Two years ago, two very bad teams, the Detroit Pistons and the Brooklyn Nets, played a game that meant very little in the league’s over-all standings. To Cade Cunningham, it meant the world. Cunningham, the Pistons’ point guard, played the entire second half, scoring thirty-five points in those twenty-four minutes. He drove through bodies to the rim, hit threes, crashed the boards. But the Pistons lost, 118–112, setting the record for consecutive losses in a single N.B.A. season, with twenty-seven. Their record sunk to 2–28. In the locker room right after the game, he told his teammates, who’d missed twice as many shots as they’d made, not to “jump off the boat.” He added, “Right now is the easiest time to stand off and be on your own. We need to continue to lean on each other.”

If anyone had a reason to jump ship, it was Cunningham. He was doing everything one player possibly could, for an organization that was squandering his efforts. A few days after the loss to the Nets, the team built a twenty-one-point lead over the Boston Celtics, who had the best record in the league and had yet to lose at home. Cunningham scored twenty-two points in the first half, and the Pistons were so dominant that the Boston crowd booed the home team, the defending champions, as they left the floor at halftime. But the Pistons lost in overtime, tying the Philadelphia 76ers for the most consecutive losses ever. (The 76ers’ streak stretched across two seasons.) That 76ers team had been designed to lose, in order to build draft capital. The Pistons were just . . . losers. They couldn’t shoot, couldn’t defend, sometimes couldn’t even inbound the ball. They had no identity. Their coach, Monty Williams, who was making an average of just over thirteen million dollars a year, tried thirty-six different starting lineups that season. Their general manager, Troy Weaver, had stocked the team with injury-prone vets and young players who seemed stuck in the development process.

Cunningham, a former No. 1 over-all draft pick, had room for improvement. In his third season at the time—he’d missed much of the previous one with a leg injury—he could be inconsistent, sloppy with turnovers, and wasn’t a great three-point shooter. He wasn’t the fastest player on the floor, either. But he had a quick mind and a big body, especially for a point guard. He also had a degree of fortitude and an instinct to lead. He endured loss after loss with a stoic look, exaggerated by his hollow cheeks and a mouth that turns down at the corners. After the Nets game, he took responsibility for the embarrassing record. “A lot of this load is trusted to me, on the court and in the locker room,” Cunningham said. “Every day, I try to lead the squad, and I haven’t been successful at that—2–28. It’s only right that I speak for it and be the face of it.”

The streak finally ended at twenty-nine losses, with a two-point-win over the Toronto Raptors. Then the Pistons lost another seven straight. They finished the season with just fourteen wins. Weaver and Williams, who was still owed about sixty million dollars on his contract, were fired, and the roster that Weaver had assembled to support the young core was overhauled. But the core—Cunningham, Jalen Duren, Isaiah Stewart, Jaden Ivey, and Ausar Thompson—was kept intact. This was a risk. Each player, on his own, had something to recommend him: Stewart was an old-fashioned bruiser who could also shoot threes; Thompson had élite athleticism; Ivey could explode to the basket; and Duren was a dominant rebounder and showed some promise in the pick-and-roll. They were all under twenty-five years old. But they didn’t fit together like modern, offense-oriented N.B.A. teams, which tend to be built around outside shooting. If these Pistons were going to win, they would have to do so differently.

Two years after that historic losing streak, Detroit has the best winning percentage in the N.B.A., a smidge ahead of the defending-champion Oklahoma City Thunder. The turnaround didn’t quite happen overnight; last season, the Pistons finished with forty-four wins, becoming the first team in N.B.A. history to triple their previous season’s win total. Still, it’s hard to overstate the speed and the degree of the improvement. These Pistons have already equalled those forty-four wins, and they have six weeks to go.

What makes the turnaround even more striking is how it happened—or how it didn’t. They didn’t lose on purpose, Philadelphia-style, in order to maximize their chances at high draft picks. They didn’t spend years engaged in careful, actuarial planning, executing canny, future-oriented trades, in the matter of Oklahoma City’s front office. They didn’t sign or trade for a superstar. The Pistons made major roster changes deeper in the rotation, and have added a few important role players, including Tobias Harris and Duncan Robinson. But, with the exception of Ivey, who was traded a few weeks ago to the Chicago Bulls, most of the key figures on the team now are the same guys who lost sixty-eight games two years ago.

The coach is new, and deserves a good deal of the credit. J. B. Bickerstaff has a track record of turning bad teams into good ones, and a reputation for being hands-on. He likes old-school, defense-first, big-man basketball, which is what the Pistons play. There was a natural legacy to build on in Detroit—not only the Bad Boys of the nineteen-eighties and early nineties but also the bullying team that won the title in 2004. The Pistons had a talented but terrible defense during their fourteen-win season. They needed a good coach, but it wouldn’t have worked if the players hadn’t also transformed themselves.

Thompson has become a top shot blocker among wings and a menace in the passing lanes. Duren, the team’s starting center, is now one of the league’s best rim protectors and, at twenty-two, an All-Star. Stewart, who appears undersized at six feet eight but has a seven-foot-five wingspan, has focussed his game on defending the paint, and his ability to keep offenses from scoring there allows the team’s perimeter defenders to take more risks, creating more turnovers, and letting the Pistons get out and run.

Stewart has a nickname: Beef Stew. Its origins have something to do with his documented passion for cooking oxtail, but it fits because he likes beef, as in grievances. He’s always up for a good mid-game brawl. (Stewart is about to end a seven-game suspension for leaving the bench to join a scrum between the Pistons and the Charlotte Hornets, when he was still in his warmups, with ice packs strapped to his knees.) The Pistons lean into their physicality on offense as well as defense: they take charges, lower shoulders, make contact and play through it. Other teams wheel the ball around the arc, but the Pistons punish opponents at the rim. Their three-point shooting is among the league’s worst, but accounts of the N.B.A.’s three-point revolution sometimes obscure an important fact: the paint is still the most efficient place to score. You just have to get the ball there. That’s what Cunningham does.

The Pistons are gritty, but the salient quality of Cunningham’s game is its smoothness. Some of this has to do with his physical skills and attributes—his footwork, his body control—but a lot of it has to do with his anticipation and his vision, which opens up the court. In contrast to the chaotic action all around him, Cunningham plays with a kind of deceptive simplicity, which is a reflection of his ability to process so much complexity. He slips around screens before they come. He reads different coverages and knows where to go. Cunningham draws most of the defense’s attention, and he has become brilliant at recognizing and exploiting the weaknesses and imbalances that this creates. He is averaging nearly ten assists per game this season. His passes aren’t as flashy as those of Nikola Jokić or Luka Dončić, but they can be just as deft. Watching the Pistons play the Cleveland Cavaliers on Friday night, I found myself marvelling at a textbook bounce pass from Cunningham to Duren. A few possessions later, in a similar situation, it was the ideal chest pass. It was like watching a master carpenter carve a flawless rail.

Could the Pistons win it all? It’s a strange question to ask about the team with the best record, but it still seems a little far-fetched—the East is the weaker conference, and any team that emerges from the West is likely to be favored over them. The Pistons have one of the two strongest defenses in the league and a top-ten offense, by the numbers. They defeated the Thunder last week, 124–116, and have gone 20–7 against teams over .500, the best such record in the N.B.A. But in a bad loss to the Spurs earlier in the week, some of their weaknesses were exposed. They can’t stretch defenses or space the floor with shooters or make up big deficits quickly. Aside from Cunningham, they don’t have a natural playmaker. When he’s shut down, they struggle to score. When the playoffs come, other teams will ratchet up their defensive intensity, and it’s not clear whether the Pistons can similarly elevate their game. It’s unlikely that they’ll suddenly launch a barrage of threes.

But watching them succeed with their own style is a pleasure in the meantime. On Friday, Cunningham played to his usual high level: twenty-five points, seven assists, ten rebounds. But it was a strange game, with a long delay for a blaring horn, and, even by Pistons standards, everyone was a little chippy. Cunningham fouled out with two minutes remaining. How were they supposed to score? Whatever way they could, apparently. Cunningham’s backup, Daniss Jenkins, was fouled on a desperate heave with four seconds remaining, and hit three free throws to tie the game. In overtime, the Pistons leaned on one another, sans Cunningham, and got the win. ♦