First Step Into a Larger World (Cade Cunningham Season Review.)
Cade Cunningham set the Pistons world on fire with his rookie season, but what does it mean for the long term?
This post is long. Bring some snacks.
The Basics:
Cade Cunningham averaged 17.4 points, 5.6 assists, and 5.5 rebounds in 32.6 minutes per game over 64 games played this season. He shot 31.4% from deep and 41.6% overall for a True Shooting Percentage of 50.4%.
He started the season inauspiciously, missing preseason and the Pistons first few games with an injury, then playing miserably in his first seven career outings. He shot just 31.5% from the floor in those games before finding a groove of sorts with 25 points and 8 assists against the Kings.
There were all kinds of good in Cade’s rookie season, and some bad (we will get to all of it), but to start off let’s talk about the best thing. Coming out of college, the main concern that people (including myself) had about Cade was that he might not have the explosive athleticism to beat NBA defenders and get to the hoop consistently. In college, Cade was overly reliant on his jumper and lived off a diet of highly difficult jumpers, floaters, and flip shots.
These concerns only festered in his slow start where he took almost nothing but those shots. Eventually, he settled in, and even though he did good work from the mid-range, he did his best work at the hoop and his combination of quickness and size made him effective inside. Check out his shot chart from the season.
It would be nice if there was more red on that shot chart (more on that later) but in terms of shot distribution, that is ideal for a lead ball-handler. Cunningham was comfortable and effective from the mid-range but was mostly taking those shots when defenders were giving it to him, which allowed it to be an efficient source of offense but he was rarely looking for the mid-range shots.
Cade mostly forced the issue into the paint despite defenses setting themselves up in increasingly gratuitous ways to try and keep him from the hoop. This did occasionally result in him getting lost in no-man’s land before puking up ugly and difficult floaters and hooks but he rarely was just settling for jumpers.
What are these examples of good mid-rangers? Analytics say mid-range bad.
Not to get into some big analytics rant but its important to remember that analytics do not say that you should never take mid-rangers. The idea is that your offense shouldn’t be purposefully trying to create looks from the mid-range. The thing is though, that if you are using the threat of mid-range looks to get more looks at the hoop and from three for yourself and teammates, then it’s effective and even encouraged. The clearest example would be that Chris Paul remains an analytics darling with a shot chart that looks like this
In particular, notice how Chris Paul’s shot (just like Cade’s) doesn’t feature tons of long two-pointers but true mid-rangers, especially around the elbows. Cade doesn’t have as pronounced love of elbow jumpers as Chris Paul, but you can see the outline there. As a lead-ball handler, everyone from the old-school to the analytics gurus can get behind these shots.
Those are not plays where the goal is to get a mid-range shot. But when the defense is overplaying you to drive to the hoop, lead ball-handlers need to be able to threaten this area. Once again, many of the most beloved analytics players in history have made hay in this area, if you check out Cade’s shot chart again you will see that these areas are the main red spots on his chart. When the defense has to respect you in that area it opens up some of the juiciest passes in the game.
Those passes do not open up without Cade proving himself to be a threat to dribble into an easy pullup, and he hit enough of them to be an efficient offensive weapon. Once again, look at his shot chart, he is not trying to relive the early 2000s here, outside of late shot-clock situations he largely was taking those shots when the defense was overplaying other things. He did occasionally put himself into more difficult shots than the situation called for:
But those are
Somewhat inevitable that a high-volume guy will take some bad shots
Rare enough for Cade that it isn’t a huge concern.
Basically, when Cade was taking those mid-rangers it was either totally called for on that specific play, or a late-shot clock situation where the #1 offensive option is going to get stuck taking tough shots.
If he’s opening up the hoop, why isn’t his percentage better at the hoop?
An excellent question!
First off, it is important to remember that those shot charts are based on the league average. Cade’s shots at the rim were still a highly efficient form of offense, just not as efficient as other players at the hoop. The problem is big men who do nothing but dunk skew the league average at the hoop. When you look at most ball-handling guards they are either below or average at the hoop.
The key here is that even though Cade (and most guards) are not as efficient at the hoop as the various big-men dunkers of the world, their shots at the hoop are still a highly efficient offense, and this is where volume comes in. It’s great that Marvin Bagley is efficient by dunking 5 easy shots per game, but Cade is still getting far more production by getting to the hoop more often and his penetration is also creating those easy looks for Bagley. Take this fancy stream chart for Cade.
This chart shows pretty clearly that even if big-men dunkers skew the league-wide averages when Cade gets all the way to the hoop he’s still shooting nearly 60%, WHICH IS HIGHLY EFFICIENT, and he’s getting tons of his shots there. Even though he is above league average from 14 feet, it’s still a less efficient shot than at the hoop. (also, once again, shooting nearly 55% from 14 feet is REALLY GOOD)
This also connects to the previous points about how he uses that effective mid-ranger just enough to allow him to get the majority of his shots at the hoop, but doesn’t take so many that he gets diminishing returns.
So any narrative about Cade not being effective at the hoop is either total ignorance or purposeful misconstruing of the data and can be safely ignored?
Pretty much.
Some of the inefficiencies are real. As you can see on the stream chart, his efficiency drops quickly when he gets a few feet away from the hoop. Part of that is his propensity to take tough floaters and hooks, but those can probably be mostly chalked up to the fact that the Pistons’ spacing was awful all season.
I don’t want to be too hard on Isaiah Stewart here because he’s a nice player who gives his all but the fact that Cade spent most of the season with him as his running mate did SEVERE damage to his effectiveness. I mean, just look at this.
I’m not totally sure what Stew is doing here, but it is certainly not helping. It’s not a coincidence that Cade’s efficiency got a bump up after the arrival of Marvin Bagley. Pre-all-star break his TS% was just 48.9%, post-break it was 53.1%.
Compare that to when Bagley is the roller so the big man has to give some respect to the lob threat.
The opposing big (Robert Williams) has to stay with Bagley due to the lob threat which gives Cade just enough of a window to get an easy layup.
To further hammer this point home. Prior to the break, Cade Cunningham shot 44% on all two-pointers, after the break he shot 52% inside the arc. When Cade shared the floor with Isaiah Stewart, the Pistons were -9.1 points per 100 possessions. With Bagley they were -2.8 and with Kelly Olynyk they were +4.8. The more time you spend watching Cade’s shot attempts from this past season the more it seems that Isaiah Stewart may have genuinely cost Cade rookie of the year.
To be fair to the rest of the Pistons though, Cade did occasionally dribble and pump-fake himself into trouble all on his own, a tendency that will be important for him to cut out from his game going forward.
There’s also plenty of evidence that when Cade smelled blood in the water that the defense was not set up to send a helper who was a threat to contest him, he had a one-track mind to go all the way to the hoop. Watch how he sees the moment the big defender (Even Mobley in this case) is not going to be able to recover so he turns on the jets.
That’s a remarkable play for a variety of reasons, the explosion for a guy who was noted as lacking explosion, reading the play so early, the fact that alleged defensive maestro and #winningplayer Evan Mobley was left utterly dead in the water, that’s brilliance. The problem is that the Pistons were so regularly paring Cade with just one other threatening shooter (Saddiq Bey) that he rarely got a chance to attack like this.
So are we saying that perhaps spacing should be a priority this offseason?
Probably. There is pretty solid evidence that Cunningham can dust just about anyone one on one, the trouble only really comes with the comical way defenses bent to stop him. Check out these clips of Cunningham claiming victims
Derrick White and Grant Williams
OG Anunoby
Kevin Durant
Matisse Thybulle
Making BBQ chicken of Danny Green
And once again, it’s important to see that Cade is recognizing that the big man is preoccupied with something else. In some cases, the big got switched onto someone on the perimeter who can actually shoot, or they are simply not going to want to aggressively contest him. It’s a purposeful effort. Watch this play where he gets switched onto Christian Wood so he resets to the perimeter because he knows he can burn him.
You can see he nearly pumped faked his way toward one of the hooks that are so tough, but he realizes he has the advantage now so he resets and goes to the hoop with a clear purpose.
This all points to a clear road-map for both Cade and the Pistons, that with better players around him Cade should easily level up his effectiveness.
How about off the ball? How will he fare if the Pistons bring in/properly develop another ball-handler?
Off-ball it was a mixed bag primarily because Cade simply didn’t shoot that well in off-ball situations. That said I did appreciate that the coaching staff clearly made an effort to sprinkle in these types of looks for him.
Once again, he struggled to hit these, but the process was good. Cade is clearly willing to put in work off the ball and the Pistons made sure to get him enough of these that he should be able to hit the ground running if the Pistons don’t need him to control the ball so much in the future.
Perhaps the best thing about his off-the-ball process is how fast he did things, which is key to off-ball play. Especially with guys who are ball-dominant stars, the tendency is to want to dribble a few times and take their time, but when Cade ran off of screens he either shot right away like above, or he attacked immediately. Watch how he takes no time to assess that he didn’t lose his defender so he should attack instead.
There are also a few examples from the season of the Pistons taking advantage of the fact that Cade Cunningham is huge enough to be used as a screener and, oh baby, this play is the type of thing that can make you suddenly really want Killian Hayes to work out.
The potential of having multiple guards who are big enough to screen for each other is powerful. We are rooting for you, Killian.
This brings us to the main thing that Cade needs to truly level up his game. Like I mentioned before, the process was good but he just didn’t shoot that well off those situations, that was largely true with his 3-ball in general. He shot just 31% from deep on the season and it actually got worse as the season went on. (just 27% after the break)
He clearly has the confidence and know-how to become a guy who can burn defenses for going under screens.
But he simply didn’t hit enough of them. He occasionally hit them in bunches and for his rookie season most teams respected him enough not to sag too far off, but if he doesn’t improve quickly teams will dare him to take threes more and more which will cause issues for him and the wider Pistons offense.
What about his passing?
This is goofy because his passing ability coming out of college was largely cited as perhaps his best attribute, but, I feel as though there isn’t a ton to say about his passing. This is a big area where the Pistons’ offensive design (or perhaps lack thereof) combined with the lack of shooting really hurt him. Once Bagley arrived we got some fun alley-oops which we highlighted earlier, but Cade simply didn’t make tons of the high-level passing plays you may have expected just because the Pistons offense doesn’t lend itself to that. The best thing to say about Cade’s passing is that he makes the right passes most of the time and because he is huge and has great hands he makes most passes look easier than they should be.
That isn’t a flashy play or one that makes highlight reels (and I typically try to specifically avoid highlight reel stuff in these posts) but he times the pass perfectly and the fact that he can just flip it over the defender makes it look so easy. Perhaps eventually we will see a combination of more offensive cohesion and better players around him so that we can see him manipulate a defense with his passing more, but for now, it’s pretty much “he made the passes that were there to be made”
When he did commit turnovers with his passes many were of the typical “rookie” passes where he simply forgot just how quickly windows close in the NBA.
The real issues were going back to the above complaint of the fact that sometimes when he dribbled into trouble he was missing open guys. Some of that can be explained away by the fact that oftentimes the open players were not really worth passing to, but on this play, he dribbles into multiple defenders instead of kicking it back out to a wide-open Saddiq Bey.
Even plays like that can still fall into the “rookie mistake” column. At every level he’s played at before the NBA he has likely been capable of forcing through any number of defenders in the open floor to finish at the hoop. These plays are something to keep an eye on for next season though, for now, they are small blemishes on an awesome young player, but if they linger into next season it will be harder to explain away with “he’s a rookie”
Defense?
Similar to the passing this is a shorter bit. Cunningham made plenty of rookie mistakes by occasionally getting lost in the sauce but he did play hard with some consistency.
The main issue was that he would not always be totally engaged in the play, which is understandable given his offensive workload, but when he was engaged he made crisp rotations and good use of his size.
Even if Cade wasn’t making those types of plays all the time, having a guard who can act as a genuine rim protector like that as a help-defender is a huge benefit. Given his high hoops IQ it stands to reason that his defensive awareness will only improve over time, the only real question is whether or not he will truly commit to being a plus defender every possession night after night. Even if his effort was mostly solid he clearly let his mind wander at times. Time will tell.
What about the lack of free throws?
It was insane, he deserves more trips to the line. He will help himself if he starts to try and sell them a bit more, but hopefully, that’s something that will simply come with experience.
What does all this mean for next season and beyond?
The main thing is that the Pistons can move forward knowing they have a cornerstone piece, time will tell exactly how good he gets but he is clearly trending in the direction of multi-time all-star at least. That means the question and challenge for the Pistons in the future will be building the proper team around him.
I’d like to give props to his attitude and approach to the game. Cade seems to fit in the perfect balance you want out of a superstar. He is totally comfortable being a facilitator and willing to let other guys get theirs and do dirty work off the ball, but in the big moments, he wants the ball and is fearless in his efforts to be the man. The fact that he did so much stuff with the ball in his hands but still gave his full effort when asked to play off the ball means something.
The first order of business will be deciding exactly what type of team is best for him. The evidence of him getting to play 1 on 1 with spacing around him makes a pretty compelling case to just get as many guys who can shoot as possible, but he theoretically can fit tons of different kinds of rosters.
That versatility is part of the reason why he was the right pick at the top of the draft. As long as his shot catches up to where it was projected, if you were to add another theoretical all-star level player to be his partner it could be a score-first guard who would let Cade have a more facilitating role, it could be a true PG who runs the offense and lets Cade be more aggressive as a scorer, it could be a slashing wing or an awesome shooter, it could be a stretch big or a rim-runner. He even brings the sort of defensive versatility to make most any theoretical combination work. The only thing that can get in the way of this is if something really is broken with his shot, in which case it will be more beneficial to build the team with the ball in his hands more often than not.
So those are the options, what do you think?
The good news is that the Pistons have another year or two before they have to lock into any of these decisions (when they have to start paying their young guys) but if you had to decide it now I’d probably lean towards trying to pair Cade with a true PG and a really good, but complimentary big-man. I’d guess that his best future would be a role somewhat in line with Devin Booker on the current Suns.
That is a bit of a cop-out though because Devin Booker currently resides in just about the best role of any player in the league. The basic idea is that I’d prefer another PG on the floor allowing Cade to focus more on scoring, Cade is clearly a good passer but I’m not totally convinced that he’s shown the sort of elite-level court-vision to toss into a Luka/Houston James Harden type of role. Also worth mentioning that I’m not a fan of that kind of offense regardless.
Once again, the fact that Cade has so much versatility means that the Pistons should probably just focus on getting whoever are the best players they can get because they know Cade can make the fit work as long as the guy they pair him with is good enough. For instance, adding Jordan Poole would be antithetical to what I just suggested as the ideal partner, Poole would put Cade firmly into the facilitator role, but if Poole looks like a guy the Pistons could actually lure to Detroit this offseason or next then sure. I’m far more concerned with getting good players than a specific fit.
Cade Cunningham is the real deal, he isn’t going to win rookie of the year due to the number of voters who have totally lost the plot, but he’s the best guy to have in this draft. He is very likely the second most talented player to put on a Pistons jersey behind only Isiah Thomas. This season he grasped a lightsaber for the first time, threw his first punch, and jumped his first building. The future is bright.