Rnd 2: Bulls/Pistons reminisce about the good ol days

DREW SHARP: Echoes of the '88-'91 Pistons-Bulls series reverberate still

May 4, 2007

<p class="story_byline" style="padding-bottom: 0pt;">BY DREW SHARP</p>FREE PRESS COLUMNIST <p> There's something to be said for holding a grudge for 16 years.</p><p> "I'm still glad that we didn't shake their hands," Bill Laimbeer said Wednesday. "They were whiners and criers. Piss on them."</p><p> </p>The last visual of the 1991 Pistons-Bulls playoff series was a sullen Isiah Thomas and Laimbeer marching past the Chicago bench with seconds remaining in Detroit's three-year Eastern Conference championship reign. The Pistons didn't shake hands because they didn't appreciate the assertion Michael Jordan had made a day before Chicago completed its four-game sweep that the Bulls were doing the NBA a favor by closing the book on Bad Boys hooliganism.<p> It was disrespectful.</p><p> It was petty.</p><p> It was beautiful!</p><p> Pistons-Bulls. No blood? No interest.</p><p> Intensity left an imprint when these two teams turned the Eastern Conference finals into their own personal border skirmish in 1989, 1990 and 1991. They also met in the conference semis in 1988.</p><p> The impression of Thomas' fingerprints might still be found on the throat of former Pistons assistant coach Brendan Malone after Thomas' emotions boiled over in a 1990 game at Chicago Stadium. Zeke vented at Malone rather than place a stranglehold on Bulls center Bill Cartwright, who had nearly decapitated the Pistons captain when Thomas made a strong drive to the basket.</p><p> Animosity possessed depth and soul then. A migraine turned Scottie Pippen to mush in Game 7 of the 1990 conference finals, inspiring one Piston to suggest after a 19-point Detroit blowout that the ice bag belonged a few feet below Pippen's head.</p><p> On Saturday the descendants of the Bad Boys and the Jordanaires will tip-off the first Pistons-Bulls playoff series in 16 years. The series will establish its own personality at its own pace. Yet things are different now.</p><p> A much more civil mood prevails. Players text-message one another. When one star arrives in another's town, the host either invites him over for the evening or treats him to a night on the town.</p><p> Everybody likes everybody now.</p><p> It's cordial.</p><p> It's reverential.</p><p> It's disgusting!</p><p><b>Forged in battle</b></p><p> When the Bulls approached John Paxson about becoming their executive vice president in charge of basketball operations, Paxson sought only one man's counsel -- Joe Dumars.</p><p> "It was Joe's blueprint that I wanted to emulate," Paxson said Tuesday. "He was always professional. I really don't have any recollection of Joe ever doing anything (dirty) when we played. In fact, I think the biggest thing you need to point to is that Michael used to talk about him with great respect.</p><p> "Joe has always been classy. That showed through as a young player during his prime and then, if you remember, Joe playing with the Detroit teams as he got older, he just always carried himself the right way. That's why it's not a surprise that he's sitting in that chair having success and being a great leader. He has all the qualities."</p><p> The irony is that Dumars and Paxson -- two of the quieter participants in the old rivalry -- are now calling the shots for their respective teams.</p><p> "Just shows that you don't need to be loud to get your point across," Dumars said Wednesday. "We have nothing but the highest respect and admiration for the job that Pax has done in putting together the team that he believes has the best chance at winning championships, because that's all that matters -- winning championships. He's made the tough choices that you've got to make if you want to reach that level."</p><p> Dumars is reluctant to look back. He doesn't want his team fixating on "back in the day" whimsy. But the Pistons-Bulls rivalry was special and still has a hold on fans, even many who live outside of Detroit and Chicago.</p><p> We asked some of the participants of those great battles to share their recollections.</p><p><b>In the beginning</b></p><p> <b>Rick Mahorn:</b> "We became their rival long before they became ours. They weren't even on our radar back in '88 and '89. For us, it was all about the Lakers then and, before that, it was all about Boston. Everything we did that year we did with the Lakers in mind, not Chicago. That's what we were pointing to that season. We finally got past the Celtics and we wanted the best regular-season record so that we could get home-court advantage in the Finals against the Lakers. We didn't even think that we would play Chicago that year (1989) because everybody was talking about Cleveland and New York, and Philly was pretty good back then. And then Michael hit that shot to beat Cleveland."</p><p> <b>Paxson:</b> "Detroit was already established as one of the top teams in the league. It's like anything else. You're trying to bring attention upon yourself and making people pay attention to you, but nobody cared to listen to us. All everybody wanted to talk about was Celtics-Lakers, Lakers-Pistons or Pistons-Celtics. Those three teams pretty much comprised the entire basketball universe in some people's minds. And that was the challenge for us. People were already recognizing that Michael was a special player, but there were concerns about the entire team. It was a learning process. We had to stick our head in there. Detroit already had a big rivalry with Boston in the East, and we had to change that."</p><p> <b>Laimbeer:</b> "Aside from winning the NBA championships, the biggest thing for me was finally clearing that obstacle with Boston. We didn't give Chicago a thought. But keeping the Bulls down was a good task. It was fun. Chicago thought they were a pretty good team, but they whined and cried so much that you had to shut them up. You couldn't pick up a newspaper without hearing them whining and crying, so you knew you were getting in their heads. But what bothered me most was how they went into the newspapers and called us all kinds of names, personal names, like portraying us as bad guys. But time has proven that our team never had any issues with the law or any issues with the league. They did.</p><p> "By the time they finally broke through and beat us, we were done. It was fun keeping them down, though, for as long as we did. It was clear that Michael Jordan was a great player and his time was coming. But we enjoyed keeping them down -- very much so."</p><p><b>Bad moon rising</b></p><p> It began as a feud between Thomas and Jordan. Isiah had been Chicago's basketball pride and joy until Jordan launched himself into the stratosphere during his rookie season in 1984-85. From there, the animosity spread.</p><p> <b>Paxson:</b> "Laimbeer took a cheap shot on me when I flipped a shot up at the Palace. There were a lot of shots, but that's the one that I remember. It made you mad, but Phil's whole thing to us that year was to play away from those things and not to get baited into things like that. It was the greatest education we ever got. The Pistons weren't going anywhere. Ultimately, we had to find a way to beat them." (Phil Jackson was Chicago's coach.)</p><p> <b>B.J. Armstrong:</b> "Back then, you played teams in your division six times a season instead of just four times like you do now. So we wound up playing the Bulls 12 or 13 times a season if you include the playoffs. Things are going to get a little chippier when you're so used to playing against a team. I'm sure that contributed to the higher level of intensity."</p><p> <b>Mahorn:</b> "We didn't like them."</p><p> <b>Pistons trainer Mike Abdenour:</b> "The elbows seemed to have a little extra steam behind them when the Pistons and Bulls met then. You just planned on guys spending a little extra time in the training room after those games. And Chicago Stadium was a building that was unique to itself. It just helped creating an environment that led to the higher intensity. In older buildings like that, you had to go up and down the stairs to get to the locker room. It was a challenge with the crowds because they were close enough to you, and sometimes they threw stuff at us. You could literally taste the intensity there."</p><p> <b>Paxson:</b> "There was a genuine dislike among players then. They were the Bad Boys and they used to beat us up pretty good. You just didn't see all the grabbing, hugging and kissing that you're seeing today."</p><p> <b>Mahorn:</b> "They played in an old dump of a building like they did in Boston, and it seemed like they were always on top of you, and that stirred up some things."</p><p> <b>Laimbeer:</b> "My biggest memory of that (1991) series? Without question it was their crying and whining, and Phil Jackson was the No. 1 leader in the bunch. And I loved playing in their building. It might have been the loudest stadium in the league. We loved it when they booed us because there was nothing sweeter than silencing that crowd."</p><p><b>The Jordan rules</b></p><p> <b>Mahorn:</b> "We were just throwing stuff out there for (the media). It was just a joke. Chuck (Daly, Pistons coach) throws it out there that we had some secret plan to stop Jordan, and everybody just jumped on it. Everybody was writing stories about this strategy. When we kept reading about it, Isiah told us that we had gotten in their heads, and that's how we had them beat."</p><p> <b>Abdenour:</b> "You talk about the prince of disinformation? Chuck Daly threw a whole lot of nonsense out there that didn't exist. That should have gone down as one of the greatest fakes of all time."</p><p> <b>Armstrong:</b> "Jordan was the first NBA player capable of going beyond the rules, and the league wasn't prepared for that. He was the first exceptional basketball player who just happened to be an exceptional athlete. The defensive strategy against athletic players was just keep knocking them down to the ground. Make him feel like it's the fourth quarter in the first quarter. But he was able to elevate beyond that, and the league had to catch up. That's why you saw the rules change, trying to get a lot of the excessive physicality out of the game."</p><p> <b>Paxson:</b> "They just kept pounding Michael, and we're looking to the officials for help, and then we realized that we're going to have to help ourselves."</p><p> <b>Armstrong:</b> "Others looked at the so-called 'Jordan Rules' as a blueprint for stopping him, but we looked at it as more of a reflection of what the rest of us on the team weren't doing to take some of the pressure off Michael. It all helped change our collective mind-set. We knew we had a special, one-of-a-kind player, so the rest of us had to keep the game close for the first 44 minutes so that our great player could take over and win it in the last four minutes."</p><p> <b>Laimbeer:</b> "We knew that it was just a question of time because you weren't going to be able to keep a great player like him down for long."</p><p><b>The Pistons' last stand</b></p><p> <b>Armstrong:</b> "Game 7 in 1990 (Pistons 93, Bulls 74) was the first time I could recall in my basketball career that I couldn't come up with any excuses for why I lost. You could usually say that if we did a couple of things better, we might have had a chance. But Detroit was clearly the better team that day. And I think that woke everybody up to what we needed to do to get past them. And the proof of that was that just a week later, everybody showed up for the first day of off-season conditioning. We knew then we weren't going to let that happen again."</p><p> <b>Paxson:</b> "After 1990, we thought that we were a pretty good team and that if we had home-court advantage -- guaranteeing that seventh game on our floor -- we could beat those guys. And that became our rallying cry. We had to stop waiting for the Pistons to stumble and just take it away from them. But even though we lost that seventh game, I think we came away with a lot of confidence in ourselves. Beating the Pistons became our No. 1 objective going into the next season."</p><p> <b>Mahorn:</b> "There's a process that we had to go through to finally get past Boston, and there was a process for them. There comes a point when everything clicks upstairs and you finally figure it out. But I wasn't there when they finally figured it out."</p><p><b>End of an era</b></p><p> <b>Laimbeer:</b> "There are more teams. The talent pool is watered down. You can't build deep teams like you once could. You also have a transient situation with the salary cap and the money situation where you can't keep teams together for long periods of time. And it has to come together. Every thing is cyclical in sports. You have to have both teams hitting their strides at the right time in order to have a rivalry because if one team is bad, nobody is going to care."</p><p> <b>Abdenour:</b> "Quoting Tony Soprano, 'It's a bad conversation when you start by saying, "Remember when?" ' He's absolutely right. That's why we have ESPN Classic, the Discovery Channel and the History Channel. We can go back and reminisce, but you don't necessarily want to go back to that. But that's the nature of the entire athletic genre all over the place. Everybody's hugging and kissing everybody before the game these days. Nine guys on the same team are represented by the same agent. But when you roll the ball out there, they still want it as badly as they wanted it 15-20 years ago."</p><p> <b>Dumars:</b> "This is a league that loves its rivalries, and because of the proximity between the two cities, there's always going to be a little more fire when Detroit meets Chicago, and that's great. But what happened 16 years ago has no relevance to what's happening now. The time comes to turn the page."</p><p> <b>Paxson:</b> "People said those games and how they were played was ugly, but I thought there was a lot of beauty in how those games were played physically because it tested how badly you wanted something. How far were you prepared to go? It was kind of fun to be a part of it. But that was a different time. It's nice to think back, but you can't recapture those moments. It's their time now to write a new chapter."</p>