After more than a decade of horrible losses and painfully bad seasons, nearly all of Detroit’s sports teams are, finally, on the upswing.

While teams like the Lions and Red Wings are full of young talent and potential, the Pistons are out-swinging all of them, and will be the next Detroit team to make the playoffs.

Over the past three years, the Pistons have collected a deep and versatile talent pool and have a front office set up to perfectly match the team’s timeline.

With the NBA season less than a month away, hope for the future of the Pistons has reached a high not seen since the days of the Going to Work era, whose defense and balanced play brought the franchise an NBA Championship in 2004.

The team is led by rising second-year guard Cade Cunningham, who General Manager Troy Weaver took with the No.1 overall pick in last year’s draft. After just a year in the league, Cunningham is already a bonafide all-star, whose versatile offensive attacks and scrappy defense allowed him to finish top three among the league’s rookies in nearly all statistical categories.

No stat, however, can show the amount of heart the 20-year-old has for the team. After being drafted, Cunningham famously donned a pair of buffs, — a style of sunglasses significant to Detroit’s culture — pointed at the camera, and said “Detroit Pistons, I’m all the way in, let’s do it,” on national television.

Every second of every play of his rookie campaign proved the level of passion that that move boasted.

Cunningham is the rising superstar that the franchise has been searching for for more than a decade. He is joined by rising third-year players Saddiq Bey and Isaiah Stewart. This summer, Bey was training so hard that the team told him to take a couple weeks away from basketball. He responded by spending those weeks in the mountains of Colorado, altitude training.

In his two years with the team, Stewart has already spent time standing over former Piston Blake Griffin — to a standing ovation from the Detroit crowd — and ran over nearly every member of the Pistons trying to pay back LeBron James for the elbow and fist that left Stewart face covered in a mosaic of blood.

Bey and Stewart could not more perfectly embody the blue-collar, get-your-hands-dirty approach that has defined the franchise’s culture for more than 30 years. Not only that, but they’ve also put up the stats to match. Stewart averaged nearly a double-double with more than a block a game, and Bey became the first Piston in nearly four years to drop 50 points in a game.

To top it all off, the addition of combo guard Jaden Ivey in this year’s draft spells trouble for teams in the East for years to come. Ivey is a lightning-quick walking bucket with underrated distribution skills that seem to compliment Cunningham’s game perfectly.

More than just raw talent and individual passion, the fiscal side of the team – which has prevented so many great teams from becoming dynasties – is more than in order.

Thanks to shrewd moves on Weaver’s part, the team has more than $6 million in cap space, a number that explodes to nearly $40 million next season. This gives the team more than enough room to make a move for the team’s missing piece either next offseason or the one after.

The team is set up perfectly to mirror the trajectory of the Cleveland Cavaliers, who are now a force to be reckoned with in the East. The Cavs stayed patient, accumulating young talent and draft capital, until the opportunity presented itself, and they made a move for all-star Donovan Mitchell to help launch them to the next level.

That opportunity, for the Pistons, is — at most— two years away, at which point the team will be poised to enter not just the play-in, but to claim a top six seed.