Cade Cunningham broke a 58-year-old Detroit Pistons playoff record on Wednesday night, scoring 45 points to push the top-seeded squad past the Orlando Magic 116-109 and force Game 6. The man across the floor, Paolo Banchero, also scored 45. He shot the ball better doing it. Banchero went 17-of-31 from the field and 6-of-11 from three. Cunningham went 13-of-23 and 5-of-8. By every percentage measure but one, Banchero outproduced him. The exception was the free throw line. Cunningham made all fourteen of his attempts. Banchero missed seven of his twelve. The math is exact: nine fewer points from the stripe in a seven-point loss.
The full stat lines are worth keeping. Cunningham finished 13-of-23 from the floor, 5-of-8 from three, 14-of-14 at the line, with five assists, four rebounds, and a step-back jumper with 32 seconds left that drew MVP chants at Little Caesars Arena. Banchero finished 17-of-31 from the floor, 6-of-11 from three, 5-of-12 at the line, with nine rebounds, seven assists, and two steals. Across the play-by-play era, no Detroit Pistons player had ever scored more in a postseason half than the 27 Cunningham hung in the second quarter alone. The duel went whistle to whistle, and only one of the two stars came home with the win.
The Pistons franchise mark Cunningham passed had stood since the 1968 postseason. Dave Bing scored 44 points in Game 6 of an Eastern Division semifinal at Boston Garden, and the Boston Celtics won the game and the series. Bing was 24 years old, the No. 2 pick of the 1966 NBA Draft, and that spring he had led the league in scoring at 27.1 points per game. He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1990 and named to both the NBA's 50th- and 75th-anniversary teams. After basketball, Bing founded Bing Steel and won election as mayor of Detroit in 2009, serving through 2014 and steering the city through the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. His No. 21 hangs in the rafters of Little Caesars Arena. Isiah Thomas got within one point of the record with 43 in the 1988 playoffs and could not pass it.
Cunningham was the No. 1 overall pick of the 2021 NBA Draft. Banchero was the No. 1 overall pick of the 2022 NBA Draft, taken one slot ahead of Chet Holmgren. Each player set his franchise's single-game playoff scoring record on the same night, and the pair became just the second set of opposing players in NBA postseason history to each score 45 points or more in the same game. The first was Donovan Mitchell and Jamal Murray inside the 2020 Orlando bubble, when Mitchell scored 51 and Murray scored 50 in a Utah Jazz Game 4 win over the Denver Nuggets. Mitchell and Murray combined for four 50-plus games in that seven-game series. Cunningham and Banchero are now the only other pair to crack 45 on both sides of a single playoff scoreboard.
Two years ago this Detroit Pistons team won fourteen games and lost twenty-eight in a row, tying the NBA's all-time consecutive-loss record set by the Philadelphia 76ers across two seasons from 2014 through 2016. The Pistons did it inside one. Then-coach Monty Williams was fired one year into a six-year, $78.5 million contract — the richest coaching deal in league history at signing. The Pistons hired J.B. Bickerstaff on July 3, 2024, six weeks after the Cleveland Cavaliers fired him despite a 99-win two-season run. Detroit gave him four years plus a team option. He took the same nucleus from 14 wins to 44 wins to 60 wins in two seasons — the first 60-win Pistons squad since the Chauncey Billups era ended in 2007-08, and the first East No. 1 seed for Detroit since the 2006-07 season.
The bet on Cunningham himself looked nuts when it was made. He had missed all but twelve games of his second season with a stress fracture in his left tibia. The Pistons handed him a five-year, $224 million rookie maximum extension on July 10, 2024. When he made the 2025 All-NBA Third Team, the Rose Rule recalibrated the deal to as much as $269 million, and he is now under team control through his age-28 season in 2029-30. Game 6 tips Friday night in Orlando, with Game 7 in Detroit on Sunday if the series returns. A Pistons loss makes Detroit the seventh No. 1 seed in NBA history to fall to a No. 8 — joining the 1994 SuperSonics, 1999 Miami Heat, 2007 Dallas Mavericks, 2011 San Antonio Spurs, 2012 Chicago Bulls, and 2023 Milwaukee Bucks. A Cunningham win extends the duel another forty-eight hours.