In defense of Isiah
Talent overlooked due to Jordan feud
In light of “The Last Dance,” a writer makes a case for Isiah Thomas’ greatness.
In the 2004 NBA Finals, I started an argument about Isiah Thomas that lasted an entire afternoon. We were in Los Angeles for the LakersPistons series — the final days of the Shaquille O’NealKobe Bryant era — and on an off day, I declared Thomas to be a top-20 player all time. Period. Didn’t want to hear anything else.
Some of my colleagues viscerally disagreed. I made them list their 20 and mocked their conclusions. This went on for hours and hours in a Marriott hotel lobby. I could have continued for as long as the bar had liquor.
“You’re letting your dislike of him distort how great he really was,” I kept repeating. I must’ve said it a thousand times that day. Thomas wasn’t just a Bad Boy. He was a bad boy all by himself, an indisputable legend who, sadly, can’t get out of his own way.
His many controversies and his antagonistic role in Detroit’s fierce rivalry with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls have diminished his greatness. That’s incredibly disappointing. I wasn’t a Pistons fan — who really was outside of people from Detroit and the state of Michigan? But as a basketball geek, I respected them. I respected the dimensions of their play. They were so much more than physical and nasty. There was plenty of skill and grace to go with their brawn. They were unselfish. They seemed to know and appreciate their roles better than any other team. And they had Thomas, a wizard with the ball, a showman who adjusted to a more methodical and equitable style better than any ball-dominant guard in NBA history.
In watching “The Last Dance,” the marvelous ESPN documentary about Jordan and the Bulls, it is most striking to experience again how Jordan’s icon overtakes everything, including sensibility sometimes. He was greater than great. He is greater than great. In June, 22 years will have passed since he clinched a sixth championship with that clever little push-off and shot over Bryon Russell. Still, he is basketball’s most irreplaceable superstar.
He forced all challengers from his era to bow or be humiliated, often both. Since then, in the 17 years since he retired for a third time, he has left all challengers from this era to live in his shadow. As I’ve written before, it’s impossible and largely unfulfilling to declare one player the definitive greatest of all time. I would rather take several who stood out in their time and put them in a G.O.A.T. cluster. But it’s reasonable to suggest that Jordan is an icon without peer in team sports history on the basis of transcendence, marketability and something I like to call “charismatic excellence,” the ability to present your best at the most awe-inspiring times. Jordan is one of a precious few athletes capable of revising the script for stardom, and he became a billionaire because of it. To this day, all the current great ones still are following his example.
On the other hand, Thomas is the ultimate disrupter. He and the Pistons were more than a good team sandwiched between the end of the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird NBA era and Jordan’s takeover. When they won back-to-back titles 30 years ago, it was just the fifth time that the NBA had seen a repeat champion. The number of instances is up to 12 now, but back then, going back-toback was the most powerful symbol of dominance. Yet of that rare breed of champion, the Pistons have a low respectability rating compared to their peers.
Only two other repeat champions can gripe more about disrespect —the threepeat Minneapolis Lakers from 1952-54 (because the young NBA wasn’t all that popular then) and the Houston Rockets who won in 1994 and 1995 (because Jordan’s mini-retirement contributed to their ascension and they finished the regular season just 47-35 before that second championship).
Consider that context in thinking about why the Bad Boys were so defiant and unsportsmanlike in their conduct after the Bulls swept them in 1991. As the documentary reminds us, that is the primary source — along with the “Jordan Rules” and the Pistons’ punishing style — of a feud that neither Jordan nor Thomas have let go. The prominent Pistons walked off the court before Game 4 had ended, and most of them refused to shake hands with the Bulls. And everybody still is cursing about it in 2020. And Thomas is still mad about not making the Dream Team and forever being in the doghouse.
“Looking back, if I’m not a part of the Dream Team because a lapse in emotion in terms of not shaking someone’s hand . . . then I am more disappointed today than I was back then,” Thomas said in an appearance on ESPN’s “Get Up” in which he managed to be both regretful and dismissive.
As Thomas continues on a rather ridiculous explanation tour, his detractors smirk and agree with what Jordan said in the documentary: “It’s no way you can convince me he wasn’t an [expletive].”
Thomas cannot win this fight, not against Jordan. Jordan’s legend is too immense. He is too beloved. Outside of his petty Hall of Fame speech, Jordan has a near spotless and dignified public image. And Thomas is the tenacious little guard who smiles at you while twisting the dagger into your back.
I can’t help feeling sad about Thomas, though. Historically, basketball is a big man’s game, and the list of true franchise-carrying players standing 6 feet 3 and under is smaller than you realize. Even when Jordan was trying to break through, there was a thought that it was foolish to try to build a championship team around a high-scoring 6-6 guard. So imagine the low odds that Thomas — at 6-1 in the time of Magic — faced in trying to get the Pistons over the hump.
I understand the fight in him and his team. I don’t condone their extreme actions, but I understand their fight. And I wish that we recognized all the layers of the complicated Thomas. I wish that we appreciated him as a remarkable player whose success paved the way for future smallish, creative basketball geniuses such as Allen Iverson, Steve Nash and Steph Curry.
“He is a basketball genius and a hell of a person,” said Jamal Crawford, who wears No. 11 in honor of Thomas and signed with the New York Knicks when Thomas was the team president. “He’s always been straight up, real. People forget that before Steph Curry won his first championship, Zeke was the last smaller player to be the clear-cut best player on his team and win a championship. And he did it twice in a row.
“I was mesmerized by the way he played the game.”
Crawford, 40, also idolized and trained with Jordan. So, there. It is possible to like both rivals.
Sixteen years after my epic hotel argument, I wouldn’t put Thomas in my revised top 20, but that’s just because of the many great players who have finished their careers or made a legendary impression since then: O’Neal, Bryant, Curry, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, LeBron James, Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Durant and possibly others. But the passage of time shouldn’t diminish Thomas’ importance as a defining player in both the NBA and college, where he led Indiana to the 1981 national title.
Magic captured the imagination, but Thomas was a magician, too. When the Pistons figured out a different way to win, he became a disrupter. He picked the wrong icon to needle in Jordan, but people underestimate the Pistons’ role in making the Bulls develop the resolve that led to their dynasty.
The Jordan legacy can marginalize, if not obliterate, all opposition. But try not to let Thomas’ defiance minimize his greatness. Please try. The game is big enough for a feisty little guard to have his shame and still keep his fame.