Michael Jordan still hasn’t forgiven Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons for the lack of respect they showed after losing to the Chicago Bulls in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals.
“I know it’s all bullshit,” Jordan said in The Last Dance’s Sunday episode, speaking about Thomas’s attempts to contextualize the Pistons’ decision to leave the court at the end of the series without acknowledging the Bulls. “Whatever he says now, you know it wasn’t his true actions then. He’s had time enough to think about it or the reaction of the public has changed his perspective of it.”
“You can show me anything you want,” Jordan added. “There’s no way you can convince me he wasn’t an asshole.”
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Thomas’s Pistons team—famously dubbed the “Bad Boys” for their aggressive play, which pushed the limits of the sport’s rules—physically dominated Jordan and the Bulls during three straight postseason series from 1988 to 1990, en route to winning back-to-back NBA titles in 1989 and 1990. So, after losing in Game 7 during the 1990 conference finals, a devastated Jordan and his teammates flipped the script: The team engaged in a rigorous off-season training program that started soon after their season came to a heartbreaking end. When the teams met again during the 1991 conference finals, Chicago swept Detroit. Jordan, who had put on 15 pounds of muscle between the 1990 and 1991 seasons, led all players in scoring with 29.8 points per game.
“That was the only time I think I’d ever been swept in a series,” Thomas said in the same episode. “I was normally the one doing the sweeping.”
Perhaps it was that unfamiliarity with losing that played a role in how the Pistons ended their brief run of NBA dominance. Rather than shaking hands with the Bulls at the conclusion of the deciding Game 4, the team’s players walked off the court with 7.9 seconds left on the clock.
“Their time had arrived, and ours was over,” Thomas said in The Last Dance, before claiming it was forward Bill Laimbeer who urged the Pistons to forgo even a cursory attempt at sportsmanship. Thomas’s teammate Dennis Rodman was a bit blunter in his assessment.
“We just walked off the court. Fuck you, guys. Thank you for kicking our ass,” said the mercurial Pistons forward, who later joined Jordan in Chicago—and won three titles with him.
Even in 1991, the Pistons were roundly denounced for the snub. “It was a miserable display of sportsmanship, but it was consistent with their play during the game,” wrote Ira Berkow in the New York Times two days after the Pistons were eliminated. “It was one of the ugliest examples of basketball in memory.”
Thomas, however, asserted the Pistons’ behavior was consistent with how teams acted during that period. “To us, that was okay,” Thomas said, pointing out that the Boston Celtics had done the same thing to Detroit after the 1988 conference finals. “Knowing what we know now, in the aftermath of what took place, I think all of us would have stopped and said congratulations…we would have did it, of course, we would have done it. But during that period of time, that’s just not how it was passed. When you lost, you left the floor. That was it.”
“Go back to us losing in Game 7,” a visibly angry Jordan said after watching footage of Thomas’s remarks on an iPad. “I shook everybody’s hand. Two years in a row. We shook their hands when they beat us. There was a certain respect to the game that we paid to them. That’s sportsmanship, no matter how much it hurts. And believe me, it fucking hurt.”