The NBA officially released its schedule on Thursday. Even though the Detroit Pistons are kicking off the season with the first game on the calendar on opening day, they have been largely overlooked by the league. Not being given a Christmas game is one thing, but the Pistons have only 19 nationally televised games on the docket.
Between ESPN, NBC, Peacock, and Amazon Prime, the Pistons will have 19 of their 82 regular-season games on national TV. Sure, this could increase by one or two games depending on how Detroit does in the NBA Cup, but as things stand now, the Pistons rank 13th in the NBA in the number of nationally televised games.
Pistons & Cade Cunningham aren't getting the love they deserve from the NBA
The Lakers, Knicks, Sixers, and the Spurs are tied for the most such games with 34. All of these, as well as Oklahoma City having 30 and Denver having 28, are understandable.
What is more difficult to understand is how the Pistons can rank below the likes of the Miami Heat (25), Dallas Mavericks (21), and the Houston Rockets (21).
The Pistons won 60 games last season. They are entering the season with significantly higher title odds than the three teams above. One would assume that the league would want to showcase its best teams on a nightly basis. Instead, teams like the Mavs and the Warriors, who will most likely not make the playoffs, will be more featured than Detroit.
If the point isn't to showcase the best teams, but the biggest stars, this doesn't make a ton of sense then, either.
Cade Cunningham is arguably the best player in the Eastern Conference. He enters the season as an MVP candidate after finishing each of the last two seasons in the top seven of MVP voting. He is only 24 years old and should be even better next season. There is a good chance that he will be the best player on the best regular-season team in the East.
But Cooper Flagg will feature more heavily on national television than Cunningham.
There is a two-month stretch between November 20 and January 18 where the Pistons have only one nationally televised game: a December 22 clash at OKC. This means that the Pistons might have the best record in the East, but national audiences would catch them only once in that 26-game stretch.
Are there really 12 teams that NBA fans would rather watch than Cade and the Pistons on a given night? The league chooses to showcase bad teams night in and night out and wonders why fan attention is lackluster during the regular season.
The Pistons continue to get counted out. This is the latest example that no one is giving the Pistons a real chance of contending for a title. If this team needed any more fuel to motivate them, the league and its broadcasting partners may have given it to them.
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