It started with a benign pain in the right shoulder. Michael Blackstone, currently with the Detroit Pistons, was an assistant general manager with the New Orleans Pelicans at the time in 2023. He had begun feeling discomfort in the offseason, but it worsened during the Summer League, prompting him to meet with his primary physician. A CT scan, PET scan and a biopsy later, reality hit.

Blackstone, a non-smoker, had stage 4 lung cancer that had metastasized to his shoulder and spine. He spent that afternoon crying on his couch before his family rushed to him. Blackstone has been receiving treatment for it at the Mayo Clinic in Florida, undergoing aggressive chemotherapy, and even took up a new job with the Detroit Pistons along the way. And after keeping his health situation private for years, Blackstone has decided to talk about it for one and only one reason.

“The reason I’m talking about it now versus the past three years is because time is basically all I have now, right?” Blackstone told The Athletic. “Time is what matters… If I didn’t pay attention to the discomfort I was having and ask a very innocent question, I wouldn’t be here right now. It was already Stage 4 when we found it; it had already gone too far.

“If I actually went with what I was told initially and didn’t actually demand the scan in combination with my doctor, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.”

Blackstone is asking everyone, not just NBA fans, to take every minute detail of their health very seriously. The survival rate for someone with late-stage or metastatic, or late-stage non-small cell lung cancer is 12 percent. Lung cancer is also the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States.

But Blackstone did not leave basketball after learning of his cancer. Trajan Langdon brought him from New Orleans to Detroit in 2024. He honestly accepted his new role as executive vice president of basketball operations without knowing how much time he had left to help rebuild the team.

It is during these tough times that his connection to Detroit and love for the game have kept him fighting through radiation. But he doesn’t work from home. You’ll still see him pacing through the Pistons Performance Center. Blackstone also attends practices, shootarounds, and games, and he stays involved with the team’s plans.

“I don’t want to sit in my house and just wait and wallow away,” Blackstone said. “So, I’m trying to live as normal a life as I possibly can, knowing I’ve got to make some changes.”

Blackstone also revealed that he kept his diagnosis private from staff for a long time and only recently began sharing it.

Even though the Pistons executive has started discussing it, Blackstone reiterated that he isn’t going down without a fight.

There’s a beautiful line by Hunter Patterson of The Athletic, who wrote Blackstone’s story, that I’d like to requote: “He wants to make clear that although he has cancer, cancer doesn’t have him.”

The diagnosis has changed how Blackstone now views time and health. He said that the “logic side” of his brain tends to dominate his approach to everything.

“It helps me get through what this whole thing is. It is what it is, I have what I have. I don’t control any of it; there’s nothing I can do. I do what the doctors tell me to do. I ask a ton of questions,” the executive said.

Blackstone admitted that if his life were to end tomorrow, even though he doesn’t want it to, he believes he has “lived a great life.”

“I am so lucky with the types of things I’ve been able to do… The people I’ve met, the places we’ve gone, the friends I have, the support system, this job, the people (in Detroit) — all the way down the line,” Blackstone said.

For Blackstone, continuing to work is also a way to keep living normally. He does not want his diagnosis to make him sit and wait for what happens next. At the same time, Blackstone also knows how serious Stage 4 lung cancer is, but he does not see it as the end of his journey.

“There’s hope,” he said. “There’s hope because of different advancements made, especially in lung cancer, that we could ultimately get to the place where this becomes a chronic disease versus a death sentence.”

Blackstone has spent ample time with his wife Julia, his parents, sister and close friends. He compares his situation to a ‘Category 5’ hurricane. This implies that it doesn’t matter whether the wind is moving at 200 or 1,000 miles per hour. It’s still Category 5, and there are no more categories after that.

“Pay attention to the signs, don’t ignore them,” Blackstone reiterated.

This message is one reason Blackstone decided to speak out about his experience after keeping his diagnosis private for almost three years. He wants to use his platform to help others, and he has done so more than once in recent days.

“Pay attention to the weird pain,” he told the Detroit Free Press last week. “Pay attention to the ‘something’s not right.’ It’s not, every pain, go to the doctor, that’s not what I’m talking about. But you know your own body. You know. Everybody does. Something’s not right for long enough, what’s the worst thing that happens if you get it checked out? They tell you nothing’s wrong? Why not go get it checked out?”

Blackstone’s path to the NBA was neither the most straightforward nor the most intentional, and he describes his path as an anomaly. More than two decades ago, Blackstone was at the Shapiro Negotiations Institute, and the San Antonio Spurs were his client. He sorted multiple player contracts with R.C. Buford (then GM).

He eventually landed a job as the executive director of basketball operations at the Cleveland Cavaliers, another client of the negotiation company where he worked. It was there that he mastered the art of developing a viable cap strategy and became an expert in CBA rules. The rest is history.