Brandon Inge and Ben Wallace: A Tale of Two Detroit Sports Careers

Two Detroit sports underdogs peeled off their uniforms for the last time as members of their respective teams, and they both did it on Thursday.

While that’s not where the similarities end, the endings couldn’t have been more different. The only thing the cessations of their careers have in common is that they happened within hours of each other.

At approximately 4:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon, Brandon Inge was called into the manager’s office, and he certainly must have known what was cooking. When Inge stepped into Jim Leyland’s lair and saw that GM Dave Dombrowski and assistant GM Al Avila were also there, the trio likely didn’t even need to say a word.

Inge was out, given the ziggy by his patient-to-a-fault bosses.

This wasn’t so much a release as it was a mercy killing.

Inge’s baseball career in Detroit had become that rabid dog in To Kill a Mockingbird and the trio of Dombrowski, Avila and Leyland had no choice but to shoot it dead.

Detroit doesn’t have the reputation of Philadelphia or other tough sports burgs when it comes to booing its athletes out of town. The Motor City sports fan has a lot of forgiveness in his blood, sometimes to a fault.

But when it comes to Inge, the much-maligned utility man, there’s no question that the people had spoken. The Tigers organization, like any responsible customer service-based business, had no choice but to listen.

Inge, along with his .100 batting average, was jettisoned after Thursday’s game against Seattle. He was the butt of a wry and mean-spirited joke.

“Who bats after Brandon Inge?”

Answer: the other team.

In the end, there were one too many pop-outs, one too many strikeouts and one too many mistakes in the field. And each was followed by the cascades of booing in Comerica Park usually reserved for the superstar Tiger-killers from other teams.

I believe that last weekend’s unmerciful booing of Inge is what sealed his fate with the Tigers.

As the Tigers dropped three of four to the vaunted Texas Rangers, and as the entire team struggled to match forces with the two-time defending American League champions, Inge was hardly the Lone Ranger—as Leyland would say—when he struggled to to scratch out a hit.

But no Tiger was booed as savagely as Inge was as one at-bat after the other of his ended badly. He was the dead man walking—or in his case, striking out.

There was a stirring and murmuring in the crowd every time Inge strode to the plate against the Rangers, kind of like there is in those courtroom scenes in the movies.

A weekend of this and the organization that shuns drama decided to put an end to it on Thursday.

In the end, watching an Inge at-bat was—as the late, great sportswriter Jim Murray would say—like watching a guy walk into a noose.

About three hours after Inge was cashiered, Ben Wallace slipped on his Pistons jersey and his blue headband, and took the floor for what is likely the last time in his 16-year NBA career.

Nine of those seasons were spent in Detroit.

Boos didn’t rain from the Palace, however; far from it.

Wallace, who started the game at the insistence of coach Lawrence Frank, was greeted with a standing ovation by the sparse but grateful crowd. A video testimony of his brilliance as an undrafted player from Virginia Union played during a timeout. His Pistons teammates all donned blue headbands in honor of the man they call Big Ben.

The Pistons won, blasting the Philadelphia 76ers out of the gym, 108-86.

After the game, the 37-year-old Wallace appeared noncommittal about his future. After vehemently declaring that retirement was imminent earlier in the year (via ESPN), who among us will be surprised when he hangs up his sneakers and headband for good?

Inge and Wallace both arrived in town around the same time—Inge in 2001, Wallace the year prior.

Both were blue-collar players in their respective sports with less talent than most of their brethren, but with work ethics that dwarfed most.

Both were, at times, the face of their franchise.

You have now reached the end of the Similarity Zone.

Inge never left Detroit to play elsewhere, even when his bosses tried to show him the door. Wallace, on the other hand, grew mystified by coach Flip Saunders and took his act to Chicago in 2006 via free agency.

Ben Wallace and Chicago weren’t a good match. Just two years after inking a deal with the Bulls, Wallace was shipped to Cleveland. It didn’t work out very well with the Cavaliers, either.

By 2009 Wallace was back in Detroit, yet another prodigal son welcomed back by the sports faithful here.

Meanwhile, Inge was a loyal Tiger. Even when the team replaced his star with the likes of Ivan Rodriguez, Miguel Cabrera and, by proxy, Prince Fielder, Inge was like a warped Dickens character.

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

Both Inge and Wallace made All-Star teams playing in Detroit, but while that may appear to be a similarity, it really isn’t. Inge’s All-Star year (2009) was an aberration, while Wallace was a multiple-time All-Star who was Defensive Player of the Year four times.

Then there is the end of their respective careers in Detroit.

Inge was driven out of town, done in by poor performance and customer dissatisfaction. Wallace was lauded and cheered, all the way until he disappeared into the tunnel leading to the Pistons locker room.

But there is one more similarity.

Both Brandon Inge and Ben Wallace wore their team logos as if branded onto their heart. Even though Wallace fled via free agency, it wasn’t anything personal against the city or its basketball fans. It was hardly a surprise when Big Ben returned in 2009.

Inge, for his part, could have done a money grab last summer when the Tigers designated him for assignment. Yet he chose to stick it out, serve his time in the minors and hope for a call-up, which he got.

It’s ironic that this final similarity did nothing to diminish the extreme disparity of how Inge’s and Wallace’s commitment to their team and their city influenced their exits.

Detroit vilified Inge, but portrayed Wallace as a hero.

Go figure.

NBA’s “Player’s League” Claims Another Coaching Victim

It’s hard to imagine now, but there really was a time when NBA players didn’t rule the roost. There was a time—really, truly—when the players listened to the coach, obeyed orders, and felt privileged to play in the league.

The NBA coach of days gone by wore rumpled suits, chomped on cigars and taught things like the bounce pass and how to “deny” your man the basketball.

There were stars on the court, for sure. But for every Bill Russell, there was a Red Auerbach to rule with an iron fist.

The NBA coach had no assistant; he coached the team himself—offense and defense. He had the keys to the gym and made sure the trainer had enough tape. The coach helped make travel arrangements while also explaining the back door pass.

And the players listened.

It started to get away from the coaches during the late-1970s. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird entered the league and it became very evident that the fans paid to see superstar players play, not cerebral coaches teach and strategize.

Before long, the likes of Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan happened upon the scene and the coach became a foil—a second banana with a squirting daisy on his lapel.

It’s a player’s league, people say today. It’s a kind way of saying, “The coach can be replaced with a snap of certain players’ fingers.”

Today’s NBA coach is better off following the philosophy of the Pistons’ legendary Chuck Daly, who once described coaching the tallest millionaires in the world as akin to managing 12 different corporations.

Few coaches—if any—were better than Daly at making the players think that they were running the show, when it was “Daddy Rich” who was the real Great and Powerful Oz behind the curtain.

The so-called “player’s league” has chewed up and spit out another victim.

The New York Knicks, eons ago, lived in the penthouse of the NBA. Once, the Knicks were to basketball what the Canadiens were to hockey, what Shoemaker was to horse jockeying. Pro basketball and the Knicks went together like a pick and a roll.

It started as an East Coast game, pro basketball did, and you couldn’t get much more East Coast than New York City.

After some down years in the mid-1960s, the Knicks—with the help of a dreadful Pistons trade in which Detroit sent Dave DeBussschere to New York—not only got in the way of the vaunted Boston Celtics for league supremacy, they surpassed Auerbach and Bill Russell’s bunch.

The Knicks of Reed and Frazier and DeBusschere and Bradley won championships in 1970 and 1973.

The pro basketball team from Manhattan hasn’t won a championship since. They’ve only qualified for two NBA Finals—in 1994 and ’99—since ‘73.

The Knicks tried it with a superstar center (Patrick Ewing) for about 12 years, surrounding Ewing with various and sundry mini-stars, but aside from ’94 and ’99, they really didn’t come close to winning it all.

The latest victim of the “player’s league” is Mike D’Antoni.

D’Antoni resigned from the Knicks as coach this week, with the typical slings and arrows darting around him because of his supposedly tenuous relationship with superstar Carmelo Anthony.

Anthony, like Ewing, has the same amount of championship rings as you and I have.

D’Antoni joined the Knicks in 2008, in the midst of their latest state of disarray. It was yet another turbulent time inside Madison Square Garden, which was still shaking from the Isiah Thomas/Anucha Browne Sanders sexual harassment scandal.

D’Antoni then went out and did something unusual, for the Knicks: He brought some stability and a calming influence. It was only slightly less impressive than when Moses parted the Red Sea.

Then the Knicks acquired Anthony from Denver in February 2011, and the balance of power again shifted from coach to player.

The D’Antoni-Anthony drama was replaced on the back pages of the New York Post, temporarily, by “Linsanity”—the out-of-nowhere story of journeyman point guard Jeremy Lin and his ridiculous exploits in January and February.

The Knicks were winning games with Lin manning the point. They still weren’t anything close to elite, but they weren’t fodder for the Post’s cleverly stinging headlines on the back page—for a while.

Linsanity ebbed, the Knicks started losing again and the focus returned to D’Antoni and whether he had “lost” his players, something that happens a lot in this “player’s league.”

Stuck in a six-game losing streak, D’Antoni surprised everyone by turning in his coach’s whistle to his MSG bosses earlier this week.

Pistons coach Lawrence Frank, a firing victim with the New Jersey Nets a couple years ago, reacted with disgust to the circumstances surrounding D’Antoni’s resignation.

“That’s a damn shame,” Frank told the Free Press before the Pistons faced the Sacramento Kings on Wednesday night.

“Mike, one, is a hell of a coach, and a great guy. I’m sorry to hear that. That’s ridiculous.”

Frank wasn’t done.

“(The Knicks) had to get their (mess) right,” Frank said. “They were over the cap, very high paid, underperforming, so they had to suck scum. They had all these guys on one-year deals. So finally, they go for it, without a true training camp, then they add talented players a couple weeks ago. It’s a shame.”

It’s today’s NBA.

It didn’t do D’Antoni any favors that in their first game without him, the Knicks trounced Portland, 121-79.

Mike Woodson, an assistant and a former head coach himself, is the interim coach in New York. Good luck to him.

There were reports out of Orlando, in the days leading up to Thursday’s trading deadline, that Magic superstar center Dwight Howard had the power, if he wanted, to essentially have coach Stan Van Gundy fired.

The news barely made a ripple.

If reports came out of Boston that Bill Russell had the power to fire Red Auerbach, it would have been filed in the “man bites dog” category of journalism.

But that’s today’s NBA.

With all due respect to Lawrence Frank, et al, you gotta have a screw loose to want to coach these guys.

Will Knight Be Next Great Pistons Point Guard?

What does it say for the Pistons when, in the middle of their season, they are getting nudged off the front pages by the likes of a baseball bench warmer who hit .197 last season?

Brandon Inge is getting more media coverage than the Pistons. So is Ndamukong Suh, the football player, and his team doesn’t play any games of any meaning for another six months.

Even the high school girls are getting more space in the local papers, as their March Madness games get into full gear. Before long, the hoop-playing boys will be knocking the Pistons further from the front page.

The NBA season, in these parts, is about as in the background as elevator music.

The Pistons stink. On some nights, their stench is every bit as strong as the stuff the Brits famously wrap in newspaper and eat with chips.

But the Pistons don’t stink without some brightness in their future. They’re not ready for prime time, but they have a couple pieces—Mr. Little and Mr. Big.

Mr. Big is Greg Monroe, the Pistons’ second-year, athletic power forward/center, who’s beginning to make the 16-point, 15-rebound night a routine.

Mr. Little is Brandon Knight, the rookie point guard.

The two of them are reasons to be genuinely optimistic about a basketball team that has spent the past several years in purgatory after six straight trips to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Knight handles the ball on every possession, and despite his inexperience as a pro, the kid from Kentucky is averaging less than two turnovers per game. That’s a reason to get giddy, right there.

 

The Pistons have had two of the best point guards in NBA history—Dave Bing and Isiah Thomas. Both of them have something in common with Brandon Knight: the Pistons stunk when Bing and Isiah joined them, too.

In all three instances, the Pistons had sunk to ridiculously low depths before they plucked Bing, Thomas and Knight off the NBA draft board in 1966, 1981 and 2011, respectively.

Bing’s story has been told before by yours truly, and others.

The one where the Pistons coveted U-M’s Cazzie Russell, playing 30 miles west along I-94, and how they salivated at the thought of the local hero suiting up for them.

Only a stinking coin flip separated the Pistons from Russell in the summer of 1966. The other team in on the flip was the New York Knicks.

The coin was flipped inside league offices in New York. The Knicks must have had home office advantage—the coin flipped their way.

The Knicks grabbed Russell. The Pistons, deflated, nabbed Bing from Syracuse University.

Bing developed into a Hall of Fame point guard, and for my money helped save pro basketball in Detroit. Russell had a decent career, but nothing close to Bing’s.

Ray Scott, a Piston at the time, recalled to me recently that the Pistons did the unthinkable with Bing, initially.

“They didn’t play Dave right away,” Scott told me as he spent some time with Big Al Beaton and me on “The Knee Jerks” podcast a few weeks ago.

 

I was aghast.

The Pistons corrected that mistake 15 years later, when Thomas arrived from Indiana University.

The Pistons, once again, stunk. They won 16 games two years before Isiah, and 21 games the year prior.

Isiah was aghast.

He made no secret of his concerns.

“I wonder whom I will pass to with the Pistons,” I remember Thomas pondering aloud before the 1981 NBA draft, and he wasn’t trying to be mean. He was right—the Pistons, with their 37 wins spread over two seasons, didn’t have much talent.

But the Pistons played Isiah right away, unlike what had been done with Dave Bing in 1966.

Scott later coached Bing, and Bob Lanier—together. The Pistons’ original Mr. Little and Mr. Big.

 

If you want some cool, calculated analysis of pro basketball, you can do far worse than to pick Ray Scott’s brain.

So I picked it, that night on the podcast.

 

What is the best way to develop a point guard in the NBA, I asked, speaking specifically of Brandon Knight, who, like Bing in ’66, didn’t start for this year’s Pistons right away.

“Minutes,” Scott said. “He has to play. It’s the only way to do it.”

Then Scott dropped the bomb of Bing’s baptism, and how the Pistons were reluctant to start the string bean from Syracuse until the season wore on a bit.

Pistons coach Lawrence Frank didn’t unleash Knight until several games of this truncated, aggressive schedule had been played. Frank chose to have Knight come off the bench.

But that meant that Knight was playing against the other team’s second unit, for the most part. So Frank, wise to the ways of the NBA at a relatively young age, saw that his team wasn’t going anywhere this season, except to the bottom of the standings, and gave Knight a starting slot about 10 games into the season.

Knight has started since.

It’s far too early to tell how Knight will ultimately compare with Bing and Isiah, even as rookies. But there is much to like about Knight’s game, as tender as it is.

 

There’s the quickness, for one—both with the ball and as a defender. Knight moves down the court, with the ball in tow, as well as anyone in the league.

There’s the shot, which isn’t bad for a rookie. Knight has range and can nail a three-pointer—if a three-pointer is needed to be nailed.

 

But more important is that tiny 1.7 turnovers per game number.

The Pistons, Lord knows, have plenty of players who are good at dribbling the basketball off their foot or throwing it to the other team. It’s very nice that the kid who handles the ball the most isn’t prone to doing that.

Coach Frank, speaking basketball-ese, put it this way to the Free Press the other day.

“I think a big part of it is when Brandon is playing north-to-south and not east-to-west. He has those, we call them ‘rack attacks,’” Frank said in that East Coast dialect that all pro-basketball coaches seem to have.

“That’s vital, especially for a primary ball handler, you have to be on the attack and put pressure on a defense,” Frank continued. “When you do that, it might not be your shot, but you’re going to collapse (the defense) and force help.”

There you have it. The Pistons are better off when Mr. Little makes those big rack attacks.

Only time will tell if those rack attacks, and his growing chemistry with Greg Monroe, will put Brandon Knight on the path of Dave Bing and Isiah Thomas-like greatness.

Or at least enough to be the Brandon of choice for the front page in Detroit.

Pistons’ Frank Has to Make Team Likable AND Competitive

Auburn Hills is a 35-minute drive north of Detroit. Make that almost an hour if you dare try it in the shadow of 5:00 traffic. It’s a rather uninspiring trek up I-75, with warehouses and impersonal office buildings surrounding you on the east and west.

The starkness of the Detroit city limits gives way to those of the industrialized Troy as you head north, with a lovely view of the Oakland Mall to your right. Your passengers can practically reach out and touch Macy’s.

Then there’s a woodsy interlude before more commercialization, in the form of the Great Lakes Crossing shopping complex. More retail outlets and fast food joints than you can shake a stick at.

Finally, there it is, to your left, off Lapeer Road. The Palace of Auburn Hills, sitting by its lonesome self, like the Silverdome did so infamously in Pontiac.

The Palace, built in the middle of the woods in 1988, is a state-of-the-art facility that continues to be a model of engineering for those seeking out new sports arenas.

It’s a delightful arena with wonderful sight lines and plenty of parking. You don’t have to settle for a space in another part of town and take a shuttle (or a People Mover) to get there. There isn’t a parking structure with which to contend.

The problem is that it’s too far away from…anything.

Certainly too far to travel to watch an unlikable pro-basketball team lose on a snowy January night.

Professional hoops has never been the easiest sell in our town. The Pistons, in their sometimes-inglorious 54-year history in Detroit, have heavily discounted and given away more tickets than all the community theater performances of “Annie” put together.

When the Pistons first arrived in our town back in 1957, they played Olympia Stadium like they were the Beatles’ opening act.

The maintenance crews would throw some would panels onto the ice surface so the folks in the expensive seats wouldn’t slip and fall on their fannies. The court was also laid on said ice, which resulted in some players sliding too.

The crowds were a couple thousand of the most curious, or those who happened to see a voucher on a fast food counter.

Then the Pistons took their act to brand new Cobo Arena in 1961. Cobo, a pill-shaped venue on the Detroit River, was gorgeous in its own way but too vast for the Pistons crowds. Cobo seated about 11,000 for basketball and on most nights about 8,000 of those were empty.

In 1978, the Pistons moved into the Pontiac Silverdome, an even more cavernous facility. It was like moving a mouse into a mansion.

Ten years later, the Pistons inched even further north, into the glitzy Palace of Auburn Hills.

For a time it worked. The team was winning championships—two for two in the first two years in the Palace. The drive north didn’t turn too many people away, as it turned out.

But as soon as the losing returned to a franchise that had been quite used to it—circa 1993-96—the Palace seemed like a faraway place.

The championship of 2004 and the near miss a year later made the Palace seem closer again. Funny how that works.

Today, the Palace is far away, once more.

Lawrence Frank is the Pistons’ new coach. His charge isn’t necessarily just to make a winning team. He has to make people like the Pistons—enough to want to venture to the Palace on a snowy night in January to see them battle the rest of the NBA. On most nights, those battles will likely end up in the other team’s favor.

Some would say that the challenge of making the Pistons likable again is more daunting than that of making them winners once more.

Let’s wind the clocks back to June 2004.

There the Pistons were, championship t-shirts and caps on their bodies and heads, confetti dumping on them from the Palace rafters.

World Champions!

There was no superstar on that Pistons roster, which was greater than the sum of its parts. The Pistons were bucking the trend that said you had to have at least one megastar, if not two or three, to win the whole shebang.

It was all a fluke, as it turned out.

You DO have to have at least one white-hot star on your roster to win an NBA championship. Two would be even better, thank you.

The Miami Heat notwithstanding, that’s the reality of today’s NBA.

The Pistons, who will begin play the day after Christmas to tip-off the truncated 2011-12 season, have no superstars. Not even close. They have a roster full of guys who are 6’8”. No one does anything particularly well.

The Pistons were last in the playoffs in 2008 and that ended in an ugly fashion on a May evening in Boston. The Pistons who had confetti rain on them in the Palace in 2004—Chauncey Billups, Rasheed Wallace, Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince, et al—had turned into petulant, shameful crybabies.

The 2007-08 season was the culmination of four years of almost greatness that instilled an unattractive sense of entitlement into a team whose players felt like all they needed to do was show up, and a return trip to the NBA Finals would be theirs.

The Pistons made it to six straight Eastern Conference Finals, but in the last three they progressively regressed physically and mentally.

It all ended with an ejected Wallace tearing his jersey off and the Pistons imploding in Boston in 2008. Billups was traded early the next season, and the die was cast.

Since then, it’s been three seasons of bad coaching hires, inmates running the asylum, questionable trades, suspect free-agent signings and general disdain.

Lawrence Frank has a rookie point guard, Brandon Knight, who might be something. He has a second-year big man, Greg Monroe, who showed promise in the second half of last season.

He has a healthy Jonas Jerebko, one of those 6’8” guys, but has some potential as an X-factor or a sixth man.

Frank has Tayshaun Prince, newly signed to a four-year pact. Another 6’8” guy that could have championship pedigree.

Frank also has the disappointing free-agent class of 2009—Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva.

Frank doesn’t have Hamilton any longer—but this is addition by subtraction.

That’s pretty much it. Everyone else is either a hard-worker, a role guy, or both, like the ancient warrior Ben Wallace.

From this hodgepodge of a roster, coach Frank has to not only make the Pistons competitive but also make a team that people will want to see perform. He doesn’t have the luxury of a superstar player around whom the rest of the team satellites.

The Pistons’ fan base, I suspect, is ready to embrace a kinder, gentler team—even if it’s one that doesn’t produce a lot of wins right away. That’s how bad things have gotten here since 2008.

Frank has dealt with starting 0-16 in New Jersey a few years ago.

The Pistons won’t scare him.

The Pistons’ new slogan, to replace the tired and worn “Going to Work,” should be a derivative of Al Davis’s mantra with the Oakland Raiders:

“Just Like Us, Baby.”

Do I Miss the NBA? Depends!

Right about now, if the Hatfields and the McCoys had been able to settle their differences (that would be the players and the owners, or vice versa), the NBA season would be just underway.

The season would have tipped off after weeks of exhibition games, during which time the Miami Heat and LeBron James would have been unmercifully mocked and taunted for losing in the Finals to the Dallas Mavericks. Followed by an entire 82-game regular season of the Miami Heat and LeBron James being unmercifully mocked and taunted for losing in the Finals to the Dallas Mavericks.

The Pistons would be just starting out under their new coach, Lawrence Frank, not long after stubbing their toe on him.

Do I miss the NBA?

Yeah, the same way I miss a root canal, Vanilla Ice and New Coke.

Do I miss looking at tattoos that make a player’s arm look like a 19^th century treasure map? Do I miss shorts that go to the ankles?

Do I miss the NBA, you ask (or even if you didn’t)?

Do I miss wall-to-wall games on Christmas Day, the one day of the year in which the television should be turned off?

Do I miss Kobe Bryant? Do I miss the Charlotte Bobcats at the Palace on a Tuesday night?

 

Do I miss the NBA?

 

 

Do I miss that goofy, dotted half-circle under the hoop?

Do I miss a league where 95 percent of the players can’t execute a bounce pass? Or even know what one is?

Do I miss the NBA?

Do I miss four guys on one side of the court while the fifth dribbles the ball for 15 seconds, looking up at the shot clock?

Do I miss the final 30 seconds of a close game taking 30 minutes to play?

Do I miss the NBA?

Do I miss wondering on whose sidelines Larry Brown will turn up next?

Do I miss the latest season-ending injury suffered by Greg Oden?

Now, let me tell you about the NBA I do miss.

I miss shorts that went mid-thigh.

I miss the 24-second clock on the floor, in the corners.

 

I miss three-to-make-two.

I miss a final score of 132-127 that was played in regulation, not five overtimes.

 

I miss names like Coby Dietrick and Zaid Abdul-Aziz and Tom Boerwinkle.

 

I miss coaches like Doug Moe and Frank Layden, who were worth the price of admission just for their post-game comments. That, and Moe wore leisure suits and Layden looked like your tax guy.

I miss backcourt fouls and jump balls to start each quarter.

I miss every basket worth two points, even if you nailed it from 30 feet away.

I miss Pete Maravich and how he wore “Pistol” on the back of his jersey instead of his last name. And, of course, I miss his ball-handling skills, which even the Harlem Globetrotters would have been hard-pressed to match.

Do I miss the NBA?

Well, yes, if that NBA included arenas like the HemisFair and Kemper and the Fabulous Forum and Cobo.

I miss referee Earl Strom, the animated, Ron Luciano of the NBA.

 

I miss best-of-three playoff series.

I miss this oddball division: Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and PHOENIX.

I miss the year the Bullets were the Capitol Bullets—between being Baltimore and Washington.

 

While I’m at it, I miss the Kansas City-Omaha Kings.

I miss first round playoff matchups like Golden State and Chicago.

 

I miss the Vancouver Grizzlies, because how cool was it that the NBA was silly enough to put a team in Vancouver?

Do I miss the NBA?

I don’t miss Pau Gasol but I miss Swen Nater.

I don’t miss Phil Jackson the coach but I miss Phil Jackson the player. Oh, those shoulders.

I don’t miss Billy Hunter the players rep but I miss Billy Knight the scorer for the Pacers.

I don’t miss Gilbert Arenas calling himself Agent Zero but I miss John Williamson being called Super John.

 

Do I miss the NBA?

I don’t miss 6’11” small forwards but I miss 6’7” centers.

I don’t miss Nike but I miss Chuck Taylor. And I don’t miss leather but I miss canvas.

I don’t miss Jason Kidd but I miss Ernie DiGregorio.

I don’t miss the New Orleans Hornets but I miss the New Orleans Jazz.

 

I don’t miss Charles Barkley the commentator but I miss Charles Barkley the player. Because who wouldn’t miss someone dubbed “The Round Mound of Rebound?”

Do I miss the NBA?

 

Well, if you’re asking if I miss Gus the Dancing Vendor, hell yes. But if you’re asking if I miss the Automotion dance girls, hell no.

Don’t draw any conclusions from that, by the way.

I miss Leon the Barber.

I miss World B. Free, Harthorne Wingo, T.R. Dunn, Harvey Catchings and Joe C. Meriweather.

I miss David Thompson leaping from the free throw line for a dunk.

 

I miss the Buffalo Braves.

I miss smoke in the arenas drifting to the lights above.

I miss when basketball players were called “cagers.”

I miss 20-second injury timeouts.

Do I miss the NBA?

I don’t miss three days off between playoff games—in the same city.

 

I don’t miss Bill Walton the commentator, and I really don’t miss Bill Walton the player all that much, either. Except for his headband.

Speaking of headbands, I don’t miss them on today’s players but I miss them on Slick Watts, who was bald.

I don’t miss Kevin McHale coaching the Minnesota Timberwolves but I miss Bill Russell coaching the Seattle Supersonics.

I miss saying Seattle Supersonics.

So, do I miss the NBA?

Which one you talking about?

Dumars’ Latest Coach Has Quite a Story, But is He “The One”?

They paraded another poor sap onto the lectern to be given his death sentence as the new head coach of the Detroit Pistons the other day.

There was Joe Dumars, team president, leading the march, and the way these things have gone over the years, you half expected to see Joe reading from a Bible in Latin, his head bowed.

The scene that unfolded on Wednesday was the seventh one presided over by Dumars since 2000.

It goes like this: Dumars leads his doomed coaching choice onto the lectern, says a few words tinged with hope and confidence that the man seated to his left is “the one.” Doomed coach speaks of work ethic and tradition and fends off questions about his past failures or mercurial history. The proceedings end with Dumars, the coach’s future executioner, shaking hands and smiling with his eventual victim as the cameras snap away.

Dumars was a rookie executive in 2000 when he fired Alvin Gentry and made assistant George Irvine the head man, much to Irvine’s chagrin.

Irvine was an old ABA guy who had more than one stint as coach of the Indiana Pacers, occasionally functioning as their GM, too. He lasted a little more than a year with the Pistons as head coach, given the ziggy after a 32-50 season.

Next, Dumars turned to Rick Carlisle, a smart young coach with a perpetual poker face. Carlisle delivered two 50-win seasons and a conference finals appearance before owner Bill Davidson asked Dumars to relieve Carlisle of his duties. Carlisle was rude to some Palace employees, the story goes.

Enter Larry Brown, with his suitcase covered in stickers, like in one of those cheap paintings you see at the airport. Brown coached for two seasons, winning a championship and taking the San Antonio Spurs to seven games in the NBA Finals the year after that.

But Larry was all about Larry and again Davidson told Dumars to render a ziggy.

Next up, Flip Saunders, rumpled and lugging the baggage of being an underachiever in the playoffs. Kind of like a basketball version of hockey’s Bryan Murray, when the Red Wings hired him in 1990.

Flip debuted with a fantabulous 64-18 season and coached three seasons in Detroit before it was evident that Saunders’ reputation as a playoff lightweight was confirmed.

Then it was Michael Curry’s turn to trudge up to the lectern, in 2008. Curry was a former Piston who’d spent one measly year as an assistant before Dumars took leave of his senses and tabbed him as head coach.

Not content with that kind of pressure—Curry was hired after the Pistons made six straight appearances in the conference finals—Dumars heaped more on by trading Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson a week into the season.

Curry lasted one season.

Was it really two years ago when John Kuester was smiling and happily answering questions from the gathered media, excited and giddy about his first head coaching opportunity?

Kuester was an offensive genius of sorts, we were told. He was an assistant to Brown during the 2004 championship season, and Kuester supposedly made LeBron James what he is today while an assistant in Cleveland.

It was all talk.

The new Pistons coach, actually, is someone who the players should look up to—even though the only way they can do that is if they’re lying down.

Lawrence Frank is the latest future casualty, but if he goes down it won’t be without a fight. You see, Frank has spent his entire basketball life scratching, clawing and willing himself to succeed.

Frank is a short man in a tall man’s game, which can be OK if you’re a point guard but if you’re a coach, do you know how much basketball you have to know and how much character you have to have to get dudes a foot-and-a-half taller than you to even glance down at you, let alone listen to you?

Frank’s story has probably been pitched a few times during lunch at Spago in Beverly Hills to smirking, skeptical movie producers.

“So here’s the concept,” the pitch man says. “Short guy longs to be a basketball coach but can’t even make his high school team. Undaunted, he pursues his dream even though he can stand underneath real players to shelter himself from a rainstorm.”

Movie producer gives a lazy stare over his martini.

The pitch man continues.

“The short guy, who’s wanted to be a basketball coach since he was 13—yes, I said 13—enrolls in Indiana University simply so he can be a student assistant to the legendary Bobby Knight.”

By this time, the movie producer is two steps from his limo.

Yet this is Frank’s story, and every bit of it that you’ve read so far is true.

After Indiana, Frank latched on with the old Vancouver Grizzlies in 1995 as an advance scout. He was all of 25 years old and accused of being the Doogie Howser of the NBA for his sleight stature and creamy white baby face.

In 2004, Frank was an assistant with the New Jersey Nets before being thrust into the head coaching seat when Byron Scott was fired. Frank was 33. The Nets won the first 13 games that Frank coached for them.

But Frank also lost the last 16 games he coached for the Nets, some five years later. Ask Rod Marinelli what 0-16 does to a man’s coaching career.

The Nets fired Frank after his 0-16 start to the 2009-10 season. (“I deserved to be fired,” Frank said, “but I didn’t let it define me.”)

After a season as an assistant to Doc Rivers in Boston, Lawrence Frank is back in the hot seat, where so many coaches aspire to be, even if it means signing your own walking papers, as former Pistons coach Earl Lloyd once said.

“There are only five NBA franchises that have won three titles,” Frank said on Wednesday, showing off his basketball historian chops. “This (Detroit) is one of those places. It’s an honor to be here.”

You know what else is an honor? To die in battle.

Welcome to Detroit, Lawrence. We’re the Arlington National Cemetery for basketball coaches—and Joe Dumars has just read you your last rites.

Yet somehow, I don’t think you’re going to let that stop you. You worked for Bob Knight, for God’s sakes.

Though Avoidable, Pistons’ Next Coach Likely to Be a Yawner

For the third time in the past four summers, the Detroit Pistons’ Joe Dumars is looking for a new basketball coach. It’s a search that is becoming so frequent in its repetitiveness, you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or yawn.

Dumars, the Pistons president, has been unshackled now that the sale of the team has officially been finalized. For nearly two years, while the Pistons were on the block, Dumars says he was reduced to helpless bystander status while Rome burned around him.

As Pistons players mutinied against coach John Kuester, who was himself shackled—to a roster that was the antidote to winning—Dumars says he could only watch, unable to do anything brazen or bold, thanks to the pending sale.

Dumars confirmed this at the press conference introducing new owner Tom Gores. Personnel moves of any significance were placed on hold. Kuester never had a chance, coaching the prima donnas and stiffs that Dumars had provided.

Kuester is gone, but the prima donnas and stiffs remain.

Three coaching searches in four summers. Sooner or later, a cockeye has to be turned to the guy doing all the searching.

The next hire is likely to be another yawn inducer.

The candidates have been identified, parroted by newspapers and websites so much that their identity surely must be accurate.

The names don’t exactly inspire any Pistons jingoism.

Former college coach Kelvin Sampson, supposedly the front runner, is an NBA assistant coach with three years experience, all with the ho-hum Milwaukee Bucks. The extent of his experience in the NBA is that, period. He never played in the league, never coached in it as the head man.

Yet Sampson is the front runner.

Lawrence Frank—what do they say about never trusting a man with two first names?—is another who has been interviewed, according to those all-knowing sources.

Frank, at least, does have NBA head coaching experience, with the New Jersey Nets. But Frank never did anything spectacular with the Nets, and was fired after a 0-16 start to the 2009-10 season.

Mike Woodson is definitely in the mix, those sources say. Woodson was an assistant with the Pistons in 2004 under Larry Brown, the year of the franchise’s last NBA championship. Woodson, too, has been a head coach in the NBA, with the Atlanta Hawks.

Woodson’s first Hawks team won 13 games, but then they steadily improved to playoff status.

It should be noted that Kuester, too, was an assistant on that 2004 Pistons team. Despite Woodson’s OK tenure in Atlanta, it floors me that Dumars would even go there—to the 2004 assistant coaching well—again.

Dwane Casey has been mentioned as another who Dumars has either already spoken to, or will shortly. Casey is another former NBA head coach (Minnesota) who is now an assistant with the new champions, the Dallas Mavericks.

Casey might be a fine coach, but I’m fighting back a yawn just writing about him.

But finally, an intriguing candidate who you don’t dare yawn at—former Pistons Bad Boy Bill Laimbeer, currently an assistant with the Minnesota Timberwolves. But Laimbeer’s candidacy seems perfunctory, and his interview (it’s supposed to be next week) has a bunch of courtesy to it.

The Pistons don’t excite. They don’t get anyone’s basketball juices flowing in this town. The empty seats nightly at The Palace for the past two years, where you once couldn’t get a ticket without doing so illegally, confirms that.

It’s a team bereft of star power and filled with unlikable characters, with an attitude that is the polar opposite of what blue-collar Detroit sports fans are all about.

The next coach must want to be an NBA head coach awfully badly to even consider leading this dysfunctional bunch.

But Dumars is headed for another yawner. Laimbeer, the only one among the candidates who’d re-pique interest in Pistons basketball, doesn’t have a prayer of landing the job. My opinion.

Dumars hired overmatched assistant Michael Curry in 2008, with nary a look elsewhere. Curry’s one year on the Pistons bench was all that Dumars needed to assess the former’s coaching skills.

In 2009, Dumars wanted Doug Collins, but Collins was put off by the revolving coach’s door at The Palace.

Dumars then set his sights on Avery Johnson, but Johnson quickly realized the Pistons needed him a whole lot more than he needed the Pistons, and so Johnson’s salary demands reflected that. Dumars flew home from Texas after meeting with Johnson, coach-less and twice rejected.

Enter Kuester, propped up as the offensive whiz that was behind the curtain with the championship-contending Cleveland Cavaliers. To hear some talk, you’d have thought LeBron James was taught everything he knew about basketball by John Kuester’s brilliant offensive mind.

Kuester, though, was Dumars’s third choice, and the results were not unexpected.

In the interest of full disclosure, Chuck Daly was Jack McCloskey’s third choice—at least—when Daly was hired in 1983. But Daly had decades of basketball coaching under his Gucci belt, unlike Kuester.

Whoever Dumars chooses as his next coach, that individual won’t do much for the casual basketball fan in Detroit. Neither Sampson, Frank, Woodson nor Casey is going to spur new season ticket sales.

The next Pistons coach isn’t going to be the one to lead them to the franchise’s fourth championship. The Pistons are too far away from contention for that to happen with this next fellow.

The Pistons almost need to go for style over substance with this next coaching hire. The roster, as it is now, isn’t going to make anyone get the chills, unless they’re symptomatic of the flu.

The man the Pistons should hire, but won’t, is someone they’re not even considering: Isiah Lord Thomas.

Thomas knows what being a Piston is all about. He’s been a train wreck after his playing career, but that’s been as an executive. As a coach, with the Indiana Pacers, Isiah did OK.

Thomas could work with disjointed guard Rodney Stuckey, to whom the team just tendered a contract, making Stuckey a restricted free agent.

It’s one thing to not listen to Kuester, as Stuckey was prone to do. It’s quite another to not listen to a Hall of Famer who essentially played your position.

Hiring Thomas would sell some season tickets. It would be a splash for the new ownership, and it would buy Dumars some time so he can assemble a proper NBA roster.

The hiring would have to be preceded by a heart-to-heart between the former Pistons backcourt mates, mainly to delineate boundaries between Thomas, who can be power hungry, and Dumars’s authority.

Thomas was asked by the media in April about his thoughts of coaching the Pistons.

“It would be an honor,” Thomas told them.

Yet none of this is going to happen. Dumars told the media that he wouldn’t even consider Thomas so as not to risk their friendship.

That’s chicken-excrement management.

Sometimes the job of the sports columnist isn’t to only write about what did happen, what is happening, or what might happen. Sometimes it’s to write about that which will never happen.

Sadly.

James, Once Again, Shrinks From the Spotlight in NBA Finals

Nearly a year after we had The Decision, we need to have The Incision.

How else are we going to find out if LeBron James has heart? Or guts? Or brains?

Those things certainly didn’t materialize on the hardwood of the NBA Finals, where Dirk Nowitzki and the Dallas Mavericks stormed into Miami and took, right from under James’s nose, that which LeBron has long desired but clearly has no idea how to attain—an NBA championship.

This was supposed to be the coronation of a King, but we found out that James is instead an emperor with no clothes.

James fled Cleveland last summer, turning his back on his hometown, conspiring with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to form a trio of stars that LeBron saw as a fast track to a ring. His 2007 Cavaliers were outclassed in the Finals by the San Antonio Spurs, and subsequent Cavs teams fell short of the Larry O’Brien Trophy, a round or two shy of the Finals, largely because of James’s confounding disappearing acts in the most crucial of times.

But all is forgotten and forgiven once you win. After you win the title, everything prior to that is conveniently filed under “learning experience.” Sometimes you can even manage to be portrayed as having lived a hardscrabble NBA life, culminating in that previously elusive championship, thanks to the requisite blood, sweat and tears.

LeBron James’s days of fooling even the foolish are over. He is fraudulent—a paper lion, if you will. He’s a player with shoulders that narrow and a heart that shrinks in the most important games of his life. He quit on the Cavs last year, “took his talents to South Beach”—and won’t those soon become some of the most notorious, inglorious words ever spoken by a pro athlete?—and tried to take cuts in line.

How much more moronic does Scottie Pippen look this morning?

Pippen caused a stir recently when he suggested that James might be better than even Michael Jordan—Scottie’s old teammate, six-time NBA champion, and three-time Finals MVP.

What else, Scottie? Saccarin is better than sugar? “Caddyshack II” was a better gift to motion pictures than its predecessor?

The Heat showed flashes of greatness in these playoffs, and James played OK for stretches of time. But Jordan’s jockstrap dwarfs LeBron’s hands.

James’s supporters believed he would eventually take over one of the Finals games, loading the Heat onto his back and almost single-handedly beating the Mavs. You know, like how Michael Jordan did in big games.

Those folks are still waiting.

“It’s now or never,” James Tweeted after the Heat lost Game 5 in Dallas.

Well, “now” just left town. All that’s left is the booby prize of bad Karma.

Shed no tears for the phony superstar who didn’t even have the decency to shake hands with his vanquishers following the 105-95 loss in Game 6 Sunday night. Cry not for James and his failed mission. Don’t you dare try to aggrandize his quest by attaching to it even a shred of valor.

James wanted this. He wanted the biggest stage, once again, on which to showcase his skills. He wanted to validate his place in the annals of NBA history.

Well, he got it, and when the heat—pun intended—got ramped up, LeBron shriveled like newspaper tossed into a fire.

Where WAS he, anyway? He missed a good series. As soon as you find his fourth quarter production, let us know.

The Mavericks, on the other hand, played like the more desperate, more driven team that was truly on a mission, and they were. For five years, Nowitzki and Jason Terry have relived those awful memories of the 2006 Finals, when the Mavs darted to a 2-0 series lead and had Wade’s Heat on the ropes in Game 3, before Miami stormed back to snatch the championship.

That was Dwyane Wade’s team then, and it still is, today.

That’s what makes this Finals loss by the Heat all the more hilarious in its irony.

James made a mockery of his free agent choice last July with the whole made-for-TV thing as he slowly eviscerated the Cavaliers and their fans. But you want to know the punch line?

James left Cleveland for Miami and he did so to be a caddy for Wade. Don’t buy if someone tries to sell you that James’s decision was proof of his team-first mentality—that he doesn’t need to be “the guy.”

It’s not that James doesn’t need to be the guy—he doesn’t want to be. Which is just as well, because he’s incapable.

The Heat are still Dwyane Wade’s team, but wait, there’s more.

It’s Wade’s team and yet LeBron James will get all the flak for this series loss, as he should.

So let’s get this straight. James leaves Cleveland, where he was “the guy,” goes to Miami so he doesn’t have to be–so he can win a championship—and is still expected to be some semblance of “the guy,” but he’s derelict in that duty and gets all the blame normally assigned to “the guy.”

Some Decision, LeBron.

James has lost on more fronts in this whole escapade than Custer did on his last stand.

James was a cockroach in the Finals—scurrying away as soon as the lights got turned on.

Yet he still had a shot at redemption, despite the Game 5 loss in Dallas. LeBron had, potentially, two chances to rescue his legacy. Two chances to be something that he’s never really been: a clutch player who could kill, with one stone, the two birds of doubt and derision by lifting the Heat past the Mavericks in seven games.

James’s critics would have had a sweat sock stuffed into their mouths. No longer would they have been able to say, “LeBron can’t win the big ones.”

Today, they not only can still say it, it’s going to shouted from the rooftops—splashed all over the Internet and burning up the phone lines of all the sports talk radio stations across the country. This isn’t going to blow over in a few days.

Despite our fascination and fanaticism about sports, we still have a hard time remembering the names of the teams who finish as the first runners-up in any championship round. It’s not that we can’t—just that it sometimes takes some brain-racking.

Not so this time.

The Miami Heat won’t soon live this one down, folks. Maybe not ever. History, me thinks, will be in a cranky mood when it passes judgment on the 2010-11 Miami Heat—the team LeBron James couldn’t wait to join. The team that so easily seduced him, but that he also disappointed by leaving—during the NBA Finals.

Until he wins a championship—and there’s no guarantee that he ever will—LeBron James should go down as one of the most laughable “superstars” that pro sports has ever seen. He should go down as a less-than-brilliant, heartless, gutless player who managed to fool his public even while hiding in plain sight.

But LeBron didn’t just fool them—he failed them.

His name doesn’t belong in the same sentence as Michael Jordan’s, unless it’s to create a grocery list of reasons why it doesn’t.

Here’s to you, Cleveland Cavaliers fans. You had to wait almost a year for this. God bless you.

Like Davidson in ’74, Gores Has Work Cut Out For Him

Bill Davidson was a graduate of that old school you keep hearing about. Whatever it was, that’s where Davidson learned about business.

It was a school that said loyalty meant something, and a contract was worth not just the paper it was written on but the forest that produced the trees that made that paper.

It was a school that mandated that you represent your company with the utmost dignity and respect, and that no one individual was greater than the whole.

Davidson brought these credos to the NBA when he bought the Detroit Pistons from Fred Zollner in 1974.

Zollner, for his part, had brought the NBA itself to Detroit, bringing with him his Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons and staking out his big top inside Olympia Stadium, which would be his basketball team’s home whenever the tradition-rich Red Wings weren’t in town.

The Pistons immediately became Detroit’s redheaded stepchild of pro sports.

Zollner’s team failed to draw at Olympia, and then the Pistons moved into brand-new Cobo Arena in 1961 and they failed to draw there, too. Pro basketball wasn’t moving the sports fan in Detroit, not like it did in hoops-rich towns like New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Zollner’s franchise was Goofus to the other Detroit teams’ Gallant. It seemed to exist only to serve as a cautionary tale. It was perpetually the “before” in one of those before and after success stories.

The Pistons went through coaches like a Broadway cattle call audition. They made trades that were outshined by the contestants on “Let’s Make a Deal.”

The Pistons couldn’t do anything right. They drafted funny.

By the mid-1960s, it was touch and go as to whether Zollner would pick up his tent and move to another burg.

Then the Pistons got lucky, even when they thought they hadn’t, and drafted a skinny guard from Syracuse named David Bing, when the guy they really wanted, forward Cazzie Russell from Michigan, went to the New York Knicks. This was 1966.

The Pistons lost a coin toss for Cazzie, and so settled with Bing, who only happened to become the man who would save pro basketball in Detroit.

Still, by 1974, Zollner had become a recluse owner, jetting to Detroit from his home in Florida maybe twice a year to see what his basketball players did to earn the paychecks that bore his signature.

Zollner’s was an unsuccessful franchise, though it had two big stars: Bing and center Bob Lanier.

Bill Davidson, Zollner’s neighbor in Florida, had wanted into the pro sports ownership business in the worst way. You know the rest of the joke.

Davidson had bid on Tampa’s World Football League franchise in 1974, but the price was too high. So he turned his attention to his neighbor’s pro basketball team.

The Pistons hadn’t made a dime of profit in the 17 years they’d been in Detroit. Even a 52-win season in ’73-74 failed to spin the turnstiles with much speed or frequency. They were the Edsel of Detroit sports.

Davidson forked over a grand total of $6 million to buy the Pistons from his neighbor Fred Zollner.

The team Davidson purchased was still mostly dysfunctional and by far the fourth favorite in a city with four choices for pro sports.

Fast forward to Thursday afternoon at the Palace, the House That Bill Davidson Built.

On the dais sat a tanned, handsome, 46-year-old man—only five years younger than Davidson was when he bought the Pistons in 1974.

Tom Gores spoke to the media on his first day as Pistons owner. Gores, the day before, had finalized a transaction of mega proportions. In the package came the Palace Sports and Entertainment Group and a dysfunctional basketball team that is by far the fourth favorite in a city with four choices.

The parallels between the state of the Pistons now and their state when Davidson bought them 37 years ago are uncanny.

The Pistons were off the radar in ’74, and they pretty much are now, too. The TV cameras don’t lie. Games televised from the Palace the past couple of seasons were conspicuous by the absence of fans in the stands. The camera shots looked like an NBA game in the closing seconds of a blowout. Only, it was like that for entire games.

In fact, you could make a case that the Pistons of ’74 were in better shape than the ragtag bunch of today, because at least the former had two bona fide superstars in Bing and Lanier.

The Pistons, 2011 vintage, have no one remotely close to being a star, let alone a superstar.

But Gores is plunging into the NBA waters anyway, a Flint kid made good—and how many of those are there? Flint has been kicked, crapped on and stripped of its economy for the better part of 20 years now.

Yet here’s Gores, a Flint guy, with hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at the Pistons and the entertainment conglomerate of which they are part.

The price tag that Gores paid for the entity that Bill Davidson paid $6 million for in 1974 is thought to be in the $320 million range.

Oh, and Davidson managed to turn a profit a time or two—along with winning three league championships.

The Pistons team that Gores has inexplicably bought is filled with unlikable, petulant players who have defiled the team’s motto of “Going to Work.”

It’s a bunch that has won a grand total of 57 games over the past two seasons, not coming close to the playoffs in either year. Attendance is way down, befitting the overall interest in the team throughout metro Detroit.

It is, in effect, 1974 all over again when it comes to pro basketball.

From this embarrassment of non-riches, Tom Gores plans on making money and winning another championship and leading a resurgence of NBA basketball in a town that could, right now, pretty much take it or leave it.

Just like what Bill Davidson hoped to do 37 years ago.

Oh, and there’s a lockout looming in less than a month.

Gores is either about to show off his mad skills as an astute businessman, or he’s a damn fool.

But a guy from Flint who’s just managed to come up with $320 million couldn’t be a fool, could he?

Pippen Needs to Get Over “Bad Boy” Pistons

It’s been about 20 years since the Pistons did their infamous walk-out on the Chicago Bulls in the Eastern Conference Finals, and still Scottie Pippen can’t get over it, or the “Bad Boy” Pistons themselves.

Pippen’s Bulls won the next three NBA championships, starting in 1991, and eventually six of the next eight from ’91 to ’98. You’d think all that hardware would help mend Scottie’s wounds.

Apparently not.

Pippen is still whining about the Pistons, some two decades after some of their starters walked off the floor before time ran out in Game 4 of the Bulls’ sweep.

Pippen recently told the Chicago Sun-Times:

”The Pistons were a nasty team. You always had to expect them to play dirty because, remember, they were the Bad Boys of Motown. They’d go out of their way to be mean and try to hurt you.

“And because we had better athletes, coach Chuck Daly just let them play the way they had to play to win. Bill Laimbeer was no real athlete. The same for Rick Mahorn and Joe Dumars and James Edwards. We were faster, quicker, more competitive and smarter.”

The only thing Pippen got right in the above comments was the one about Bill Laimbeer not being much of an athlete. No one in Detroit, though, propped Laimbeer up as athletic. He was, however, one of the best rebounders in the history of the league because of his positioning, technique and, yes Scottie, his basketball IQ.

And do I see Joe Dumars’s name in there as being “no real athlete”? That’s a lot of Bull.

And let’s clear up, once and for all, this misconception of the Pistons being thugs who deliberately tried to hurt you. I think there’s a line between aggressive, hard-nosed basketball and thuggery. I seriously doubt that the Pistons played the game with the idea of deliberately hurting opposing players.

If anything, blame the Celtics for the Pistons’ style of play.

The Bulls needed four post-seasons before finally beating the Pistons in a playoff series, and the Pistons needed three (1985, ’87 and ’88) to unseat the Celtics for supremacy in the East. And it was during those rugged playoff series that the Pistons learned the same hard-nosed, physical brand of play that has been misconstrued by the Bulls and other NBA observers as being sadistic.

You think the Celtics of Bird, Parish and McHale were more finesse than physical?

Please.

Did the Pistons turn it up a notch in the physicality department? You betcha. But they needed to, in order to finally topple the Celtics.

The Bulls of Pippen and Michael Jordan—that was probably the first time any writer put Pippen’s name before MJ’s, by the way—were indeed less physical. But it also took them one more try to dispatch the Pistons than it took the Pistons to eliminate the Celtics.

The Bulls’ defeat of the Pistons in the 1991 ECF was less about the Bulls’ supremacy than it was about the Pistons’ fatigue. The Pistons had played into late-May or June since 1987. They came off another brutal series with the Celtics in the ’91 East semis, and the Pistons simply hit the wall. They had nothing left.

I find it amusing but also annoying that Pippen and others still whine about the Pistons, even after 20 years and after all those Bulls championships. It’s too bad that all that success, and time, hasn’t enabled Scottie Pippen to soften a little and be more philosophical than psychotic about those “good old days” of Pistons-Bulls basketball.

Get over it, Scottie. The Pistons are still in your head, and it’s pretty pathetic.