Pistons reach the second round, and Detroit's downtown turns it into a week

The Detroit Pistons closed out the Orlando Magic 116 to 94 in Game 7 on Sunday at Little Caesars Arena, finishing a comeback from a 3 to 1 series hole and taking their first playoff series since 2008. It is the first postseason series a Detroit team has won since the arena opened in 2017, and it puts the Pistons in the Eastern Conference semifinals for the first time in more than a decade.

The game stopped being close in the middle. Detroit outscored Orlando by roughly 20 points across the second and third quarters, per NBA.com, and never gave the lead back. Cade Cunningham finished with 32 points and 12 assists and Tobias Harris added 30, his highest scoring night of the season. Paolo Banchero led Orlando with 38, but the Magic had been without Franz Wagner for the last three games of the series.

Cleveland is next. The second round opens Tuesday at Little Caesars Arena, with Game 2 on Thursday, before the series shifts to Cleveland for Games 3 and 4, according to the published series schedule. That is two more downtown game nights this week, on the heels of a first round that already ran the full seven games.

For the blocks around the arena, that matters. The Pistons run an official watch party on the Little Caesars Arena Plaza in District Detroit, with plaza activities before the doors open and giveaways inside, and the team has leaned on that format throughout this postseason run, per dbusiness. The bars and restaurants that ring the District, Comerica Park and Ford Field have spent the spring absorbing the overflow from those nights. A second-round series guarantees them at least two more.

Cleveland also travels well. The drive up from Ohio is short enough to bring a real contingent of visiting fans into downtown on game nights, which gives the surrounding businesses a different kind of crowd than a series against a Florida team produced.

The Pistons went down three games to one against Orlando, then won three straight to send it back to Detroit, where they finished it. It is the second time the franchise has erased a 3 to 1 deficit, after doing it against Orlando in 2003 as well. For a team that went years without this kind of May relevance, the next two weeks give downtown a reason to fill up again.