The Boston Celtics were never going to be prominent figures in the new ESPN Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance”, but the ripples left in the wake of the mid-1980s championship teams led by Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish made for an interesting cameo.
While Boston was on the decline by the time Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and the “Bad Boy” Detroit Piston were fighting out for supremacy in the East, boh had to go through the Celtics and their aging core to do it.
“Detroit had a similar thing with Boston that we had with them,” observed Chicago guard John Paxson in the documentary. “I can still remember the first time that Detroit beat them. And I can remember seeing Kevin McHale come out to half court and shaking hands and things like that.”
This was, of course, in direct response to Pistons Hall of Fame point guard Isiah Thomas (not be confused with former Boston floor general Isaiah Thomas, more on that shortly).
After his Pistons were eliminated by the Bulls in 1991, the team chose to exit the court without shaking hands or congratulating Chicago, Thomas claimed it wasn’t just the norm in that era, but what they’d experienced themselves from the Celtics under similar circumstances in 1988.
This was of course rejected by Jordan and the rest of the Bulls to this day, and was refuted by Celtics employees working the game at the time as well.
“What Isiah said simply isn’t true,” explained ex-Boston video coordinator Jon Jennings via the Boston Globe’s Adam Himmelsbach. “I was sitting right behind [head coach] K.C. Jones.”
The game already decided, Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Danny Ainge were all benched at the end of the game, with Kevin McHale even going out of his way to greet Thomas briefly before play resumed and the game ended.
“K.C. and [assistant coaches] Jimmy Rodgers and Chris Ford were all talking about getting guys off the floor, because we were in the Silverdome, and you could just tell these folks were ready to storm the court,” explained Jennings.
A review of the contest by the Globe confirmed announcers had to ask fans to return to their seats with a foul called on a Celtics with just seconds remaining.
“That is honest-to-goodness what that was about,” he continued.
“It had nothing whatsoever to do with trying to show up the Pistons or a lack of sportsmanship. It was really the safety of those guys. I remember K.C. pointing at the guys, going down the bench and saying ‘OK, go to the locker room.'”
The reserves who were in the game stayed on the court until the buzzer sounded, and sure enough the parquet was flooded with fans almost immediately.
“One of the scariest experiences of my entire life was after that game ended,” Jennings continued.
“I was literally behind K.C. as we were trying to make our way to the locker room and you had all these people — it was a domed stadium — so you had this massive crowd and they were coming onto the floor excited and jumping up and down. It was crazy. It was absolutely pandemonium. Of course, they finally beat us, so you get it.”
“It’s nothing against the Detroit fans,” finished Jennings. “But I’ve never forgotten that feeling of trying to make our way to the locker room.”
In another interesting twist tying Sunday’s premier of episodes three and four of “The Last Dance” to Boston is the roasting poor IT got for his name sake’s paper-thin excuse for poor sportsmanship.
Named for the nearly-eponymous Detroit point guard after his father lost a bet with a Pistons fan, the younger Thomas spells his first name with two ‘a’s — and got sick of being blamed for Isiah’s choice of explanation.
While it’s literally been decades since those series went down, the history of the league has taken on much additional weight with the coronavirus pandemic robbing us all of professional sports of all kinds.
But it’s been an outstanding means of bringing forth new versions of old controversies — and learning anew the ways those events continue to affect our basketball present while we wait for a return to normalcy.
Just make sure you spell “Isiah” right if you’re going to get into it on Twitter.
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