Cade Cunningham leads Pistons comeback to force Game 7 as Magic collapse

The Orlando Magic came into Friday with a chance to pull off a historic upset over the No. 1-seeded Detroit Pistons in front of their home crowd. Instead, they pulled off a historic second-half collapse.

After going down by as many as 24 points, Detroit pushed through with a big third quarter to get back into the game. But more importantly, the Magic went completely ice-cold from the floor, missing more than 20 straight field goal attempts in the second half and only scoring one bucket in the entire fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, with the season on the line, Cade Cunningham came alive. The Pistons guard hit 19 second-half points as Detroit picked up the 93-79 win.

The Magic were playing without Franz Wagner, who missed his second-straight playoff game with a calf strain. But that alone wasn’t enough to explain Orlando’s complete inability to hit a basket in the fourth quarter.

The teams kept it close in the first quarter, with strong defense from both sides keeping the score relatively low to start. But in the second quarter, the Magic went on a huge scoring run to pull ahead by double digits and firing up the Orlando crowd. That lead only kept growing as the game headed towards halftime, with the Magic heading into the locker room up 22 points.

Orlando played very well in the first half, outplaying Detroit across the board stats-wise as the Pistons faltered from the floor. But Detroit emerged from the locker room looking like a completely new team.

Orlando’s scoring slowed down significantly in the third quarter, but their defense stayed strong, shutting down the Pistons’ comeback attempts — for part of the quarter, that is. A 16-2 run by Detroit suddenly narrowed the lead heading into the fourth.

Early in the fourth quarter, Cunningham cut that deficit down to five points. And a few minutes later, a pair of free throws and a steal-and-score from Cunningham brought the Pistons back even at 72-72.

Meanwhile, the Magic went completely cold. Orlando missed 24 consecutive shots in the third and fourth quarters as Detroit chipped away at the lead, until suddenly it was gone. Paolo Banchero scored the Magic’s only field goal of the fourth quarter with a dunk with 2:24 remaining.

That gave the Pistons even more room to pile it on, pulling to a double-digit lead in the final minutes of the game and absolutely ruining the party in Orlando.

This story will be updated.