The Detroit Pistons won the NBA title unexpectedly in 2004, beating Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal along with the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals.
The team had a lot of really good players like Rasheed Wallace, Ben Wallace, and Rip Hamilton, among others. And Sheed once described what the celebrations after they clinched the title were like.
Stephen Jackson asked Wallace about the celebrations on All The Smoke and he said, “At the Palace. We stayed at the Palace all night. And we didn’t leave till about like 9-10 that next morning. We was drinking. I lived like, less than a mile from the Palace.
“So the brothers that indulged ran to my crib real quick. Boom Bam, ran back up to the Palace. And we was grubbing and drinking all night. I ain’t take my uniform off. All I did was cut my tape off and change my sneakers. I still had my tights, the same bloodstains on this jersey. Kept that on.”
(starts at 51:53 minutes)
Nobody expected the Detroit Pistons to beat the 3-time champion Los Angeles Lakers in 2004, but that’s exactly what they did. The Pistons won in five games, too, only allowing the Lakers to score more than 90 points in one game. Rip Hamilton and Chauncey Billups led the way with 21 points per game each in the Finals, while Sheed had 13.0 points and 7.8 rebounds on average. And they would go on to continue celebrating for a while after they won too.
Rasheed Wallace Showed His Championship Ring To Get The Pistons Into A Club
A lot of those Pistons players had been counted out in their careers, so they really made the most of their championship win. Even after they won, sometimes they had trouble being recognized. This led to a legendary moment when Sheed showed his ring to get the team into a club, a story he told on the same podcast.
“So Lindsey (Hunter), first in like, and you know he’s a little pit bull. So he drunk, walking in, security was like, ‘Whoa whoa whoa dog, you know, we gotta see some ID, we gotta check y’all, y’all can’t just walk in like that.’
“He (Hunter) was like, ‘What? What? You know who we is? Look at all these cats. You know who we are?’ He was like, ‘Matter of fact, I got my ID right here. Yo… Show him our ID.’ And it’s just at that time, I had my ring on. So I showed the dude the ring, and Lindsey was like, ‘That’s my ID,’ and walked on into the joint. And I thought he was gangster for that.”
The Denver Nuggets recent celebrations show just what an incredible thing it is to win a championship for a franchise and a city. And the Pistons knew all about it and they celebrated just that hard as well.
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