Let’s start this off with a bang, shall we? The current line up that the Detroit Pistons will be trying to utilize this coming season is filled with a lot of what-ifs. Kentavius Caldwell-Pope can go hot or cold any night of the week, Ersan Ilyasova brings a little bit of boom from Milwaukee, and Andre Drummond and Marcus Morris like to make their opponents suffer. Oh yeah, Reggie Jackson won’t be a bad fill at the point-guard position either.
Detroit is also home to the “Bad Boy” Pistons, who won back-to-back NBA championships by not caring about anyone else’s feelings or emotions other than their own. Knowing that MoTown has an aggressive history of basketball and beyond, here’s a look at the all-time starting five for the Detroit Pistons:
Point Guard: Isiah Thomas – 1981-1994
Choosing the best point-guard in Pistons’ history came down between Isiah Thomas and Chauncey Billups. Billups was in contention here because he brought life to the most recent championship-caliber team in MoTown. Billups has one ring, whereas Thomas has two.
Thomas, as a member of the “Bad Boys”, took the league by storm during the 1988-89 season that ended with the Pistons defeating the Los Angeles Lakers 4-0 in the NBA Finals. Thomas averaged 18.3 points-per-game (PPG) in both seasons that he won basketball’s biggest prize, whereas Billups averaged 16.9 PPG. Even though neither of those are Kobe Bryant-LeBron James esque, Thomas is still the clear winner on the stat sheet.
Shooting Guard: Joe Dumars – 1985-1999
Some would argue that Dave Bing deserves the nod over Dumars, but that argument shuts down about as quickly as the Thomas-Billups debate. At the end of the day, Bing never got a ring. Dumars was also part of the “Bad Boys”, while playing toe-to-toe alongside Thomas & Co en route to back-to-back titles during the ’88-’89 and ’89-’90 seasons.
Dumars put up 16 points, five assists, and two rebounds-per-game in the near decade and a half he spent in the Motor City. Not to mention the fact that he is the only Pistons’ shooting guard to spend the full span of his career in Detroit.
Small Forward: Grant Hill – 1994-2000
Coming in right on the heels of Isiah Thomas’ exit, Pistons fans were more than ready for their next superstar. That’s exactly what they got in then-rookie Grant Hill. With all of the pressure on and none of the attention on him just yet, Hill performed well above expectations.
In fact, Hill’s 20 points, six rebounds, five assists, and two steals-per-contest earned him the Rookie of the Year honor in the 1994-95 season. To follow suit, Hill is also able to say at the end of the day that he made the All-NBA team five times in his career,along with seven All-Star game appearances.
Power Forward: Rasheed Wallace – 2003-2009
Rasheed Wallace proved to be one of the most valuable pick-ups for the Detroit Pistons en route to their 2004 NBA Finals clash with the Los Angeles Lakers. With Wallace, that team would not have had nearly as much firepower as they did in the Finals. The Lakers, being the Lakers, were not just going to go away quietly and Detroit knew that all too well. At one point during Game 4 at the Palace of Auburn Hills, Wallace went berserk and the rest is history.
This performance helped be the dagger to the Lakers’ title hopes that season, as the Pistons finished Los Angeles off in Game 4 and 5 to win the Larry O’Brien trophy.
Center: Ben Wallace – 2000-2006, 2009-2012
The other Wallace on the Pistons’ roster that played an irreplaceable role on the 2004 championship team was Ben Wallace. Instead of just energy, just offense, or just defensive skills, Wallace seemed to bring everything into a tightly knit basketball package. Throughout the playoffs, the Pistons found out that he was really the icing on the cake.
He did not score as much as you see stars in today’s game scoring. Wallace lit up the floor on any given drive because he had what the majority of players did not have back then and are striving for now: raw talent. The 16-year veteran was naturally that good to the point where the coach could put him in with all of the weight on his shoulders and he’d still deliver.
And, of course, his shot-blocking abilities were freakish, super-human, and second-to-none when it comes to Pistons down low.
The Heat Check Magazine 