It seemed so innocuous at the moment: just a bit of backcourt pressure early in a sleepy mid-March game between two teams on diametrically opposed ends of the Eastern Conference standings.

Cade Cunningham forces Tre Johnson to turn — Job No. 1 for any pressing defender trying to make a ball-handler uncomfortable. Johnson loses the ball and his balance as he tries to spin off Cunningham into open space; both players dive for the loose ball. Cunningham’s first to the floor: quicker, more assertive, more physical in pursuit of possession. But also, more vulnerable.

What looked at first like just an uncomfortable collision, the Wizards rookie landing hard on the Pistons superstar’s back before everybody got back up and kept it pushing, soon landed Cunningham in the Pistons locker room. And what looked at first like back spasms was revealed on Thursday to be something significantly more serious: a left lung pneumothorax, or collapsed lung, that will reportedly cost Detroit’s All-NBA table-setter an “extended period of time.”

How long “extended” might mean, at this stage, remains unclear. The Pistons’ official statement on the injury says the team will re-evaluate Cunningham in two weeks. The average time lost for an NBA player who suffers a collapsed lung, according to injury expert Jeff Stotts of In Street Clothes, is 26 days.

“Average,” of course, means that some returns happen more quickly than that. Back in 2015, Houston Rockets forward Terrence Jones suffered a partially collapsed lung in late March. He would miss only two weeks and six games, returning for the final eight games of the regular season and playing a key role on a Rockets team that made the Western Conference finals. And when he sustained a collapsed lung in 2023 while with the New Orleans Pelicans, CJ McCollum was back after 22 days, missing 12 games.

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It also means, though, that returns can take longer — sometimes much longer. Back in 2021, while still a member of the Portland Trail Blazers, when McCollum suffered his first collapsed lung, that one cost him 41 days, keeping him on the shelf for 18 games.

If Cunningham hits the bull’s-eye on the average return-to-play timeline in Stotts’ database, that would peg a prospective comeback to April 13 — the day after the end of the 2025-26 NBA regular season.

Entering Thursday’s action, Cunningham has played in 61 games, but only 60 of those count toward the 65-game threshold for year-end awards eligibility under the player participation guidelines the NBA instituted before the 2023-24 season. You have to play at least 20 minutes in a game for it to “count,” and since Cunningham left after just five minutes on Tuesday, his appearance against the Wizards doesn’t.

If Cunningham’s able to return immediately after his in-two-weeks re-evaluation, he could be available for the Pistons’ final five games, giving him an opportunity to get over the 65-game finish line. If the check-in turns up evidence that he’d be best served taking another couple of weeks to heal, though, costing him the rest of the regular season, Cunningham would find himself ineligible for consideration by the media members who comprise the awards electorate. Which feels preposterous, because the 24-year-old — who is 15th in the NBA in minutes per game and 28th in total minutes, and who had played in just under 90% of Detroit’s games this season before someone landed on his back — has been a top-10 player this season by virtually any measure.

Cunningham is averaging 24.5 points, 9.9 assists — second in the NBA, behind only Nikola Jokic — 5.6 rebounds and 1.5 steals in 34.4 minutes per game. (I know it’s, like, the 50,000th most notable thing about this situation, but still: Cunningham leaving after only five assist-less minutes against Washington dropped him down to 9.9 dimes per game, when he was on pace to become just the eighth player in NBA history to average 20-10-5 for a full season. Just brutal.) He’s finishing at the rim, generating free throws, dishing assists and snagging blocks and steals all at career-high rates, and doing it while grading out as a plus contributor to, and the leading minutes-getter on, the NBA’s No. 2 defense.

Reasonable people can quibble with Cade’s shooting marks: 51.3% on 2-pointers, 34.6% on 3-pointers and 81.3% at the free-throw line, landing in the bottom 10 in effective field-goal percentage and true shooting percentage among players who use at least 25% of their teams’ offensive possessions. But in spite of that relative inefficiency, chances are good that your advanced stat of choice loves him.

Among players who’ve played at least 40 games this season, Cunningham ranks fourth in The BBall Index’s LEBRON, sixth in box plus-minus and tied for sixth in value over replacement player, seventh in ESPN’s Net Points Added, eighth in DARKO daily plus-minus and win shares, ninth in estimated plus-minus and Neil Paine’s LAKER, 10th in Jeremias Engelmann’s xRAPM and 12th in player efficiency rating. The Pistons have outscored opponents by 10.8 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions in Cunningham’s minutes — just beneath the league-leading, defending-champion Thunder’s net rating over the course of the full season — and score at a top-two clip with him at the controls.

Cunningham isn’t the only reason Detroit has built on last year’s incredible turnaround by climbing to the precipice of the franchise’s first 50-win campaign since 2007-08 and vaulting up to the top spot in the Eastern Conference. He’s the biggest one, though … which is why his absence could throw a pretty significant hurdle in the path of a Pistons team hoping to stay in that lofty perch.

Significant, but not insurmountable. The Pistons enter Thursday’s rematch with the Wizards in first place in the East at 49-19, holding a 3.5-game lead over the second-place Boston Celtics. They also hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over Boston, having beaten the Celtics three times in four tries this season, and look to have a friendlier stretch-run slate, with the East’s seventh-toughest remaining schedule, while the C’s have the third-toughest, according to Tankathon.

While Boston might project to have a tougher finishing slate, though, Detroit’s isn’t exactly a picnic. The Pistons still have meetings coming up against the Thunder, the suddenly scorching Lakers and Hawks, the postseason-bound Raptors, Magic and Hornets, and a perked-up Pelicans team that’s been playing .500 ball for more than two months and is 9-5 since the All-Star break, plus a pair of games against the Timberwolves (who might be without their own All-NBA guard, Anthony Edwards). 

The glass-half-full take: The Pistons have gone 5-2 in the seven games Cunningham has missed this season — 6-2, if you include the win over Washington after his early exit — and have outscored opponents by a sturdy-if-unspectacular 2.7 points-per-100 with him off the floor. They’ve survived non-Cade minutes largely on the strength of their elite defense, cranking up the ball pressure to force turnovers on a panic-inducing 18.1% of opponents’ offensive possessions, a mark that would lead the league. The concurrent absence of Isaiah Stewart, himself sidelined by a left calf strain, complicates the “let’s defend like demons” approach somewhat … but Detroit’s won the minutes with neither Cade nor Beef Stew on the floor, too.

It’s worth noting, though, that Detroit has benefited from opponents shooting just 32.8% from long range in those non-Cunningham minutes. A shift in the vicissitudes of 3-point variance could mean an analogous decline in the effectiveness of those units … especially if an offense that’s been precariously precipitated on Cunningham’s ability to unlock coverages and create good looks continues to sputter in his absence.

The Pistons have scored 8.4 fewer points-per-100 with Cade off the floor than when he’s at the wheel. According to Cleaning the Glass, among shot creators who’ve logged at least 1,500 minutes this season, only Jokić, LaMelo Ball, Jamal Murray, James Harden, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Julius Randle have had a larger on-court/off-court impact on their teams’ offensive fortunes than Cunningham this season.

“All year, we’ve shown that we have the depth of a group that can win basketball games, just based upon our physicality, style, how hard we play,” Pistons forward Tobias Harris told The Athletic. “So, I think, obviously, we want him to be in the best of health. Until he gets back, we’ve got to hold the fort down, and guys have just got to step up with the next-man mentality, and every player is going to be expected to do more.”

When Cunningham went down against Washington, Pistons head coach J.B. Bickerstaff turned to reserve guard Daniss Jenkins, a pleasant early-season surprise who’d been in a frigid shooting slump for the better part of three months. Jenkins finished with 15 points on 4-for-9 shooting with seven assists against two turnovers in 21 minutes against the Wiz; Bickerstaff will need much more of that for the foreseeable future.

He’ll need more from center Jalen Duren, who’s proven capable this season of shouldering a more significant share of the scoring workload en route to his first All-Star appearance. He’ll need more from third-year guard Marcus Sasser, who’s undersized but pugnacious and can shoot the cover off the ball; he’ll need more from wings Caris LeVert and Kevin Huerter, who can both serve as complementary ball-handlers who can help lighten the load for the likes of Jenkins and Sasser as they step into larger on-ball responsibilities.

And — if he’s willing to use this dicey moment as an opportunity to experiment a little bit — he’ll need more from Ausar Thompson, who just returned from a five-game absence of his own due to a sprained ankle. In a Cade-less context, Thompson’s combination of size, strength, quickness and athleticism make him arguably Detroit’s best advantage-creator and most threatening downhill driver; tossing him the keys a bit and seeing whether he can make an on-the-ball impact similar to what brother Amen’s provided in Houston might not be the worst idea for a Pistons team with its sights set on making a deep playoff run.

“It’s extremely important trying to find the right combinations for the different situations that we might face,” Bickerstaff told reporters on Tuesday. “And we’ll continue to grow.”

They’ll need to. There’s no good time to lose a player as phenomenal as Cunningham, but having it happen with three weeks left in the season gives the Pistons a chance to develop some off-speed pitches that could prove beneficial in the playoffs. To get where they want to go, though — back to competing for a championship for the first time in 20 years — they’ll need to be able to rely on their heater. The Pistons go as Cade Cunningham goes; the state of his recovery is now the biggest open question in the Eastern Conference.