The Detroit Pistons are this week’s supervillains in ESPN’s Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance. The hate was real between these titans.
Perhaps nothing in the NBA shaped the Michael Jordan we know today more than the Detroit Pistons. In the late 1980s, the Pistons were the bullies on the block, the physical force that obliterated anything that had the nerve to drive to the basket, and they’re this week’s villains in ESPN’s MJ doc, The Last Dance.
Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls were the new kids, the up-and-comers, but the Pistons were the steely force that needed to be overcome in order for the story to go the way it ultimately did.
The Pistons were aware that the NBA was invested in Jordan’s success, and according to John Salley in The Last Dance, they believed that the hierarchy of success went from Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, to Magic Johnson‘s Los Angeles Lakers to Michael Jordan’s Bulls.
Those Bad Boys took great delight in this belief and they made it their ultimate goal to keep these teams away from glory, and they did a pretty good job over the years before the young and hungry Bulls eventually took the league by storm at the end of the Pistons’ run.
In The Last Dance documentary, an off-camera voice asks Michael Jordan how legitimate the hate was between himself and the Pistons at the peak of the era. Jordan answered, “Oh, I hated them. The hate carries even to this day. They made it personal. They physically beat the **** out of us.”
It was a completely different world back in those days. Even though today’s athletes are generally bigger and stronger, there’s no match in recent history for the way those Detroit Pistons squads physically manhandled their opponents in general and Michael Jordan in particular.