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Curry's stellar season rewarded, but it wasn't that way 25 years ago for the Bad Boys

Steph Curry won the MVP award this week and if the NBA playoffs play to form, he'll cap his season by leading Golden State to its first title in 40 years about six weeks from now.

Good deal for him. That's the way it's supposed to work in sports, the ultimate meritocracy. Except it didn't exactly work that way for the Bad Boys.

When they won their two NBA titles in 1989 and '90, they were a plainly dominant team in an era that featured the greatest concentration of power teams the sport has ever known. The teams that won championships in the '80s were powerhouses – the Dr. J-Moses Malone 76ers, the Magic-Kareem Lakers, the Bird-Parish-McHale Celtics – and the Pistons won theirs by both slaying the Lakers and Celtics while holding off the burgeoning Jordan dynasty in Chicago.

To be sure, they all would have been indisputable dynasties – if not for the presence of the others. Drop any of those franchises into a different era and they all might have ripped off five or six straight titles.

So you would expect some big-time spoils to fall to the victors who led the first two NBA titles in Pistons history, no?

No.

When the Pistons won 63 games in 1988-89 – six more than the closest competitor – and swept through the playoffs with breathtaking dominance, a 15-2 record, here was the sum total of their impact on MVP balloting: one last-place vote apiece for Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars.

They tied with Terry Cummings for 17th place.

Of course, the individual star power ahead of them comprised heady company. The first five names on the list were no-doubt Hall of Famers: Magic, Jordan, Karl Malone, Ewing, Olajuwon.

I don't think Steph Curry's winning an MVP award if those guys are around, either.

The others who finished ahead of the co-stars of a 63-win team: John Stockton, Charles Barkley, Kevin Johnson, Tom Chambers, Mark Price, Brad Daugherty, Robert Parish, Mark Eaton, Moses Malone, Chris Mullin and Larry Nance. Phenomenal players, but the Bad Boys, perhaps uniquely, did not benefit as winners typically do when it comes time to parcel out individual awards.

When the All-NBA team came out after the 1988-89 season, not one Pistons player made the 15-man list for the first, second or third teams. The six guards who won acclaim over Thomas and Dumars – in their eighth and fourth NBA seasons at the time, so not exactly neophytes who caught voters unaware – were Magic and Jordan (OK, hard to argue) on the first team, Stockton and Kevin Johnson on the second team, Dale Ellis and Price on the third team.

Even more inexplicable was what happened after the 1989-90 season. Voting, keep in mind, must be conducted by the end of the regular season. So even though the Bad Boys won 63 games in 1988-89, they had yet to fully legitimize themselves by winning a title – even though they'd pushed the Lakers to Game 7 in the 1988 Finals after finally vanquishing the Celtics in the Eastern finals – by the time ballots were turned in.

But after winning it all in '89 and following up with a 59-win season and the East's No. 1 seed again in 1989-90, they fared hardly any better in awards voting that spring. Joe D and Isiah again picked up one lone, last-place vote apiece, this time tying each other for 13th instead of 17th.

The names ahead of them that season: Magic, Barkley, Jordan, Karl Malone, Ewing, Robinson, Olajuwon, Chambers, Stockton, Bird, Buck Williams, Drexler.

In All-NBA balloting, Joe D managed to eke out a third-team berth at guard, alongside Drexler. Magic and Jordan, Stockton and Kevin Johnson again got first- and second-team berths.

I'm generally not big into conspiracy theories, but Jack McCloskey to this day is convinced there was an anti-Pistons sentiment that emanated from basketball circles of power, both official and unofficial. He told me once about attending the NBA league meetings in the aftermath of the '89 Finals. In the hotel lobby, adorned by signage to acknowledge the season just past, were a couple of life-size cardboard cutouts of NBA players. Those cutouts in the past had always saluted the champions.

This time? siah? Joe D? Dennis Rodman or Bill Laimbeer?

Nope. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, stars of the teams the Pistons had stepped over to win it all after getting robbed of the '88 title by a phantom foul call on Laimbeer. Incensed, McCloskey got no real explanation for it when he confronted a stammering league official.

The results of awards balloting the greatest Pistons teams amid the greatest NBA era were accorded sure makes it look like Trader Jack was on to something there.