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Eric Woodyard, ESPN
DETROIT — It’s history not many fans inside Little Caesars Arena were looking forward to experiencing Tuesday night, but the Detroit Pistons couldn’t avoid NBA infamy, dropping their 27th straight game with a 118-112 loss to the Brooklyn Nets.
It’s the most consecutive losses in a single season in league history. The 76ers have the overall record, losing 28 straight, but that spanned the 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons.
Detroit hasn’t won a game since its home opener Oct. 28, against Chicago, and now is 2-28 on the season.
Entering Tuesday’s game, Pistons coach Monty Williams couldn’t avoid the topic of the all-time losing mark — something he said he didn’t want his name connected to — but it continues to weigh heavily on the franchise.
“Again, when you look at records, you think of coaches, but I’m sure the players don’t want that attached to the name on the jersey,” Williams said. “Was it heavy? It’s been heavy for a while. That’s just the nature of this kind of losing streak and it’s not gonna change because we’re grading the level of it, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to change it.”
Cade Cunningham, the No. 1 overall pick in 2021, finished with a game-high 41 points to go along with 9 rebounds and 5 assists. He had 37 points in the second half alone, but now has lost all 10 career games when scoring 30 or more points — the longest streak to start a career in NBA history, according to ESPN Stats & Information research.
After the game, Cunningham addressed the team passionately in the locker room about the things it needs to fix, while telling teammates not to “jump off the boat” and to “stay together” as the losses continues to mount.
“I don’t think what I said was positivity, I think it’s just being real … there’s nothing positive about this situation right now that we put ourselves in, so that’s why we have to dig deep and get ourselves out of it,” Cunningham said. “You can’t get away from it. It weighs on us every day, I mean everywhere. It weighs on us.”
The Pistons got off to a fast start in the opening quarter, holding a double-digit lead (14 points) for the first time in a contest since Nov. 12 (against the Bulls). But they committed six turnovers in the second quarter and entered halftime trailing 61-54.
They went down 71-60 at 8:35 of the third quarter after a driving floater by the Nets’ Cam Johnson, but pulled within three entering the fourth as Cunningham went off for 18 points. Fans chanted “Let’s go Pistons” during the final frame, trying to rally the home team as Cunningham nailed a trey at 8:10 to put Detroit up 97-92.
But the Nets closed the game on a 26-15 run to etch the 2023-24 Pistons in the history books. As the final seconds ticked off the clock, a host of fans started to chant, “Sell the team! Sell the team!” though Pistons owner Tom Gores was not in the building to hear it.
The chants didn’t sit well with some of the players.
“We have the right people in this locker room and most importantly, I just heard the fans talking about sell the team and just in my mind it’s like what we talked about, who is with us? Whose really with us?” said second-year guard Jaden Ivey, who ended with 9 points and 4 assists. “The crowd was amazing, I thought, but there’s some that [I’m wondering] who is really with us?
“Chanting ‘sell the team,’ I thought it was a bit much because we’re growing and obviously the record and a lot of people expected us to be better in this upcoming point of the season, but we’re gonna continue to row the boat and we’re gonna forget what everybody else says, stay together and play for each other.”