The Detroit Pistons went 60-22 in the regular season and took the Eastern Conference's top seed — the franchise's largest regular-season jump in league history, two years removed from a 14-win season and a 28-game losing streak. On Sunday night at Little Caesars Arena, the Orlando Magic, the 8-seed, won Game 1 of the first round 112-101. It was Detroit's 11th consecutive home playoff loss, a streak that now reaches 18 years and that, by the Detroit Free Press's accounting, is the longest in NBA history. [1]

The Pistons next try to break it at 7 p.m. ET on Wednesday, in the same building. [2]

Streaks of this kind are not quite what people think they are. The Pistons last won a playoff game at home on May 26, 2008 — Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals at The Palace of Auburn Hills, against the Boston Celtics, who would go on to win the championship. [1] Nine of the losses that followed came at The Palace against Cleveland teams, in 2009 and 2016, and then against Milwaukee in 2019. Four more arrived at Little Caesars Arena in the 2025 first round against the Knicks. Game 1 on Sunday made eleven. Four buildings the franchise no longer occupies, one era of ownership, two arenas, and three head coaches the franchise no longer employs. The streak is older than most of the players on the current roster's memory of watching basketball.

The thing about a losing streak in a city is that the city remembers the last win better than the team does. The Palace of Auburn Hills — where 2008 ended — has been demolished. Rip Hamilton, who scored 20 in that last home win over Boston, is on the Pistons Hall of Honor. Antonio McDyess, who pulled down 16 rebounds, retired in 2013. The Palace was a forty-minute drive from downtown Detroit; Little Caesars Arena sits inside the city, part of the billion-dollar rebuild of the area around it. When the Pistons moved downtown in 2017, they moved into a building that had never seen them win a postseason game. They still have not.

Cade Cunningham scored 39 points on Sunday. It was a playoff career-high. He went 12-of-24 from the field, took 11 free throws, and in the second half carried an offense that, for long stretches, was the only reason the game stayed competitive. Tobias Harris added 22. The Pistons shot 45 percent. None of that was the problem. The problem was that Orlando, coming off a 43-39 regular season that ended with a Play-In Tournament berth, played looser and more coherent basketball than the team that had spent 82 games learning how to win close games. Paolo Banchero scored 23. The Magic hit 14 three-pointers to Detroit's 9. They took the lead early in the second quarter, stretched it in the third, and held off every Pistons run. Orlando had not won a road playoff game since 2020. They won one on the court of the team that had the best regular-season record in the conference. [3]

The losing streak has structural features a casual viewer would miss. The 2008 Celtics won a championship. The 2009 and 2016 Cavaliers were led by LeBron James and were on championship runs themselves — the 2016 team won the title. The 2019 Bucks won 60 games and had Giannis Antetokounmpo at his MVP peak. Even the 2025 Knicks reached the conference finals. Each of the eleven losses came against a team that was, by any reasonable measure, a more mature contender than the Pistons were in that moment. What is under stress on Wednesday is whether a 60-win regular season produces a team mature enough to break a pattern that was, until Sunday, always made against teams operating at a higher frequency.

The 2025 Knicks, losing four home games to the Pistons would-be-snappers last spring, snapped their own road playoff drought and pushed Detroit to six games; Detroit's 15-game overall postseason losing streak ended at Madison Square Garden, on the road, in Game 5. That is the right frame for Wednesday. The overall playoff-losing streak was broken in 2025. The home playoff-losing streak was not. The two counts are different. The home count is the one that says something about a building, a home crowd, a pregame routine — what sports writers used to call, perhaps too seriously, the architecture of confidence. Detroit has not established that architecture in any arena it currently occupies.

What the paper is watching for on Wednesday is not the final score but whether the pattern breaks at its foundation. Pistons fans at Little Caesars Arena have watched four home playoff losses in the last twelve months. They have not seen a home playoff win in their adult basketball-watching lives, unless they are over forty. The 60-win regular season bought them Game 1 in their building, and Game 1 went the way every other recent Game 1 in this building has gone. A Game 2 loss, against an 8-seed, in the same arena, would put the series at 0-2 and transform the conversation from "longest streak in league history" to "structural home-court liability." A Game 2 win would not end the streak — the streak is about the playoff losing at home, not a single win — but it would begin to end the architecture that produced it.

Both things remain possible at tip-off.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos