Two years ago, the Detroit Pistons won 14 games and were the worst team in the NBA. Friday night, they became the first Eastern Conference team to lock up a playoff spot.<\/p>\n
Behind 23 points from Jalen Duren and 22 from backup point guard Daniss Jenkins \u2014 starting in place of the injured Cade Cunningham \u2014 the Pistons beat the Warriors 115-101 and with that became the first team in the Eastern Conference to secure a playoff berth.<\/p>\n
Detroit now has a four-game lead over the Boston Celtics for the No. 1 seed in the East with a dozen games left to play. Without Cunningham for at least two weeks \u2014 and maybe through the end of the regular season (and beyond) \u2014 due to a collapsed lung, there are questions about whether the Pistons can hold on to that seed.<\/p>\n
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However, the Pistons are now 7-2 in games Cunningham has missed this season with a +2.2 net rating when he is off the floor. It’s going to be tough for the Celtics to make up that ground.<\/p>\n
Either way, we know the Pistons are going to the playoffs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two years ago, the Detroit Pistons won 14 games and were the worst team in the NBA. Friday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671030,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3773],"tags":[7,75,909,6101,296,188,3860,1409,912,6,297,2551,25977,85748],"class_list":["post-671029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-detroit-pistons","tag-basketball","tag-boston-celtics","tag-cade-cunningham","tag-daniss-jenkins","tag-detroit","tag-detroit-pistons","tag-detroitpistons","tag-eastern-conference","tag-jalen-duren","tag-nba","tag-pistons","tag-playoff-berth","tag-playoff-spot","tag-worst-team-in-the-nba"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116268311909480916","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}