NEW YORK — The Detroit Pistons were sitting pretty heading into the fourth quarter on Saturday: on the road, up by eight, with an opportunity to steal the first game of their first-round series against the No. 3-seeded New York Knicks.
Detroit had outscored the Knicks 36-26 in the third. Guard Malik Beasley had made five 3s, shimmied after two of them and flexed after a layup.
“We were just clicking, really,” forward Tobias Harris said.
Harris thought the young Pistons — many of whom had never before played in the postseason — had done a good job of staying composed. It was a bad sign, though, when they couldn’t get the ball in bounds at the beginning of the final frame.
It wasn’t encouraging, either, when they followed up that five-second violation with a 24-second violation.
New York cut its deficit to three points in less than 50 seconds, and the Madison Square Garden crowd responded with appropriately loud noises. But it wasn’t immediately clear that the Pistons would go away — 21-year-old center Jalen Duren connected with 22-year-old guard Ausar Thompson for an alley-oop dunk, plus the foul.
Even after Thompson bonked an uncontested dunk off the rim on the next possession, Detroit was in decent shape. Duren came up with a steal seconds later, and Thompson made a layup on a fast break.
After that, though, the Knicks really got going: A couple of buckets for Cameron Payne going downhill, a Jalen Brunson floater, a Payne 3. The Pistons lost the lead, and then they totally lost their composure.
Detroit was down by five points when, about halfway through the third quarter, star guard Cade Cunningham threw the ball away on an inbounds pass. Brunson immediately extended the Knicks’ lead to seven.
On the next possession, Cunningham turned it over again and Brunson found two more easy points:
With about five minutes left in the game, Harris attacked the basket and missed a contested layup. As he complained about the non-call, Brunson pushed the ball and Josh Hart scored in transition. This capped a 21-0 Knicks run.
“Our execution failed us, I think,” Detroit coach J.B. Bickerstaff said after the 123-112 loss. “You have eight turnovers in a quarter, it’s going to be hard to overcome.”
Brunson scored 12 of his game-high 34 points in the fourth quarter and shot 5 for 7 in the period. In between the third and fourth quarters, he changed his shoes, but coach Tom Thibodeau said, “I think he grabbed his cape.”
He may have played hero, but Brunson said that Payne and the unit that gave the Knicks a spark at the beginning of the fourth deserved credit for the comeback.
“The key was Cam Payne, the violation at the beginning of the fourth quarter,” Brunson said. “The way we started the first couple of minutes, that was the key.”
As a member of the Philadelphia 76ers last season, Payne made big shots like these against the Knicks in the first round of the 2024 playoffs.
“The thing about him is he knows exactly who he is,” Thibodeau said. “He comes in with great energy every game. He prepares himself well each and every day. He gave us a huge spark. But that’s been who he is.”
Brunson added that, “Cam always has the energy, regardless of who we’re playing, where we’re playing and what time we’re playing. He has the energy from when we walk into the arena.”
Cunningham’s playoff debut was at best a mixed bag. New York put OG Anunoby on him, blitzed him and helped on his drives. He had 21 points and 12 assists, but he shot 8 for 21, missed three of his four 3-point attempts and committed six turnovers, three of them in the fourth quarter.
“They were sending bodies at me all the time, trying to get the ball out of my hands,” Cunningham said.
The 23-year-old said he “couldn’t pick them apart enough,” but he saw it as a learning experience.
“There’s some adjustments that myself and him just talked about that he can make out there,” Harris said, adding that he expects Cunningham “to get better game to game.”
For Detroit, the late-game meltdown was a missed opportunity. If the loss was demoralizing, though, the Pistons weren’t acting like it. Harris said he was “proud” of the team and Cunningham described the game as “fun.”
“I enjoyed it a lot,” Cunningham said. “I think the whole group enjoyed it. It was loud in there, it was rockin’.”
Bickerstaff said that Detroit “did a lot of really good things” to put itself in position to win. It failed to close the game, but he framed this as a good lesson: Every possession is important in the playoffs, and that heightens in the fourth quarter.
“This is experience,” Bickerstaff said. “Now you come back the next game, and how quickly do you learn from it? You got guys in their first playoff game, understanding what playoff basketball is and what closing a playoff basketball game is and how hard that is. It’s hard to win in the playoffs because people are laying it all out there.”
Sounding surprisingly upbeat, Cunningham said that he’s “excited for this series to keep going” and “ready for Game 2.” Detroit will take a look at everything that went wrong down the stretch before it meets the Knicks again on Monday, but it will also look at what went right before that. If nothing else, it showed it can hang with them.
“We were the better team for three quarters,” Bickerstaff said.
