I see that Scottie Pippen has finally recovered from his migraine headache. He has removed his lips from Jordan's hindparts long enough to run his mouth about the Bad Boys.
The unofficial end of the Bad Boys came in the spring of 1991 when the Michael Jordan-led Bulls capped their 4-0 sweep of the Pistons in the Eastern Conference finals at The Palace.
That's when Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer and other Pistons walked past the Bulls' bench en route to the locker rooms before the game ended; they refused to shake hands with their opponent. The boycott was in response to disparaging remarks Jordan made earlier in the series about the Pistons' two-year reign atop the NBA. Many years later, Thomas apologized for not displaying sportsmanship.
I wish he hadn't.
Bulls forward Scottie Pippen opened up old wounds recently when he called the Pistons a dirty team. Those words coincided with what Jordan said in 1991 after the Bulls went up 3-0 against the Pistons in the series. Jordan sat in the risers behind the visitor's basket and blistered the Pistons for 20 minutes. He called them bad champions and said they were bad for basketball.
Old wounds That's why the Pistons walked out. But everybody forgets that. They simply believe the Pistons were poor sports and sore losers. I applauded them for walking out then and I applaud it today, and I'm sorry to see that Thomas apologized to someone who had no respect for the Bad Boys.
Now Pippen has opened his mouth. "The Pistons were a nasty team," Pippen told the Chicago Sun-Times. "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."
Pippen also said the Pistons were classless.
"It was gratifying to see the Pistons walk off the court before that last game ended," he said. "We didn't expect anything less because they were a classless organization and everybody saw they were a classless team. I didn't care to shake their hands anyway."
Those words do not sit well with Bad Boys John Salley and Thomas. They took pride in playing the game with mental and physical toughness.
"They're still talking about us 22 years later," Salley said.
Thomas said: "It's his opinion. Whatever. All I know is at the end of the day we beat them more times than they beat us."
People forget or never knew that the Celtics walked out on the Pistons in the 1988 Eastern Conference finals when the Pistons advanced to their first NBA Finals. All the networks showed, however, were clips of Kevin McHale telling Thomas to not be content with just being in the NBA Finals, but to go win it. That conversation only happened because McHale and Thomas had been acquaintances since high school. Meanwhile, many of McHale's teammates were already in the locker rooms, leaving Adrian Dantley standing at the free-throw line with about a minute left.
On second thought Thomas now says the Pistons should have taken the high road even though he was angry about losing and angry about Jordan blistering their legacy.
"I'm not trying to justify what we did and say it was right," Thomas said. "In that era when you lost you walked off the court. Should we have walked off the court? Probably not. We should have taken the high road. Should we have shaken hands? Probably. It probably would have supported more sportsmanship. If all of us had a chance to do it over again we would want to set and give a better example."
Thomas said the Pistons were pupils of the Celtics. The two teams were locked in tough battles for years. But the Celtics with Larry Bird, Robert Parish, Dennis Johnson and McHale were the superior team until 1988. That's when the tide turned. And when the Celtics crashed, they walked.
The Pistons advanced to three straight NBA Finals, winning titles in 1989 and 1990.
"We probably hadn't won enough championships to earn that walk-off and didn't have enough tradition to earn that walk-off," Thomas said. "Boston did because of what Bill Russell did and what Red Auerbach did. They earned that walk-off. We probably hadn't earned that right after winning just two championships."
Like Thomas said, everybody is entitled to their opinion.
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
