Category → Pistons History
Another great Rasheed Wallace retrospective
Clearly, Rasheed Wallace is one of the most intriguing players in recent league history to NBA bloggers. The pre-All-Star Break rumors, which to this point have turned out to be untrue, that he’d come out of retirement to play for the Lakers have sparked a bunch of looks back at his really interesting career. The latest is from Grantland’s Jay Caspian Kang:
Rasheed Wallace excelled at two basketball things. The first: He was an elite one-on-one post defender who could match up against Tim Duncan or Kevin Garnett or Tracy McGrady without needing a double-team. Basketball’s ongoing love affair with Tyson Chandler has helped elevate the perceived importance of this particular skill, but there’s no reliable way to measure just how much impact this has on a team’s overall defense. The second: Rasheed Wallace, by all accounts, understood the pace and rhythm of the game. He knew when he should go on the block, he knew when he should shoot from the top of the arc, he knew when to defer to hot teammates. These instincts and the accuracy with which they are applied get lost somewhere in the vagaries of “basketball IQ,” the extremes of which are easy to spot.
I can’t do it justice with excerpts. It’s long, but well worth your time if you’re a ‘Sheed fan.
Former Pistons general manager Jack McCloskey talks about his famous trades, draft picks during the Bad Boys era
Sports Radio 750 The Game in Portland has a great interview with former Pistons general manager Jack McCloskey (hat tip to commenter and Portland-based Pistons fan Frankie D for the find) about a variety of topics, including how excited he was to get Joe Dumars in the 1985 NBA Draft:
“We were drafting 19th I think, and the owners always liked to know who I liked in the draft and who would be there. And I told them. The draft starts, and Joe Dumars isn’t picked up. We get down to, I guess it was the 17th pick, and Dallas had two picks, 17 and 18, and I thought well, they gotta take him (Dumars). They took two big guys, and I immediately grabbed the phone and called and said the Pistons will take Joe Dumars. The two owners jumped off their chairs and said, “Joe Dumars?! You never told us about him!” And I said, “I didn’t think he would be there!” And I mean, he’s in the Hall of Fame.”
Trader Jack was off by a pick (Dumars was picked 18th), but he was right about the scenario: Dallas got its twin towers right before the Dumars pick. The duo of Uwe Blab and Bill Wennington assured the Mavs of multiple future championships while the Pistons had to settle for Dumars.
McCloskey also goes into detail about one of the most controversial trades in team history, the one that sent Adrian Dantley to Dallas for Mark Aguirre. The whole interview is really interesting and worth a listen.
Rick Mahorn as a high school principal is exactly who you think he would be
Aaron Foley of MLive has a story about former Piston Rick Mahorn acting as a ‘principal for a day’ at Highland Park Community High School. A student greeted Mr. Mahorn (see, even I call him that, kid) by simply calling him ‘Rick.’ It did not make Mr. Mahorn happy:
“How old are you?” the former Detroit Pistons power forward asked a student — and fan — who greeted him by his first name.
“18,” the student responded.
“I’m 52. And you’re going to call me Rick Mahorn? I’m Mr. Mahorn,” he said.
Rasheed Wallace as a WWE ‘Attitude Era’ star
Danny Chau of Hardwood Paroxysm wrote about the hopefully returning Rasheed Wallace and has an interesting comparison for ‘Sheed:
Wallace bought a championship belt for every single one of his teammates after the Pistons won the title in 2004. Wallace wore his proudly. After all, what was the NBA to Wallace if not a professional wrestling reenactment; a universe that perpetuates the good/bad binary? Wrestling fans cling onto the storytelling of professional wrestling because they know deep down that good will always prevail. A fan’s belief can be tested through the twists and turns that plotlines often create, but ultimately they are rarely led astray. Yet half of the wrestling experience is bracing for the inevitable conspiracy that threatens to ravage the pure narrative. There is backstabbing, collusion, and puppeteering from the forces that be. NBA fans caught a glimpse of this two summers ago in how easy it was to link Miami’s Big Three to wrestling factions built to be hated. For a moment, the NBA was a platform for the wrestling idiom. And the blind, uninformed vitriol and derision reached caricatured levels that would feel at home at any WWE event. Angry fans jumped to collusion and conspiracy. That’s the world Rasheed Wallace inhabits.
I’ve always felt the same way about ‘Sheed. He doesn’t make sense as a typical athlete — he doesn’t have the same motivations, he doesn’t say the right things, etc. But as a pro wrestling personality? He was born for that. Here’s what I wrote about him in my book:
The more I’ve thought about Wallace, the more the concept of what he represented in the NBA hit me, aided after winning the 2004 title when Wallace bought the entire team championship belts. Rasheed Wallace would’ve been a huge star in the WWE. Rasheed Wallace as pro wrestler is the only comparison that works for him.
The modern WWE has successfully blurred the explicitly ‘good guy/bad guy’ roles that were made famous by stars in the 1980s and 1990s like Hulk Hogan, who portrayed the super hero fighting for flag waving, saying your prayers and vitamins (good thing kids weren’t taking the same vitamins Hulk was). Modern pro wrestlers are brash, say swear words, drink beer and connect to the crowd despite being originally intended as bad guys. Their collective actions aren’t definable as protagonistic or antagonistic, just like Wallace. Yes, he got into trouble and couldn’t control his emotions, but unlike most players who have those types of issues, he also was a key part of very good teams (He played in seven conference finals, two NBA Finals and won a title and his teams made the playoffs 14 straight seasons), he was unselfish and one of the more fundamentally sound players in the league during his career. He was complex, with striking good qualities as well as some obvious bad ones.
‘Sheed was packaged as a ‘bad guy’ by the media. Despite that, he showed up in Detroit and it was impossible not to love him. He was loud. His signature entrance, when P.A. announcer John Mason would call out his name in the starting lineup and he’d strut the wrong way, towards the crowd, chest puffed out as everyone chanted, ‘SHEEEEED!,’ was better than any professional wrestling entrance. It even had the accompanying pyrotechnics that are a customary part of every wrestler’s themed entrance now. He was the People’s Champion, fans loved Wallace as much for the outrageous way he behaved as they did for his talent.
Seriously, hand ‘Sheed a mic and tell me he wouldn’t be as good at improvisationally hurling out insults with the WWE’s best. Tell me he doesn’t have an understanding of the showmanship, the over-the-top nature of behaving to elicit huge emotional reactions out of a crowd. Rasheed Wallace was undoubtedly a gifted basketball player, but his most natural gifts were those personality traits that made people cheer him and love him in spite of how he sometimes acted.
Slate profiles Dennis Rodman’s father
I’ve mentioned before in some of my many many posts on my favorite player of all-time, Dennis Rodman, that his personal demons are not all that surprising considering his crazy, difficult and often tragic family life growing up. Slate’s Daniel Engber has a lengthy profile of Rodman’s father, Philander, that is well worth a read:
For several hours, and several beers, the long-lost son is all we talk about. Philander is a few inches shorter than Dennis and says he’s never played basketball. Still, he looks like he’s been genetically engineered to grab rebounds. His arms are like fruit-pickers: When he reaches out to say hello, it’s like I’m shaking hands with Mr. Fantastic.
“I didn’t leave Dennis; I left his mom,” Philander tells me. Either way, losing his son—and his son’s money—seems to have produced a deep wellspring of regret, and a single-minded determination to cash in. He gives me a self-published Tagalog-language phrasebook and signs the inside page: “To: Dan. From: Dennis Rodman’s father living in the Philippines.” Just below his signature, he adds a postscript: “Don’t forget: Leaves never fall too far from the trees that they fell from.”
Philander has moved on in other ways, though. Since the breakup of his first marriage, Dennis Rodman’s father in the Philippines has taken three more wives and produced another 28 children.
He’s eager to brag: Did I know that one of his kids is seven feet tall? That half a dozen have played professional basketball? When I test him on the kids’ names, though, Philander gets bashful. There are a lot of them. In the end we refer to a numbered list in the Rodman Family Calendar. Four children—Nos. 16, 17, 23, and 29—are also named Philander, and another four are named Phil or Philip. But my eye catches the name of a girl born here in Angeles on June 22, 1991, a week to the day after the explosions at Pinatubo. Pina Marie—that one he remembers. He named her after the volcano.
Grantland has an extensive oral history of Malice at the Palace
Jonathan Abrams of Grantland has a huge recap with comments from several of the players, media and others at the Palace of Auburn Hills on Nov. 19, 2004, when a cup of beer ruined the Indiana Pacers. There are so many great quotes I could excerpt, so just go read the whole thing, but these comments were among the ones that stood out to me:
Stephen Jackson (guard/forward, Pacers): [Toward] the end of the game, I recall somebody on the team told Ron, “You can get one now.” I heard it. I think somebody was shooting a free throw. Somebody said to Ron, “You can get one now,” meaning you can lay a foul on somebody who he had beef with in the game.
Ben Wallace (forward/center, Pistons): He told me he was going to hit me, and he did it. That was just one of those things. It happened in the heat of the battle.
Watching that game, it was pretty clear that things were going to escalate. I’m not shocked at all that Artest’s foul was premeditated.
Robert Horry talks about ‘the shot’ and playing defense against Rasheed Wallace
I don’t know if there are any names in Pistons history who bring up the kind of pain that Robert Horry does. The man who was close to becoming a Piston until the Houston Rockets bothered to check out Sean Elliott’s medical history came back to haunt the franchise about a decade later with a gut-punching shot and performance in game six five of the 2005 NBA Finals. I can’t rehash it more than that here, it’s too painful to think about.
But, for the people who love misery out there, Horry was a guest on Bill Simmons’ B.S. Report Friday and talked about that shot against Detroit and why it’s possibly the most memorable of his career.
The talk isn’t all depressing, though. He also is highly complimentary of Rasheed Wallace and calls him one of the most difficult players to defend that he ever faced. The podcast link is here and Horry starts talking about the shot and ‘Sheed around the 13 minute mark.
The Basketball Jones recalls former Piston Jerry Stackhouse’s funny dunk contest moment
I remember being super pumped about Jerry Stackhouse being in the 2000 Slam Dunk Contest. We’ve watched some decent Pistons dunkers over the years, but very few guys — Stackhouse, Grant Hill and maybe a couple others — who were legitimately athletic enough to compete for a Slam Dunk Title. I had high hopes for Stackhouse who, at one time, before re-inventing himself as more of a spot-up shooter and role player late in his career, was one of the best athletes in the league. Unfortunately, he happened to be in the dunk contest the same year that Vince Carter was still Half Man/Half Amazing Vince Carter and put on one of the finest displays in dunk contest history (and gave us the classic ‘it’s ova’ moment/GIF). Trey Kerby at The Basketball Jones explains how Stackhouse had a bit of an unlucky draw in who he had to follow:
This right here is my personal funniest moment in the history of All-Star Weekend. You can keep Chris Andersen’s botched dunk contest attempts, the Michael Jordan’s wide-open missed dunk and the time Darrell Armstrong shot a layup in the dunk contest. I’ll take Jerry Stackhouse, in the midst of his best season, confidently throwing down a 360 immediately after Vince Carter’s legendary 360. Whoops …
The best part, however, is Jerry’s strut after throwing down his jam. He grabs the ball and walks towards the scoring table confidently, surely thinking to himself, “I nailed it. Nice one, Jer-Bear.” Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, he’s getting killed by the TNT guys and seeing the honorary title of next best UNC shooting guard be given to Vince Carter.
Magic Johnson, Isiah Thomas and the 1991 NBA All-Star Game
One of the most sobering moments I’ve had as a sports fan was Magic Johnson’s sudden retirement and announcement that he was HIV positive in 1991. I was only 11 at the time, and sports stars like Johnson were still super heroes to me. It was hard to fathom him announcing that he was afflicted with a virus that so many were terrified of and so few truly understood.
I wasn’t really old enough to understand the scope of what was happening, but I do remember the fears expressed by some, particularly Karl Malone, when Johnson was voted into the 1992 All-Star Game despite his retirement. SLAM posted a cool reflection on that game, and one of Johnson’s biggest advocates was Pistons legend Isiah Thomas:
Isiah Thomas (All-Star, Detroit Pistons): I remember Karl Malone being very vocal and a couple of other All-Stars. At that time, I was the president of the Player’s Association so I called a special meeting where I told everyone that not only was Magic going to play, but also we were all going to line up and embrace him. At the time, my brother was HIV-positive, so I was very well aware of the disease. I understood that it couldn’t be transmitted through touching.
Along the way, something definitely happened that soured the friendship between Thomas and Johnson, but I remember Isiah’s public stance at the time and it’s still one of the reasons I have a lot of respect for Thomas despite how fantastically bad his post-playing career has gone.
Detroit legend Mel Daniels will be in the Hall of Fame
OK, so Mel Daniels wasn’t ever a Piston, but the Detroit Pershing product is absolutely a notable and often overlooked name in the great basketball history of this state. Daniels was a great player in the ABA, mostly with the Indiana Pacers, but his because he spent his prime years in the ABA as opposed to the NBA, his greatness is often forgot about. He’ll get his due this year though, as the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame announced that Daniels will be this year’s ABA Committee direct selection. From the press release:
MEL DANIELS [Player] – Daniels is one of the most dominating big men in the history of the American Basketball Association (ABA) as the league’s all-time leading rebounder (9,494) and fourth all-time leading scorer (11,739). A two-time league MVP in 1969 and 1971, he was a seven-time ABA All-Star and a member of three ABA championship teams with the Indiana Pacers, now of the NBA. He was selected as a member of the ABA 30-Man All-Time team. In college, Daniels starred for the University of New Mexico, leading the Lobos in scoring for three straight seasons and was the Western Athletic Conference Most Valuable Player in 1967. He was drafted ninth in the 1967 NBA Draft, but chose to go play in the ABA instead. Following his ABA Rookie of the Year award in 1968, he went on to earn All-ABA First Team four times and Second Team once. After his professional career, which concluded as a member of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, Daniels joined the coaching staff at Indiana State, where he coached future Hall of Famer Larry Bird. He was also a member of the Indiana Pacers front office for over 20 years.
It’s great to see another Detroit product make it into the Hall.
