The Detroit Pistons opened NBA Cup Group Play on Friday night with a road game against the Brooklyn Nets at Barclays Center, the kind of early-season test that arrives fast and leaves little room for a slow start. Detroit came in at 4-1 and favored by 7.5 points, but the matchup was not being treated like a routine trip.
That is why Pistons Vs Nets was drawing attention ahead of a 7:30 pm EST tip. The game was set for Friday, October 30 in Brooklyn, with TV20 Detroit and DAZN carrying it. Detroit had just been through a demanding stretch of travel, while Brooklyn had been home since Tuesday after its buzzer-beating overtime loss to the Boston Celtics, and the Nets had already shown they could keep games close even when the record did not show it.
The numbers behind Detroit’s start help explain the tone around the game. The Pistons were 4-1 despite playing without Jalen Duren for half of their games to open the season, and they had also been missing Ausar Thompson and Isaiah Joe for parts of the schedule. That has forced Detroit to keep adjusting around Cade Cunningham, who gives the Pistons a chance in any game, even when the offense is not clicking the way it did in the opening stretch.
Brooklyn’s 0-4 record looked rough on paper, but it was more complicated than that. The Nets had only one blowout loss, a 27-point defeat to the Indiana Pacers, and the rest of their schedule had kept them in striking distance. Julius Randle and Michael Porter Jr. were the veteran threats Detroit had to track, while Egor Demin’s leg injury from the overtime loss to the Boston Celtics added another layer to Brooklyn’s rotation. Mikel Brown Jr., a first-round pick, and Nolan Traore in his second season gave the Nets more young options, but not much margin for error.
Detroit’s recent defense has also kept this from feeling like a standard favorite-versus-underdog setup. Over its last three games, the Pistons had given up 98 points per game while scoring 100, a sign that the margins had tightened after a strong start. Jalen Duren remains Detroit’s second offensive threat, and the schedule over the next couple of weeks while he is out is less difficult than the one the Pistons just survived, but Friday’s opener still asked them to answer a different question: whether a team that has already proven resilient can turn a road favorite’s status into a clean start to NBA Cup play.
