Scheduled
Boston Celtics at Detroit Pistons
2026-27 · Regular season
Cade Cunningham: ‘I’m not the inexperienced guy’ anymore, and he wants MVP, a title and a dunk contest
Before Detroit opens against Boston, the Pistons star said his next chapter is "super stardom," that the Game 7 loss to Cleveland came down to details from Games 3 and 5, and that John Collins gives Detroit a new kind of threat.
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Cade Cunningham still calls himself a young player. He just does not think he is the new guy anymore, and on the day the Detroit Pistons open their season, he described what comes next in one word: stardom.
“I’m still a young guy, but I’m not the inexperienced guy as much anymore,” Cunningham said in a one-on-one with Detroit sports anchor Tina Nguyen that aired Monday night. “So I feel like taking that on and kind of trying to really jump into, like, super stardom and leading my team to championships and stuff is the next chapter for me.”
The No. 1 pick in 2021 is starting his sixth season. He averaged 23.9 points, 5.5 rebounds and 9.9 assists in 64 games last season, second in the league in assists per game, and then 28.1 points a night across 14 playoff games.
From 14 wins to 60
Cunningham has seen nearly every version of this franchise. Detroit won 14 games in 2023-24 and lost 28 in a row along the way. Two seasons later, the Pistons won 60, took the No. 1 seed in the East and made the playoffs for a second straight year.
“First couple years was really tough on me, on everybody in the building,” he said. “We tasted success a little bit, and now we’re shooting for championships, is where we all want it to be. That’s where we all fought to be, and to be here now feels good.”
Asked what the bad years taught him, he said there was no shortcut. “The only way around it is through it, you know?” Cunningham said. “You kind of have to go through the adversity. You can’t run away from it or hide from it. That’s what we’ve done here, and it hasn’t always been pretty. It’s been tough on us, but I think that toughness that we have now is because of that.”
He said winning in Detroit specifically matters to him because of how the city stayed with the team. “To be in Detroit and represent the city that appreciates sports the way that Detroit does, and cheers so hard for us even through the tough times, it means a lot,” he said. “But job’s not finished. I still got to go really win at the highest level, and that’s what I’m working to do.”
What Game 7 taught him
Last season ended one win short of the conference finals. Detroit came back from 3-2 down to beat Orlando in the first round, forced a Game 7 against Cleveland in the second, and then lost it 125-94 at home on May 17. Cunningham had 13 points on 5-of-16 shooting and missed all seven of his threes that night.
He said the summer was not about that one game. “You lose Game 7, you kind of look at Game 7 as what went wrong, but there were parts of the series, you know, in Game 3, Game 5, that could have won the series,” he said. “So it’s the details of it, and really taking those on and being intentional about how to get better and how to be better for this season. I think we’ve done a good job of that as a whole, and now we got to put it together during the season.”
“Sometimes you want it to go your way the first time, but it doesn’t always work that way,” he added. “So you have to experience it, and I think last year was a great test for us. We learned a lot from it.”
A new target on their backs
Cunningham said the Pistons now walk into every building as a team opponents game-plan for, which raises the bar for effort on ordinary nights. “It’s a long season. There’s a lot of games, and so sometimes you have dog days,” he said. “But the consistency of bringing that effort and the attitude every game is important. I think we’ve done a good job of that, but it’s a new season and we got to do it again this year, and take it up a level.”
Detroit kept its core together, brought back Jalen Duren on a five-year, $200 million deal on Oct. 1 after a summer-long standoff, and added John Collins on a three-year, $51 million contract in July. Cunningham singled out the newcomer. “John Collins is somebody that is a floor-spacing lob threat, you know, that’s gonna be making dynamic plays all year,” he said. “We got a team that can defend at the highest level. We can run transition at the highest level. We got a lot of new shooters that give us space.”
He said the key will be finding chemistry quickly in a deeper East. “We got new guys, and I think getting that synergy, that cohesiveness that we’re looking for as early as we can into the season will be big for us,” he said. “It’s a tougher league, like you said, and we love the competition of it.”
“I want to win everything”
Asked what he wants this season to look like for himself, Cunningham did not narrow it down. “I want to be successful, whatever that looks like. I want to grow as a person, as a player,” he said. “You know, I want to win a championship. I want to win MVP. I want to win a dunk contest. You know, I want to win everything.”
Then he pulled it back. “Whatever that looks like, I want to grow more than anything,” he said. “I just take it step by step, day by day.”
The first step is Tuesday: the Pistons host the Celtics at Little Caesars Arena at 3 p.m. ET, which is 10 p.m. in Cairo.
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