Beauty in the Struggle

“It’s beauty in the struggle” is a phrase I first remember hearing while listening to J. Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive for the first time. The phrase stuck with me as a 13 year old, but I find it resonating with me more as I get older, especially when it comes to watching NBA Basketball. As a lifelong Detroit Pistons fan, I’ve spent most of my life cheering for mediocre teams that, at best, were topping out as eight-seeds in the playoffs and getting swept by LeBron’s Cavaliers or Giannis’ Bucks. All of that changed in June of 2021 when the team finally won the Lottery, ultimately selecting Cade Cunningham with the first overall pick.

With a collective record of 54-192 between the beginning of the 2021-22 season and the end of the 2023-24 season, the first few years of The Cade Era, I’ll call it, did not come with much team success. During this time, ironically, I had never enjoyed watching Pistons basketball more in my life. Detroit wasn’t winning games, but witnessing Cade grow into the leader and All-NBA talent the basketball community knows him now to be, watching Jalen Duren get a double-double in his first career game and develop into an All-Star-level talent in his fourth season, and, ultimately, seeing the Pistons reap the benefits of building from the ground up, clinching a six-seed in the 2025 Playoffs and establishing themselves as a young powerhouse in the Eastern Conference, made all the years of development worth it. There’s a small part of me, however, that misses watching Detroit’s young players work through their kinks and figure it out on a team with little-to-no expectations.

A couple years after moving away from the Metro-Detroit area to go to college, I bought NBA League Pass to keep up with Pistons games. I’ve had the subscription since, and I’ve used it religiously to follow my hometown team. What I didn’t expect was that I’d find myself searching for the satisfaction of watching the previously developing Pistons in other developing teams around the league, like the Washington Wizards and New Orleans Pelicans, just to name a couple.

"Keep stacking days" is a phrase used by NBA legend Chris Paul that means placing an emphasis on small efforts to build a foundation for success. Through small, digestible posts, I hope to spotlight some of the developing teams around the NBA, share my perspective about various basketball topics, and cover players who don't receive the media attention I believe they deserve. Stay tuned.