Pistons beat Knicks 106-103 in Game 5 to stay alive in the first-round series

The players the Pistons put together to turn a 14-win team into a playoff squad aren’t ready to split up for the summer.

Instead, they’re going back to Detroit together — and maybe back to New York after that.

Cade Cunningham had 24 points, eight rebounds and eight assists, and the Pistons stayed alive in their first postseason appearance since 2019 by beating the Knicks 106-103 on Tuesday night in Game 5 of their first-round series.

The Pistons insisted they felt no extra pressure when they talked Tuesday morning on what could have been their last shootaround of a season in which they went 44-38 in one of the biggest turnarounds from one season to the next in NBA history.

“Everybody’s got a back’s-against-the-wall type of mentality, but the group really loves being around each other and I think that was one of the biggest things,” forward Tobias Harris said. “Like, we don’t want this thing to stop. Like, we’ve got to keep on fighting.”

Ausar Thompson added 22 points and Harris had 17 for the Pistons, who will have a chance to even things up Thursday night at home in Game 6. If they win that, the deciding game would be back at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.

Detroit, though, has lost an NBA record-tying nine straight home games since 2008.

But the Pistons seem comfortable in New York, where they were 2-0 in the regular season and now 2-1 in this series, including their Game 2 victory that snapped their 15-game postseason losing streak, the longest in NBA history.

Not surprisingly, they still like their chances in the series.

“Confident,” Cunningham said. “We’ll be back.”

OG Anunoby scored 19 points for the Knicks, who were trying to reach the Eastern Conference semifinals for the third straight season but never fully recovered from a poor start. Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges each had 17, but Jalen Brunson had his worst game of the postseason with 16 points on 4-for-16 shooting.

“We just put ourselves in a deficit early,” Towns said. “All series we’ve been fighting back.”

The game was tied at 95 before Jalen Duren made consecutive baskets and Cunningham scored for a six-point lead. The Pistons got a good break when Brunson and Josh Hart both left the game with injuries with 2:57 remaining and play went on for a while without a stoppage when they were ready to return. By the time they could, there were only 27 seconds left.

Brunson had scored 30 or more points in every game of the series and was averaging 33.3 through four games before not even getting halfway there Tuesday, when the Knicks were trying to win a series on their home floor for the first time since the 1999 Eastern Conference finals.

Now they will try to do it in Detroit, where they won Games 3 and 4.

Duren finished with nine points, 14 rebounds and six assists.

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