While many years removed from his playing days, Detroit Pistons legend Isiah Thomas doesn’t think his legacy has received a fair shake.
From one generation of Detroit Pistons fans to the next, for as much as the players might change over the years, the team has managed to maintain a cohesive identity that spans multiple eras. Back in the 1980s, the Bad Boys were formed with their physical, brash defensive methods taking the league by storm, then the Pistons harnessed a similar energy nearly a decade and a half later with Ben Wallace patrolling the Motor City paint.
Both teams were lauded for their hard-nosed defense that took challenges head-on, and the Pistons showed shades of a similar toughness over the years with Isaiah Stewart as the chief shot-swatter down low. Although Stewart was traded to the Memphis Grizzlies over the offseason, the current generation of Detroit hoopers bears some resemblance to the structure of the Bad Boys squads.
Of course, the modern-day Pistons are headlined on defense by Ausar Thompson after his third-place finish for Defensive Player of the Year, and the easiest comparison to draw would be with Dennis Rodman. Both players have a slender profile while maintaining top-end explosivity and burst that comes in handy when darting into the passing lane to intercept passes, though their personalities seem remarkably different. But as far as on-court similarities go, both Rodman and Thompson stack up as versatile defenders that are tough matchups for even the most skilled playmakers.
But much like the Bad Boys Pistons, the current generation in Detroit is largely propelled by the creativity, efficiency and leadership of their point guard. In this case, that player is Cade Cunningham. Previously, Isiah Thomas was the floor general who sparked the Pistons to back-to-back NBA titles in a time period that was littered with other dominant teams across the league.
Thomas, an NBA Hall of Famer who was famously left off the 1992 Dream Team, was accomplished as they come from a ball-dominant point guard perspective. As a playmaker, Zeke was both crafty and smooth, then he dug deep to serve as a stingy, quick-handed defender on the other end of the court. But for all of those positive traits, Thomas was a bit undersized for his time and certainly would fall into that category in the modern NBA, so his success is tangentially similar to how Jalen Brunson led the New York Knicks to the title this past season as a smaller point guard who was the focal point for his squad.
”You’re saying Jalen Brunson winning made you realize we took Isiah Thomas for granted,” former NBA player Brendan Haywood posed to a co-host on Gil’s Arena. “Isiah Thomas feels like that. I work with Isiah, and he feels overlooked to a certain degree because ‘hey listen, I know Magic was playing, I know Jordan was out there. Dog, I won two chips when those guys were out there. And if you really go back through the history, should’ve been three.’ They had the Lakers on the brink. There was a phantom foul against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he would have had a game that would have went down as the greatest of all time in the Finals. That was the ankle game. He came back in, the numbers were crazy, the assists, the steals and there was a bogus foul call that they would have won the championship. So to your point, Isiah Thomas definitely feels overlooked because we talk about the Lakers and the Celtics, we skip over the Bad Boys era and we go straight to the Jordan era.”
As a player, Thomas had famous battles with both the Boston Celtics and Chicago Bulls in what was a highly competitive Eastern Conference. Although Zeke stepped on the court alongside key players like Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahon, it was Thomas who had the pressure to deliver on a nightly basis in order to keep the Pistons flowing in the right direction.
To an extent, Cunningham falls into the same category as the metronome for the Motown squad. As the primary initiator in the half court, Cunningham has the responsibility of setting up the offense and creating looks for his Detroit cohorts, and the Pistons’ success is largely tied to Cade’s performance. That’s a level of pressure that Thomas is quite familiar with, but the Pistons legend found a way to elevate his game when Detroit needed him the most, such as the infamous sprained ankle game that Haywood alluded to.
In all, Thomas is one of the greatest point guards to ever play the game. Cunningham is currently working to stake his claim as one of the greatest in the league right now, and perhaps he’ll be remembered in a similar light.
