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.