John Niyo: Pistons paying respect to Bad Boys' legacy in playoff return

DETROIT — The New York Knicks say they’re bracing for a fight in their first-round Eastern Conference playoff series against the Pistons.

And if you ask Doc Rivers, the veteran coach of the Milwaukee Bucks, maybe they should be.

“(The Pistons) do seem to get into more fights than other teams,” laughed Rivers, whose team finished the regular season with back-to-back games against Detroit. “I don’t know if that’s the Bad Boys way or not. But they’re playing really physical.”

Not that he was complaining about that, mind you. In fact, for Rivers, that pregame conversation last week took him back to his own NBA playing days in the late-1980s and early-90s, when Isiah Thomas — his childhood hoops rival from Chicago — and the Pistons were the toughest team on the block.

“First of all, we could fight back then,” Rivers said. “They didn’t take you off the floor, which was really wonderful. I think that’s what we should go back to. When guys square off, we should say, ‘All right, go ahead.' ”

They won’t, he knows. And chances are, this Pistons-Knicks series that tips off Saturday night at Madison Square Garden won’t turn into that kind of main event, anyway. But both teams are well aware of what’s in store when the bell rings for Game 1.

"We know what kind of game it’s gonna be,” Knicks guard Josh Hart said, adding he expects this matchup with Detroit to be “probably one of the more physical series in the playoffs."

'It's not an act'

J.B. Bickerstaff, the Pistons’ head coach, wouldn’t have it any other way. And while neither he nor anyone else in the organization is claiming this is the start of a new Bad Boys era in Detroit — not yet, at least — the rough-and-tumble brand of basketball we’re seeing isn’t merely cosplay, either.

“For us, it’s real,” Bickerstaff said. “Like, it’s not an act. We have a bunch of guys who are tough-minded. They don’t mind being physical, and they don’t back down from anything.”

And perhaps more than anything, it’s that grit-and-grind mentality, as Bickerstaff calls it, that explains why the Pistons are back here in the NBA playoffs, ending a six-year postseason drought rather emphatically this spring. It’s because they have an identity, which is something that’s been talked about in the abstract for years but finally is playing out on the court for everyone to see — and feel.

“It’s really good basketball going on,” owner Tom Gores said. “And the physicality, that’s part of the game. Basketball is a contact sport. So that’s what I’m proud of. Actually, we’ve talked to the guys: ‘You don’t have to mimic anybody other than yourselves. Just be yourselves.’ And they’re doing that.”

They are, and it shows. This season, Detroit led the NBA in both dunks and technical fouls, ranked in the top five in rebounding and points in the paint, and posted the third-best defensive rating in the league after Jan. 1.

And, yes, they got into more than a few scuffles along the way, including that one in Minnesota a few weeks ago that led to suspensions for a handful of players, including the Pistons’ Stewart, Ron Holland II and Marcus Sasser. A few days later, the team took the unusual step of releasing a defiant statement from Gores that read, in part, “Let me be absolutely clear: We stand behind our players."

“We knew we needed to fight, we knew we needed to be competitive coming into the season,” team president Trajan Langdon explained Wednesday after practice. “And when I say ‘fight,’ I don't mean literally. I mean compete. And I think our guys have done that, and they felt (the support) from our end. We're going to have these guys’ backs.”

And that gets back to what Bickerstaff has been talking about in recent weeks, whenever the subject of the Pistons’ championship era and that Bad Boys legacy gets brought up.

“I mean, it's been that way as long as I can remember,” he said. “Again, I grew up watching the Bad Boys play.”

Pistons reconnect

Bickerstaff was still in grade school when Thomas and the Pistons won those back-to-back NBA titles, but he grew up around the game thanks to his father, Bernie, who spent nearly a half-century as an NBA coach and a decade ago was honored with the NBA’s Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award. Both Rick Mahorn and Ben Wallace played for Bickerstaff’s dad, and the son can rattle off countless other ties he has to the Pistons’ stars of that era and from the 2004 “Goin’ to Work” champs as well. Thomas and Joe Dumars, Mahorn and Bill Laimbeer, Chauncey Billups and Tayshaun Prince, and so on.

“I respect those guys so much that I’ve tried my best to spread that amongst our group,” Bickerstaff said. “And I think our guys have bought in to the idea of it, and they’ve gone out every day and tried to show respect and emulate what those who’ve come before us have done.”

That style of play, in turn, has helped this team start to reconnect with a fan base that had largely fallen dormant over the last 15 years or so. The Pistons haven’t won a playoff game since 2008, and hadn’t had a winning season since leaving Auburn Hills behind and moving back downtown. That was four head coaches and four GMs ago.

“You think about the city of Detroit, the people from Detroit, and nothing’s ever easy, right?” Bickerstaff said. “It's all hard-earned. … And that's what our fans want to see: A team that they can relate to.”

That's something All-Star guard Cade Cunningham quickly picked up on when he arrived as the No. 1 overall pick in 2021.

“It seems like everybody here is gritty,” Cunningham said. “That’s something that’s preached throughout the city, not just in sports. And I think that’s something that every coach here tries to instill in the team. And players that play here and understand the city, they know that if they want to earn the respect of the city, they gotta play with some grit.”

He and his teammates have leaned into that this season, urged on by their coach — a marked difference from Monty Williams a year ago — and emboldened by the success that started piling up, at long last. For the young core that had suffered through years of losing and league-wide ridicule, it’s all the more rewarding to finally push back, too.

You could see that in the way Stewart held out his jersey and pointed to the “Detroit” as he left the floor to a chorus of boos following his ejection in Minnesota. And we’ll probably see it at some point in Game 1 or 2 in New York as well.

“I mean, the playoffs is when things get chippy,” Stewart said, practically grinning, when I asked him if he thought the Pistons' style of play would serve them well now that the regular season is over. “They let you play physical, and they're not calling as much, so I think that brand of basketball is perfect for playoffs.”

It was once before for the Pistons. So why can’t it be again?

“Obviously, we can’t take it as far as they were able to back in their day,” Bickerstaff said. “But Detroit basketball is about being physically and mentally tough. It’s about being gritty. It’s about doing all the dirty things, winning all the nasty battles, and not being afraid to take those on. And that’s who we are. We’re different than a lot of other teams.”