Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance has opened up the door for a lot of controversies that were locked on a vault for twenty years, with several young fans having a first glimpse at how basketball truly was in the 80s and 90s.
And one of the subjects that have gained a lot of attention lately is the Bulls’ rivalry with the Detroit Pistons, as history had kind of snubbed the ‘Bad Boys’ for the physical, tough way they played on both ends of the court.
The documentary shows Michael Jordan complaining about how the Pistons’ were only focused on trying to bully and beat their rivals, as he had previously stated that they weren’t good for basketball.
However, former Celtics’ great Kevin McHale recently said that Boston actually liked playing against the Bad Boys because of how much their physicality brought the best out of them:
“We actually liked playing like that. We didn’t have any problem with the Pistons, really, until we got all beat up (with injuries). But their physicality never bothered us. I thought their physicality made us play better,” McHale told The Boston Herald.
Then, McHale went on to add that Jordan and the Bulls constantly whined to the referees and media about how the Pistons played, taking a shot at the GOAT and his colleagues:
“First of all, you can see why the Pistons didn’t like the Bulls. The Bulls complained all the time. That’s one thing that came across (in the documentary). Like, ‘This is not basketball. This is thuggery.’ All that stuff. I thought the Bulls really disrespected what the Pistons were able to do. But, hey, when you kill the king, you can talk sh*t,” McHale concluded.
At the end of the day, the Bad Boys would go down as Jordan’s kryptonite during the first years of his career but they were also his biggest motivators. As Magic Johnson said, if it wasn’t for them, Jordan wouldn’t have become the greatest player of all time.
