For over two decades, Isiah Thomas has never backed down.
Chicago native or not, Illinois high school preps legend or not, he has never once apologized or shown remorse for walking off the Palace of Auburn Hills floor without shaking the Bulls’ hands when they finally broke Thomas and the Bad Boy-era Pistons’ stranglehold on the Eastern Conference in 1991.
Unsurprisingly, Thomas again stood his ground after ESPN’s “The Last Dance” documentary detailed the Bulls’ four-game Eastern Conference finals sweep that produced the moment.
“Straight up b**ches,” Horace Grant said in Episode 4. “That’s what they walked off like.”
Thomas reiterated what he has said over the years, that he and his teammates merely followed the lead of the Boston Celtics when the Pistons finally broke through them en route to back-to-back titles in 1989 and 1990.
“During that period of time, that’s just not how it was passed,” Thomas said. “When you lost, you left the floor.”
One of the most powerful moments from Episode 4 occurs when the filmmakers hand Michael Jordan a device to watch Thomas, in a present-day interview, reiterate his stance.
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“Well, I know it’s all bulls**t. Whatever he says now, you know it wasn’t his true actions then,” Jordan said as he grabbed the device (but before watching Thomas’ interview). “He’s had time enough to think about it, or the reactions of the public has kind of changed his perspective of it. You can show me whatever you want. There’s no way you can convince he wasn’t an a**hole.”
Given the way Episodes 3 and 4 detail the Pistons’ defensive scheme to try to slow Jordan, which was called “The Jordan Rules,” it’s easy to understand how raw the episode remains with Jordan.
“This is the Jordan Rules: Every time he go to the f**king basket, put him on the ground,” Dennis Rodman said. “We tried to physically hurt Michael.”
Rodman held the unique vantage point of playing against the Bulls, once shoving Scottie Pippen into a basket stanchion, and then helping them win the second three-peat from 1996-98. That makes his smooth assimilation into the Bulls, which also gets detailed in these episodes, all the more amazing.
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