Sports Poets Society

SLAM MAGAZINE - June 2022 There have been some bumps in the road for Pistons guard Cade Cunningham during his rookie season, but he’s not giving them a second thought. Instead, he’s using the doubters as fuel to lock in as he works to turn the franchise around. W O R D S / D E Y S C H A  S M I T H  P O R T R A I T S  / J O N A T H A N L EWI S IT’S A LATE APRIL AFTERnoon,  and Cade Cunningham is  sitting on a black leather couch inside a sunny, white-walled studio in Los Angeles for his SLAM cover shoot. He’s in the midst of explaining what “ Detroit vs Everybody ” really means to him. It was already a thing, he says, when he arrived last summer as the No. 1 pick in the 2021 NBA Draft , and at first, he didn’t really understand what it meant. But when he tweeted the Motor City’s rallying cry last month, having just finished his rookie season, he wanted to make it clear to everyone in Detroit that he fully understands it now.  “I just wanted to let the city k...

https://www.nba.com/pistons/features/truebluepistons_110215.html February 15, 20114:43 PM EST Nobody knew much about Dennis Rodman when Jack McCloskey made him the Pistons’ second-round pick in the 1986 draft, as I wrote last week. But Joe Dumars knew something … About his sister, at least. “I knew him as Debra Rodman’s little brother,” Joe D laughed Tuesday when I asked him about his first impressions of Rodman. Dumars was entering his second season, entrenched by then as Isiah Thomas’ backcourt partner after moving into Chuck Daly’s starting lineup midway through his rookie season over veterans John Long and Vinnie Johnson, when Rodman arrived for training camp in Windsor as a rookie. Debra Rodman was a four-year letter winner and two-time national champion for the great Louisiana Tech teams of the early 1980s, a contemporary of Dumars during his time at neighboring McNeese State from 1981-85. “I knew her from way back in college and I knew that was her little brother,” he said. “So...