It seemed so innocuous at the moment: just a bit of backcourt pressure early in a sleepy mid-March game between two teams on diametrically opposed ends of the Eastern Conference standings.

Cade Cunningham forces Tre Johnson to turn — Job No. 1 for any pressing defender trying to make a ball-handler uncomfortable. Johnson loses the ball and his balance as he tries to spin off Cunningham into open space; both players dive for the loose ball. Cunningham’s first to the floor: quicker, more assertive, more physical in pursuit of possession. But also, more vulnerable.

What looked at first like just an uncomfortable collision, the Wizards rookie landing hard on the Pistons superstar’s back before everybody got back up and kept it pushing, soon landed Cunningham in the Pistons locker room. And what looked at first like back spasms was revealed on Thursday to be something significantly more serious: a left lung pneumothorax, or collapsed lung, that will reportedly cost Detroit’s All-NBA table-setter an “extended period of time.”

How long “extended” might mean, at this stage, remains unclear. The Pistons’ official statement on the injury says the team will re-evaluate Cunningham in two weeks. The average time lost for an NBA player who suffers a collapsed lung, according to injury expert Jeff Stotts of In Street Clothes, is 26 days.

“Average,” of course, means that some returns happen more quickly than that. Back in 2015, Houston Rockets forward Terrence Jones suffered a partially collapsed lung in late March. He would miss only two weeks and six games, returning for the final eight games of the regular season and playing a key role on a Rockets team that made the Western Conference finals. And when he sustained a collapsed lung in 2023 while with the New Orleans Pelicans, CJ McCollum was back after 22 days, missing 12 games.

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It also means, though, that returns can take longer — sometimes much longer. Back in 2021, while still a member of the Portland Trail Blazers, when McCollum suffered his first collapsed lung, that one cost him 41 days, keeping him on the shelf for 18 games.

If Cunningham hits the bull’s-eye on the average return-to-play timeline in Stotts’ database, that would peg a prospective comeback to April 13 — the day after the end of the 2025-26 NBA regular season.

Entering Thursday’s action, Cunningham has played in 61 games, but only 60 of those count toward the 65-game threshold for year-end awards eligibility under the player participation guidelines the NBA instituted before the 2023-24 season. You have to play at least 20 minutes in a game for it to “count,” and since Cunningham left after just five minutes on Tuesday, his appearance against the Wizards doesn’t.

If Cunningham’s able to return immediately after his in-two-weeks re-evaluation, he could be available for the Pistons’ final five games, giving him an opportunity to get over the 65-game finish line. If the check-in turns up evidence that he’d be best served taking another couple of weeks to heal, though, costing him the rest of the regular season, Cunningham would find himself ineligible for consideration by the media members who comprise the awards electorate. Which feels preposterous, because the 24-year-old — who is 15th in the NBA in minutes per game and 28th in total minutes, and who had played in just under 90% of Detroit’s games this season before someone landed on his back — has been a top-10 player this season by virtually any measure.

Cunningham is averaging 24.5 points, 9.9 assists — second in the NBA, behind only Nikola Jokic — 5.6 rebounds and 1.5 steals in 34.4 minutes per game. (I know it’s, like, the 50,000th most notable thing about this situation, but still: Cunningham leaving after only five assist-less minutes against Washington dropped him down to 9.9 dimes per game, when he was on pace to become just the eighth player in NBA history to average 20-10-5 for a full season. Just brutal.) He’s finishing at the rim, generating free throws, dishing assists and snagging blocks and steals all at career-high rates, and doing it while grading out as a plus contributor to, and the leading minutes-getter on, the NBA’s No. 2 defense.

Reasonable people can quibble with Cade’s shooting marks: 51.3% on 2-pointers, 34.6% on 3-pointers and 81.3% at the free-throw line, landing in the bottom 10 in effective field-goal percentage and true shooting percentage among players who use at least 25% of their teams’ offensive possessions. But in spite of that relative inefficiency, chances are good that your advanced stat of choice loves him.

Among players who’ve played at least 40 games this season, Cunningham ranks fourth in The BBall Index’s LEBRON, sixth in box plus-minus and tied for sixth in value over replacement player, seventh in ESPN’s Net Points Added, eighth in DARKO daily plus-minus and win shares, ninth in estimated plus-minus and Neil Paine’s LAKER, 10th in Jeremias Engelmann’s xRAPM and 12th in player efficiency rating. The Pistons have outscored opponents by 10.8 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions in Cunningham’s minutes — just beneath the league-leading, defending-champion Thunder’s net rating over the course of the full season — and score at a top-two clip with him at the controls.

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Cunningham isn’t the only reason Detroit has built on last year’s incredible turnaround by climbing to the precipice of the franchise’s first 50-win campaign since 2007-08 and vaulting up to the top spot in the Eastern Conference. He’s the biggest one, though … which is why his absence could throw a pretty significant hurdle in the path of a Pistons team hoping to stay in that lofty perch.

Significant, but not insurmountable. The Pistons enter Thursday’s rematch with the Wizards in first place in the East at 49-19, holding a 3.5-game lead over the second-place Boston Celtics. They also hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over Boston, having beaten the Celtics three times in four tries this season, and look to have a friendlier stretch-run slate, with the East’s seventh-toughest remaining schedule, while the C’s have the third-toughest, according to Tankathon.

While Boston might project to have a tougher finishing slate, though, Detroit’s isn’t exactly a picnic. The Pistons still have meetings coming up against the Thunder, the suddenly scorching Lakers and Hawks, the postseason-bound Raptors, Magic and Hornets, and a perked-up Pelicans team that’s been playing .500 ball for more than two months and is 9-5 since the All-Star break, plus a pair of games against the Timberwolves (who might be without their own All-NBA guard, Anthony Edwards). 

The glass-half-full take: The Pistons have gone 5-2 in the seven games Cunningham has missed this season — 6-2, if you include the win over Washington after his early exit — and have outscored opponents by a sturdy-if-unspectacular 2.7 points-per-100 with him off the floor. They’ve survived non-Cade minutes largely on the strength of their elite defense, cranking up the ball pressure to force turnovers on a panic-inducing 18.1% of opponents’ offensive possessions, a mark that would lead the league. The concurrent absence of Isaiah Stewart, himself sidelined by a left calf strain, complicates the “let’s defend like demons” approach somewhat … but Detroit’s won the minutes with neither Cade nor Beef Stew on the floor, too.

It’s worth noting, though, that Detroit has benefited from opponents shooting just 32.8% from long range in those non-Cunningham minutes. A shift in the vicissitudes of 3-point variance could mean an analogous decline in the effectiveness of those units … especially if an offense that’s been precariously precipitated on Cunningham’s ability to unlock coverages and create good looks continues to sputter in his absence.

The Pistons have scored 8.4 fewer points-per-100 with Cade off the floor than when he’s at the wheel. According to Cleaning the Glass, among shot creators who’ve logged at least 1,500 minutes this season, only Jokić, LaMelo Ball, Jamal Murray, James Harden, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Julius Randle have had a larger on-court/off-court impact on their teams’ offensive fortunes than Cunningham this season.

“All year, we’ve shown that we have the depth of a group that can win basketball games, just based upon our physicality, style, how hard we play,” Pistons forward Tobias Harris told The Athletic. “So, I think, obviously, we want him to be in the best of health. Until he gets back, we’ve got to hold the fort down, and guys have just got to step up with the next-man mentality, and every player is going to be expected to do more.”

When Cunningham went down against Washington, Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff turned to reserve guard Daniss Jenkins, a pleasant early-season surprise who’d been in a frigid shooting slump for the better part of three months. Jenkins finished with 15 points on 4-for-9 shooting with seven assists against two turnovers in 21 minutes against the Wiz; Bickerstaff will need much more of that for the foreseeable future.

He’ll need more from center Jalen Duren, who’s proven capable this season of shouldering a more significant share of the scoring workload en route to his first All-Star appearance. He’ll need more from third-year guard Marcus Sasser, who’s undersized but pugnacious and can shoot the cover off the ball; he’ll need more from wings Caris LeVert and Kevin Huerter, who can both serve as complementary ball-handlers who can help lighten the load for the likes of Jenkins and Sasser as they step into larger on-ball responsibilities.

And — if he’s willing to use this dicey moment as an opportunity to experiment a little bit — he’ll need more from Ausar Thompson, who just returned from a five-game absence of his own due to a sprained ankle. In a Cade-less context, Thompson’s combination of size, strength, quickness and athleticism make him arguably Detroit’s best advantage-creator and most threatening downhill driver; tossing him the keys a bit and seeing whether he can make an on-the-ball impact similar to what brother Amen’s provided in Houston might not be the worst idea for a Pistons team with its sights set on making a deep playoff run.

“It’s extremely important trying to find the right combinations for the different situations that we might face,” Bickerstaff told reporters on Tuesday. “And we’ll continue to grow.”

They’ll need to. There’s no good time to lose a player as phenomenal as Cunningham, but having it happen with three weeks left in the season gives the Pistons a chance to develop some off-speed pitches that could prove beneficial in the playoffs. To get where they want to go, though — back to competing for a championship for the first time in 20 years — they’ll need to be able to rely on their heater. The Pistons go as Cade Cunningham goes; the state of his recovery is now the biggest open question in the Eastern Conference.

After years mired in the NBA’s middle, you could understand the calls for the Atlanta Hawks to choose a direction — to make a big, bold swing, one way or the other. Especially as they headed into 2026, yet again, a few games under .500, puttering around in the play-in picture, with the NBA’s 15th-ranked offense and 17th-ranked defense — still, in spite of all the offseasonpraise and roster reconfiguration, aggressively and seemingly inexorably mid.

Trading Trae Young represented the Hawks picking a side … but so did not consummating their long-rumored interest of being the team to swing a deal for Anthony Davis. (Who, as luck would have it, wound up pairing with Young, but not in Atlanta.)

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With an interesting young core locked in for the next three seasons, lots of room to maneuver under the aprons in the years to come, and plenty of draft capital in the coffers, general manager Onsi Saleh and Co. decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Rather than careening toward the extremes of blowing it up or going all-in, the Hawks made just the one big change, and decided to see where that might take them.

The answer, it turns out, might be “the playoffs.”

Behind the Hawks’ turnaround

The Hawks are 19-10 since trading the former face of their franchise, with the NBA’s 10th-best net rating in that span, according to Cleaning the Glass. After concluding the rest of their comparatively more minor trade-deadline movement — swapping Kristaps Porziņģis for Jonathan Kuminga and Buddy Hield, dealing Luke Kennard for Gabe Vincent, sending Vit Krecji to Portland for draft picks, scooping up Jock Landale for cash — the Hawks have gone an East-best 12-4, ranking seventh on offense and.

And now, after a commanding and convincing 124-112 win over the Orlando Magic on Monday night, the Hawks have won 10 games in a row — the longest active streak in the NBA, one of just four double-digit streaks in the NBA this season (joining the defending champion Thunder, East-leading Pistons and those alien-employing Spurs) and the franchise’s longest streak since the “We’re All The Eastern Conference Player of the Month” Hawks ripped off 19 in a row all the way back in 2014-15.

"Everyone's speaking up [and] the locker room's gelling,” defensive ace Dyson Daniels recently told Jake Fischer of The Stein Line. "Everyone's speaking in the group chat. It feels like a whole different vibe."

The turnaround began, as it so often does for teams that snap to attention, on defense. Atlanta owns the NBA’s No. 6 defense since the Young deal, allowing 110.2 points per 100 possessions in that span, just south of Victor Wembanyama’s Spurs. In the six weeks since the trade deadline, that’s down to just 109.6 points-per-100 — the fourth-stingiest unit in the NBA in that stretch, just a tick behind the No. 2 Heat and No. 3 Celtics.

“I think we’ve been defending at a really high level,” veteran guard CJ McCollum — who, along with movement-shooting wing Corey Kispert, constituted what seemed an underwhelming return for Young — recently told reporters. “I think that’s the biggest thing. We’re really good offensively. We have a lot of talent, a lot of shooting. We have a lot [of] speed. We have a good balance, but I think defensively we’ve been locked in.”

That was always the elephant in the room on the Young-era Hawks: that building a high-level defense around a 6-foot-2, 164-pound point guard who repeatedly graded out as one of the NBA’s most damaging individual defenders, and whom opponents could and would relentlessly hunt without compunction or repercussion, proved exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

The Hawks finished in the bottom 10 in defensive efficiency five times in Young’s first seven years with the club, and in the bottom five four times; they routinely conceded points at or near a league-worst level in his minutes. (The one year they even approached a league-average defense — 2020-21, when they finished 16th — they went to the Eastern Conference finals.) That didn’t mean the Hawks were better off without him, necessarily; thanks to his elite offensive impact, the team performed better with him on the floor than off it nearly every season. It did make him a tricky piece to build around, though.

Which is why, staring down the barrel of a lucrative, potentially maximum-salaried contract extension that could take Young through his early 30s, the Hawks chose to stop doing that, and instead decided to see what building around youth, length and athleticism — lineups anchored by the 6-8 Jalen Johnson, 6-8 Daniels, 6-5 Nickeil Alexander-Walker and 6-10 Onyeka Okongwu, and without quite as detrimental a weak link for them to cover for — might yield. With the Hawks playing .655 ball since the deal and riding a 10-game winning streak, the early returns have been exceedingly promising.

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They also, however, come with a pretty sizable schedule-based caveat. Five of Atlanta’s 10 wins during this streak came against the tanking Wizards, Nets and Mavericks. Two more came against the drain-circling Bucks, including one without Giannis Antetokounmpo; one came against the Trail Blazers without Deni Avdija; another came against the 76ers without Joel Embiid, Paul George or VJ Edgecombe.

The collective winning percentage of the opposition in those nine contests? A crisp .363. Not exactly a murderer’s row — and a continuation of a pattern that’s seen Atlanta thrive against the weakerthans and struggle against stronger competition, going 19-7 against sub-.500 opposition and just 18-24 against teams at or above .500. (In fairness, the Magic, Raptors, Heat, 76ers and Hornets — the other teams in the mix with Atlanta for the Nos. 5 through 10 spots in the Eastern Conference playoff picture — have also followed that pattern.)

But on Monday, when confronted with a playoff-caliber opponent for the first time in nearly a month — an Orlando team that entered on a seven-game winning streak of its own, with the league’s fifth-best net rating since the trade deadline — the Hawks didn’t suddenly regress, revert and shrink into a corn cob. They took the Magic’s measure for about nine minutes … and then calmly, methodically and utterly administered the belt to Orlando’s collective keister, leading by as many as 29 points in a game whose final score looks closer than the run of play actually was.

“It was a real test against a playoff team,” Alexander-Walker told reporters after exploding for a career-high 41 points and nine 3-pointers. “And I think, the talk kind of being around, well, we beat nobody and da da da da da, at the end of the day, it’s NBA players, it’s NBA teams. […] I think it was just, we continue to handle our business.”

They’ve done it collectively, with eight players averaging at least nine points per game and six averaging at least two assists per game since the trade deadline, fueled by a shuffled-up starting lineup that’s quickly coalesced into one of the league’s best, most balanced units.

The Hawks really took off when head coach Quin Snyder elected to slide McCollum — who’d been scoring well and efficiently off the bench since arriving from Washington — into the starting five alongside Johnson, Alexander-Walker, Daniels and Okongwu, in place of struggling former No. 1 pick Zaccharie Risacher. While McCollum’s individual effectiveness has dipped since the elevation, with the veteran shooting under 40% from the field and 30% from 3-point range, the Hawks’ overall synergy has surged: They’re 8-0 with their new starting lineup, which has outscored opponents by a whopping 140 points in 217 minutes, trailing only the Hornets’ starters for the best plus-minus of any quintet in the league.

That averages out to a devastating plus-29.1 points per 100 possessions, which trails … well, nobody:

It’s a unit in which many hands make for lighter work — but also one built around the crackling energy and diverse skill-set of Johnson, who has blossomed into one of the league’s best young players.

Atlanta’s new franchise player

The Young trade put the keys to the franchise in the hands of Johnson, an ascendant talent with size and skill who’d shown the playmaking chops to suggest he might be well-suited to life as a primary creator. So far, so good: His per-minute scoring and shooting efficiency have dipped in a higher usage role, but he’s remained incredibly productive, averaging 22.2 points, 10.7 rebounds, 7.8 assists and 1.3 steals per game since the Young trade.

The first-time All-Star has more triple-doubles this season (13) than anybody but Nikola Jokić, and is on pace to join Jokić, Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson and Russell Westbrook as just the fifth player in NBA history to average at least 20 points, 10 rebounds and 8 assists per game for a full season.

Johnson leads the Hawks in touches, time of possession and usage rate, but he doesn’t dominate the rock. Among the 50 players who have the ball in their hands for at least four minutes of game time on average, only Jokić averages fewer seconds or dribbles per touch than the Duke product — one reason why the Hawks lead the league in assists and points created via assist, and rank ninth in passes per game, seventh in total distance traveled on offense per game, and third in average speed traveled on offense per game.

And when the ball doesn’t stick, and everybody knows they can get a hand on it, everybody buys in just a little bit more.

“This is the closest-knit team I’ve been on with Atlanta,” Johnson recently told Fischer.

Johnson’s most frequent target? Alexander-Walker, whose baskets he’s assisted 121 times this season, according to PBP Stats — the third-most-frequent assist combination in the league, behind only Jamal Murray-to-Nikola Jokić and Cade Cunningham-to-Jalen Duren. (Johnson’s getting his fair share of service, too: Daniels has set him up 97 times, which is tied for 10th-most.)

‘It’s starting to come to life’

When the Hawks plucked Alexander-Walker from a Minnesota team that couldn’t afford him, Julius Randle and Naz Reid this summer, it looked like a smart move — an opportunity to land the prime years of a player who’d developed into one of the league’s sturdier two-way reserves, someone capable of serving as a high-level role player alongside brighter talents, for less than 10% of the salary cap. The seventh-year swingman has made that evaluation look like damningly faint praise, averaging 20.3 points per game — nearly double his previous high-water mark — to go with 3.7 assists, 3.5 rebounds and 1.3 steals per game, while shooting 51% on 2-pointers, 39% from 3-point land, and 90% from the foul line.

Even with the increased usage and heavier offensive workload, NAW has continued to form a strong defensive backcourt partnership with Daniels; the Hawks have allowed 113 points-per-100 in their shared minutes, a defensive rating that would rank just below sixth-place Boston for the full season. They’ve also scored at a near-top-six rate in those NAW-Daniels minutes — this, despite the Aussie struggling mightily with his shot, dropping from a career-best 34% from 3-point range last season to a career-worst 12.9% this season.

Even amid that frigid shooting, Daniels has continued to find ways to make a positive impact. He’s taking advantage of opponents ignoring him in the short corners or allowing him to lurk in the dunker spot in inverted spacing, posting one of the highest offensive rebounding rates of any guard in the NBA. He’s also taking care of the ball, turning in one of the best assist-to-turnover ratios among players getting rotation minutes — including an eye-popping 57 helpers against seven miscues during the winning streak. (And while Daniels is no longer snagging steals and deflections at historically elite rates — though he’s still top-five in bothcategories — he remains a dynamic and versatile enough defensive weapon to be capable of flipping a game by just, y’know, switching onto a two-time MVP to short-circuit an offense.)

In that respect, Daniels’ comparatively quieter non-scoring impact — as evidenced in the team’s second largest on-court/off-court swing, behind only McCollum — is emblematic of what’s been driving Atlanta’s fantastic recent play.

As John Schuhmann of NBA.com noted, Atlanta has seized control of the possession game during this stretch, averaging 7.3 more field goal attempts than its opponents over the last 10 games. Using Jared Dubin’s Possession Battle metric at Last Night in Basketball — which factors in whether a team collects more offensive rebounds than it gives up, generates trips to the free-throw line more than it sends the opponent there, and creates more turnovers than it coughs up — the Hawks have generated 10.8 more possessions than their opponents during this winning streak, a mammoth edge that would lead the league over the course of the full season by a comical amount.

And when the Hawks get more bites at the apple, they now have more ways to make the opposition pay. With Johnson, Alexander-Walker, Daniels and McCollum — and, to a lesser extent, new additions Kuminga and Vincent — all capable of working either end of the pick-and-roll, these Hawks can flow into and through any number of combinations and actions in pursuit of a pathway to a good look.

They don’t have any individual facilitator capable of dissecting an elite, locked in defense the way Young could. But by spreading opponents out and forcing them to treat everyone as a live threat, they make it harder for defenses to load up and stay connected; keep moving the ball and your bodies, keep playing together, and eventually, they’re going to spring a leak:

“We have multiple threats at once,” Alexander-Walker recently told reporters. “You’ve got one guy putting pressure on the rim, you’ve got ‘J.J.’ downhill and being the threat he is. And then, myself, just reading that and being able to make shots. […] We are able to execute really well. It’s something we work on and it’s starting to come to life.”

That, in turn, has given new life to the Hawks’ postseason hopes. Atlanta now sits in eighth in the East, a game behind seventh-place Miami and just 1.5 games behind the fifth-place Magic and sixth-place Raptors. The Hawks hold the head-to-head tiebreakers over the Sixers and Magic; they’ve lost it to the Raptors and Hornets, and are down 2-1 to the Heat with one matchup left on the last day of the regular season.

That jumbled-up tiebreaker positioning, combined with the congestion in the middle of the pack and Atlanta having the East’s fourth-toughest remaining schedule, according to Tankathon, makes for an awfully daunting climb out of the play-in mix. Most public-facingpostseasonprojectionmodels give the Hawks a sub-25% chance of making it into the top six; the most likely outcome, then, is the Hawks returning to their ancestral home of the play-in tournament, needing to win one or two games just to get into a first-round matchup with what will assuredly be a heavily favored top seed.

But while that destination might feel stiflingly familiar for Hawks fans, the path the team is charting there is fresh, and seemingly teeming with new possibilities. Moving on from Young gave the Hawks a direction and a clear runway. All they can do now is keep traveling down it, and see how far they might be able to fly.

“I’m proud of this group,” Johnson told reporters after knocking off Orlando. “We’ve got a long ways to go, but we’re going to stack wins one game at a time, just keep focusing on that.”