Playing for Keeps by David Halberstam

Author:David Halberstam [Halberstam, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8614-2
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2012-11-14T00:07:00+00:00

18. Detroit, the 1980s

THE PROBLEM FOR THE Bulls was that there was another team that had come together just a little earlier and was itself challenging the hegemony of the vaunted Celtics of Bird, McHale, and Parish. That was the Detroit Pistons, led by Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, and Adrian Dantley. The Pistons were a very tough and physical team (in time they were given the nickname “The Bad Boys,” which made some of the NBA’s executives more than a little uneasy), and they played an extremely aggressive game that seemed to challenge the very nature of how the game was refereed. “Detroit was our albatross,” Bulls assistant coach Johnny Bach once said. Until they beat the Pistons, the Bulls could forget about going to the Finals.

The Pistons had come together just a few years ahead of the Bulls, put together with great skill by their joint architects, Jack McCloskey, the general manager, and his close friend Chuck Daly, the coach. As the Bulls began to elevate the level of their game, they found that the Pistons had arrived a bit ahead of them and were a bit more cohesive, a little deeper, a little more physical, and a little more determined and focused in their play. Though in 1987-1988 the Bulls added two exceptional players to a weak nucleus, it was the year after the Pistons added John Salley and Dennis Rodman to a strong nucleus. The shadow cast over Chicago Stadium as the Bulls began to get better was not that of Larry Bird and the Celtics or of Magic Johnson and the Lakers but of Isiah Thomas and the Pistons.

The Pistons’ rise began in 1981, when with the number-two pick in the country they drafted Isiah Thomas out of Indiana. He was small—listed as six foot one and possibly even shorter—immensely talented, smart, and absolutely fearless. If he had been six foot six, the team’s PR man Matt Dobek said, he would have been Michael Jordan. Dallas had the first pick in that draft, but Thomas deliberately tried to alienate the Dallas management during a predraft visit, saying that he did not particularly want to play there; in his immortal words, he was not into “that cowboy shit.” His ploy worked well, and the Mavericks’ management, thus rebuffed, took Mark Aguirre instead. If Thomas had not scared off the Dallas management, and if the Pistons had drafted Aguirre instead—a talented but not an overwhelming player—the Pistons never would have risen to the top.

Thomas tried to talk the Detroit management out of drafting him as well, but Jack McCloskey had scouted him far too carefully. He was the kind of point guard that you could build a team around, McCloskey thought. “But I don’t want to play here,” he had told McCloskey at their first meeting. “I want to play in Chicago.”

“Well, Isiah,” McCloskey had answered, “that doesn’t matter because we’re going to draft you, and you’re going to play here.”

“But who do you have for me to pass the ball to?” he had asked.

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