Isiah Thomas thinks these Knicks and Pistons are cut from the same cloth.
The cloth he himself wove, that is.
The Pistons legend and former Knicks president and coach sees similarities in both teams to his “Bad Boys” teams in Detroit and doesn’t see much separating them ahead of their first-round series.
“It’s going to be a very close series,” Thomas said Friday on ESPN radio. “Both teams are evenly matched. They both have the same DNA and the DNA that comes with the Detroit Pistons Bad Boys. When you look at the Knicks culture and you look at the Detroit culture, they’re eerily very similar. What we started in Detroit, [Pat] Riley left L.A., came to New York and adopted our Bad Boy culture. That’s the DNA you see in both the Knicks and also the Pistons.”
That Bad Boys DNA, which helped the Pistons win two championships in 1989 and ’90, was physical and tough, sometimes crossing the line to dirty.
Thomas saw that DNA disappear from Detroit until reemerging recently, and he has a strong idea why — he believes what the Pistons were chastised for, Riley’s Knicks teams were praised for.
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“My answer might not sit well with some folks, but from a perceptions standpoint, it was stereotyped as dirty, as bad, or whatever you want to label all the negative languages, negative terms that were put around the Detroit culture — the city itself, the people in Detroit and also the teams,” Thomas said. “And if what you’ve noticed is that everyone else — and I’ll even include New York in terms of the Knicks — everyone else was allowed to play a rough, physical style of play and adopt it and have media support it. But national media, that same style of play that was being played in Detroit, Detroit couldn’t play it, but everyone else could.
“You’ve had and what you’ve seen is coaches that have come into Detroit, whether it be football, hockey, baseball, basketball, from Michigan State to Michigan, where everyone in the state of Michigan is really going back to standing up for who we are in the state of Michigan, what we represent and the culture that we have as in sports culture and as a state. And now, you’re seeing that culture being permeated again — key word: ‘again’ — across all the sports. … Detroit has now reacquainted itself back with its original roots.”
The Knicks have been criticized this year for losing some of the toughness they possessed previously under Tom Thibodeau.
A lot of that stems from Karl-Anthony Towns, who — rightly or wrongly — carries a “soft” reputation around the league.
Thomas disagrees.
“No, there’s no drop-off at all,” Thomas said. “The Knicks definitely have toughness. … What you have in New York in terms of style of play and the DNA there, you should never question the toughness of any of those people.
“Although sometimes you may not like the way Towns is playing, you can never question his heart, his commitment and his toughness,” Thomas said. “The rebounds that he’s able to acquire and the points he’s able to put up on a nightly basis. I have no doubt in my mind about the toughness of the Pistons or the toughness of the Knicks. That’s not a concern.”
