It’s funny, actually. Outside of our Gotham bubble, there are a lot of people who seem utterly smitten by the Detroit Pistons. It’s understandable. The Pistons won 14 games a year ago. They started this season 0-4. They were still under .500, at 25-26, as late as Feb. 5, and by then they’d already lost their exciting young shooting guard, Jaden Ivey, who broke his leg New Year’s Day.

But then the Pistons put together a streak of nine wins in 10 games, they wound up tripling their win total from last season, they began to play with an appealing fearlessness and swagger, all of it led by one of the league’s most dynamic players in point guard Cade Cunningham.

And in these first four games of this Eastern Conference opening-round series with the Knicks, they’ve mostly honored all of their advance notices. They don’t back down from a fracas or a fight. They are aggressive. They shoot the 3 with abandon. And Cunningham has been sublime: 25.8 points, 9.0 assists, 8.8 rebounds per game.

They’ve been one of the hits of the NBA’s first round.