Cleveland was dead.

With 3:00 left in Game 5 at Little Caesars Arena Wednesday night, the Cavaliers trailed the Pistons 103-94. Detroit had just gotten a Tobias Harris corner three off an offensive rebound. The crowd was on its feet. Cade Cunningham was in the middle of an MVP-caliber performance. The Pistons were 180 seconds away from a 3-2 series lead and home court for Game 6 in Cleveland.

Then James Harden remembered he is James Harden.

The Cavs closed regulation on a 9-0 run in less than three minutes, dragged the game into overtime tied at 103, and finished off a 117-113 win to take a 3-2 series lead. Game 6 is Friday night in Cleveland at 7 PM ET on Prime Video. The win probability calculator gives Cleveland a 60.9% chance to close out the series at home — and after what they just pulled off in Detroit, you have to like their chances.

Let's get into how this happened.

The Closing Stretch

Down 103-94 with 3:00 to play, the Cavaliers needed everything to go right. It did.

Max Strus kicked things off with his sixth three of the night — a playoff career high — cutting the lead to 100-94 with 3:29 to go. Strus finished with 20 points on 6-of-8 from deep, the kind of role-player explosion you absolutely need on the road in a Game 5.

Then Evan Mobley went to work in clutch time. The reigning Defensive Player of the Year — who had been getting torched in pick-and-roll coverages early in the series — hit a three from above the break with a minute left to cut it to 103-101. Cade missed on the next possession. Ausar Thompson (who had 4 steals and 3 blocks all night) swatted a Mitchell drive on the final regulation possession to send it to OT — but Mobley had already done the damage. He finished with 19 points, 8 rebounds, 8 assists, and 3 blocks, and Coach Kenny Atkinson said afterward it was "maybe the best I've seen Evan defensively, and that's saying something."

In overtime, Jarrett Allen and Donovan Mitchell got the first two buckets to put Cleveland up 107-103 with 3:14 to go. The Cavs never trailed again.

The 9-0 run to close regulation. The 13-0 run that defined the entire fourth quarter. The Pistons watched a nine-point lead with three minutes left evaporate in slow motion.

The Harden Game

For James Harden, this was the box score line of a player who refuses to let the moment slip away:

30 points · 8 rebounds · 6 assists · 11-of-14 from the line · 3-of-10 from three · +11

That free-throw line is the giveaway. Harden got to the rim or got to the line whenever Cleveland needed a bucket down the stretch — he drew 8 fouls and was the one creating the offense that finally cracked Detroit's defense. The shooting wasn't pretty (8-of-21 overall), but he hit when he had to.

Per NBA.com's deep dive on the night: this was Harden's ninth career 15-plus-point fourth quarter in the playoffs, tying him with Stephen Curry for the fourth-most all-time. The only names ahead of him? LeBron James (14), Kobe Bryant (12), and Kevin Durant (9). That's the company he's now keeping. Vintage Harden in clutch time was supposed to be a thing of the past after Houston, after Brooklyn, after Philly. Apparently nobody told 36-year-old James Harden in Cleveland.

Coach Atkinson on Harden after Game 4: "I think they're still learning each other... they have great synergy in terms of their basketball philosophy. They both kinda understand what we want, what our team needs."

He was talking about the Harden-Mitchell pairing. Game 5 was the night that pairing started looking inevitable.

Cade's Quiet 39

Here's the brutal part for Detroit: Cade Cunningham went off and they still lost.

The Pistons star finished with 39 points, 7 rebounds, 9 assists, and 2 steals on 13-of-27 shooting — including 6-of-10 from three at 60%. He hit clutch shots. He drew fouls. He was the best player on the floor for most of the night.

He just couldn't do it alone.

Around Cade, the Pistons got:

• Daniss Jenkins — 19 off the bench (career playoff high)
• Tobias Harris — 13 on 6-of-19, terrible efficiency in the loss
• Caris LeVert — 7 points on 2-of-7
• Jalen Duren — 9 points, 5 rebounds, -16 in his minutes
• Ausar Thompson — Stat-stuffed defensively (7 reb, 5 ast, 4 stl, 3 blk) but only 6 points on 2-of-6

When your second-leading scorer is a rookie off the bench and your starting forward shoots 31% from the field, you don't deserve to win a Game 5 no matter what your franchise guy does. Detroit's offense outside of Cunningham was 19-of-58 from the field — 33%. That's how a team blows a 9-point lead in three minutes.

The bigger context here is that Cunningham averaged 32.5 / 6.5 / 6.3 against the Magic in Round 1. He went 45 and 32 in Games 5 and 6 of that series to force a Game 7 (which Detroit won). The Pistons rode their MVP candidate to a 3-1 comeback in the first round. Now they need to do it again — except Cleveland is a better team than Orlando, and the road in Game 6 is at TD Garden... sorry, at Rocket Arena, where the Cavs went 30-14 in the regular season and 3-0 against Toronto in Round 1.

The Numbers That Decided It

A few stats from the box score that explain the comeback:

Free throws. Cleveland: 31-of-38 (81.6%). Detroit: 18-of-20 (90%). The Cavs went to the line 18 more times. In a road playoff game. When you're +13 at the line, you don't need to outshoot the home team — you just need to keep the game close enough to make it matter.

Bench production. Cleveland's bench scored 31 points. Detroit's bench scored 27 — and 19 of those were from Jenkins. Strip Jenkins out and Detroit's bench was essentially invisible. Cleveland got contributions from Schroder (5 points, 5 assists), Merrill (6 on 2-of-5), and Tyson off the bench in critical minutes.

Three-point shooting. Cleveland shot 40% from three (14-of-35). Detroit shot 33% (11-of-33). Outside of Cunningham's 6-of-10 night, the rest of the Pistons shot 5-of-23 from deep (22%). Brutal.

Most unanswered. Cleveland's biggest unanswered run was 13-0. Detroit's was 12-0. The difference is when those runs happened. The Cavs' came late. The Pistons' came in a stretch they couldn't sustain.

Turnovers. Cleveland had 17 (16 player turnovers), Detroit had 15. The Cavs giving up the ball 17 times in a road playoff game and still winning by 4 in overtime is a credit to their defense and their ability to flip possessions. Cleveland scored 16 points off Detroit turnovers, while Detroit scored 27 off Cleveland's. Yet the Cavs still won. That's the kind of game where the team that wants it more usually finds a way.

The Stat That Matters Going Forward

Per NBA.com: the team that wins Game 5 of a tied 2-2 series goes on to win the series 81.7% of the time. Cleveland has home court for Game 6. The Cavs went 30-14 at home in the regular season. They're playing better basketball than at any point in this series. And they have the historical math, the home crowd, and the momentum.

Detroit has Cade Cunningham — who is good enough to drag a team through anything — but his supporting cast has gone cold at the worst possible time. Tobias Harris cannot continue to shoot 14% from three. Jalen Duren cannot continue to play 30 minutes and post a -16. The Pistons need 2-3 of their non-Cade guys to break out, or they need to win Game 6 in Cleveland on a Cunningham 50-point night, then somehow steal Game 7 too.

That's a lot of asks.

What Cleveland Has To Do

The blueprint for closing this out isn't complicated:

Keep the foul rate where it was. 38 free throw attempts in Game 5 is unsustainable, but anything north of 25 is a winning formula. Harden's 14 trips to the line set the tone.

Get Mitchell going. Donovan was good in Game 5 (21 points, 7-of-18) but not the best version of himself. He was 1-of-8 from three. The Cavs need at least one game where Mitchell is the alpha and Harden is the secondary.

Mobley anchors the defense. That was the difference late. The Cavs' defense in the fourth quarter was suffocating because Mobley was switching everything and protecting the rim. He has to do it again Friday.

Don't let Cade go nuclear. Easier said than done. Cunningham is averaging 32 a game in the playoffs and finding a level even he probably didn't know he had. The Cavs need to make somebody else beat them. Force the ball out of his hands in crunch time. Live with anybody-but-Cade on the final possession.

What's Next

Game 6: Friday, May 15. 7 PM ET. Prime Video. Rocket Arena.

If the Cavs win, they're headed to the Eastern Conference Finals against the Knicks — a series that would put Donovan Mitchell vs. Jalen Brunson at center court, the New York native vs. the New York hero, with a Finals trip on the line.

If the Pistons win, we get a Game 7 Sunday at Cleveland. The 1-seed gets one more shot at a Conference Finals appearance they were supposed to be making comfortably.

Either way, the comeback in Game 5 is going to be the moment Cavs fans remember from this series. Down 9 with 3 minutes left, on the road, against the 1-seed, against an MVP-caliber Cade Cunningham game. They flipped the math on Detroit. They got there because James Harden had one more "I am still that guy" performance in him, and because Max Strus refused to miss, and because Evan Mobley locked down a defensive possession on the last shot of regulation.

Now they finish it at home. The numbers say they will.

Game 6: Friday at 7 PM ET on Prime Video. Bring the popcorn.