On a Saturday afternoon in the middle of March, Cade Cunningham walks into a studio at the Detroit Pistons Performance Center and plops himself down in front of a big-screen television that has a Zoom call on display. As the first question streams from the monitor, Cunningham cuts it off mid-sentence: “I’m proud of that, man!”
The topic at hand isn’t his Rising Stars MVP trophy or Detroit’s recent (and only) three-game winning streak. Instead, the 2021 NBA draft’s No. 1 pick is grinning ear to ear about Wordle, a mega popular online game that requires participants to guess a secret five-letter word in six tries. A few weeks earlier, Cunningham posted one of his scores on Twitter. It was his fourth time playing and he needed only two tries to guess it right.
“I didn’t even know that people don’t really get those type of scores,” he beams. Having just wrapped up practice and a 30-minute post-practice lift, Cunningham is wearing a blue Pistons tank top over a black hoodie. He looks more refreshed than exhausted as his palms turn up with a shrug. “I thought it was pretty common to get in the second try.”
