During Michael Jordan’s rise to superstardom with the Chicago Bulls, one of his biggest rivals was Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons, who were the team to beat at the time after taking down Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics.
Jordan and Thomas’ beef stemmed from a lot of different things, mainly the battles between the Bad Boy Pistons and the upstart Bulls, with Detroit holding Chicago at bay seemingly every single year.
Once the Bulls finally got the best of the Pistons and ended their magical run, which resulted in back-to-back NBA titles, Detroit walked off the floor without shaking the hands of Jordan and his Bulls teammates, which didn’t sit well with the superstar.
Things seemed to get more and more heated from then on out as the Bulls became an unstoppable force in the Eastern Conference, and the Pistons’ era of dominance was over.
In a recent interview with Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson of Bally Sports, former Pistons big man John Salley, who also played alongside Jordan briefly, talked about the relationship between Thomas and the Bulls legend.
Michael Jordan’s beef with Isiah Thomas was so bad that MJ would say things to John Salley to make him dislike the Pistons Hall of Famer: “Michael and I had the same agent and at times he wanted me not to like Isiah. That was his personal thing. But there’s no reason for it to be… https://t.co/S7IdIVFIAE pic.twitter.com/Zrs5TAmEZ2
— 👑 Brandon “Scoop B” Robinson (@ScoopB) August 28, 2023
Salley claims the beef between Thomas and Jordan was due to a false narrative because of an All-Star Game in which Jordan was supposedly ignored by Thomas, who was running the point.
The real reason was the competitive battle these two had during the late 80s, with the Pistons playing extremely physical basketball against Jordan, so much so that they devised a plan called the “Jordan Rules” to stop him.
At this point, the relationship between Thomas and Jordan seems irreparable, especially after the way Jordan talked about him during “The Last Dance” documentary, but these things can get squashed over time.
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