use it as fuel for sure. And, ‘nah, I bet y’all eat y’all words.’ I’ve always had that in my mind.”
All the losing helped Cunningham realize that he had to trust his own voice and self-belief more. “You have to draw a line,” he says. “Like, alright, I’m not going to allow these opinions to control how I feel about myself. I think that goes into imposter syndrome. Someone that doesn’t allow other people’s opinions to affect them—you don’t really get into imposter syndrome too much.”
He eventually stopped scrolling on his phone late at night, establishing a more healthy and sustainable pre-bedtime routine. The criticism was hollow, just words. “I play a bad game; everybody thinks I’m the worst. I play a good game, everybody thinks I’m the best,” he says. “None of it matters, really. None of it’s real. At the end of the day, it's social media. … I can’t allow that to dictate how I see myself.”
He knew he had to keep improving as a player, as a leader. He owed it to himself, to his teammates, and to Detroit.
The first time Bickerstaff met Cunningham ahead of this season, Detroit’s first-year head coach came away with one feeling: his point guard was all in. The two talked about how “nothing that happened before this year mattered,” Bickerstaff says. “Everything that we’re going to do from now on is a new beginning and a new start.”
The first thing he remembered Cunningham telling him? “He wants to be coached—and he wants to be coached hard,” Bickerstaff says. The coach would see that willingness in each film session, each practice. A consistent willingness to learn. “As a leader—and again, young and still working his way there, not done yet—but he has a Tim Duncan, Steph Curry impact on your organization because of the way he presents every day and the way you’re allowed to coach him,” Bickerstaff says.
That’s raised the level of play for everyone. “That made my job easier,” Bickerstaff says. “Now I get to coach him and hold him to a standard—and now I get to coach everybody that way, and nobody gets to duck it, so to speak.”
His teammates can see his leadership, too. The way he encourages others, points out good things they do. “He doesn’t blame anybody,” says forward Ausar Thompson. He’s also using his voice more than ever. Cunningham gathered the team together before a game against Atlanta in January. The Pistons hadn’t played their best on defense over the previous few games, and the point guard let them hear about it: “We’re not going for that shit no more,” forward Ron Holland II recalls him telling the group.
“Once he said that,” Holland II says, “we all kinda locked in.”
Cunningham worked on all aspects of his game, including improving his range—and he’s currently shooting 46 percent, 5 percentage points better than he did as a rookie. He took on more challenges defensively, often guarding the opponent’s best shooter, and his assists have also steadily improved each season. Put simply, Cunningham always viewed himself as a work in progress. His teammates see the way he takes accountability. “There’s been games at halftime where he’s come in and said, ‘I got to be better’ when you don’t even think he does need to be better,” Beasley says.
Even now, as an All-Star, leading his team into contention for a playoff spot, he still isn’t satisfied with his game. It’s sometimes hard to believe, after all he and the Pistons have been through together, that he’s only 23. “I’ve always known I’m going to have something like what’s going on now,” Cunningham says. “I knew I was going to … [but] I still don’t think I’ve got to where I envision in my head.”
He’s sleeping much better these days. Confidence, he continues to learn, is something to constantly build. Protect. Nurture. And it doesn’t always come from the outcome. When the Pistons faced the Cavs in early February at home, Cleveland was the East’s no. 1 team. The game probably wasn’t even supposed to be close. And yet, Cunningham came up clutch, hitting critical free throws again and again, as the game went down to the last shot. Cleveland escaped with a win on an improbable Darius Garland logo buzzer-beater. It was a miserable way to lose, but Detroit made a statement that night: The Pistons are now a team that believes they can win, and will push the best teams in the league to the brink.
Later that night in the Pistons locker room, Cunningham walked over to his locker, where he draped a towel over his shoulders. He didn’t look upset. Players were disappointed, of course, but the mood was still light. Teammates high-fived each other before walking out.
“We want to be in the playoffs this year,” Cunningham said that night. “We’re in a kind of tight race right now with a few different teams and so making sure that we bounce back, not letting things snowball on us is important. … We have to figure out how to pull these games out.”
Before heading home, he let a slight smile slip, something he doesn’t usually allow during play. There is joy in Detroit, and in Cunningham—even after a tough loss. A sense of optimism. A sense that everything he wants is going to come.
Editor’s note: This article was updated with additional information after publication.
