2004 Championship

Keith Langlois

(EDITOR’S NOTE: While the NBA season is in limbo amid the coronavirus pandemic, Pistons.com will periodically look back at some of the most significant personnel moves – trades, free-agent signings, draft picks – in Pistons history. Next up: The trade-deadline deal that brought Rasheed Wallace to the Pistons in February 2004.)

Your team being ecstatic after pulling off a trade-deadline deal isn’t the best barometer for gauging its ultimate success. When your rivals recoil in disgust over your heist, then you might be on to something.

The Pistons – front office, coach Larry Brown, the Goin’ to Work playing cast, Hooper the horse, everybody – were beyond thrilled when Joe Dumars barely beat the buzzer to pull off the three-team deal at the Feb. 19 trade deadline in 2004 that added Rasheed Wallace to Ben Wallace, Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince.

Their Eastern Conference rivals were … whatever the diametrical opposite of “beyond thrilled” might be.

“That’s going to make the Pistons awfully tough,” Cleveland coach Paul Silas glumly acknowledged. “I just don’t know what some people are thinking about.”

Dumars had long admired the pure talent Wallace possessed. He’d tried to trade for him for two solid years with all of the NBA aware that Portland – derisively known as the “Jail Blazers” for the litany of bad behavior on the record – was shopping its roster. Just 10 days before the deadline, Wallace was shipped to Atlanta. But the Hawks were bumping along at the bottom of the standings and nobody believed Atlanta was interested in Wallace – a rental about to hit free agency – beyond what he’d yield in trade.

So Dumars kept trying. But there wasn’t a match unless he could find a third team to satisfy Atlanta’s wish list. The deadline was looming. With one final arm twist, Dumars convinced an old playing-days rival, Boston’s Danny Ainge, to take the plunge.

The price tag for Wallace: backup guards Lindsey Hunter, Chucky Atkins and Bob Sura; little-used backup big man Zeljko Rebraca and two future No. 1 picks. The Pistons also got Mike James in the deal from Boston and knew that the Celtics would waive Hunter, who rejoined the Pistons a week after the trade.

“It created cap space and it didn’t mess up the core of our team,” Dumars said. “It was an easy deal to do. It made it somewhat of a no-brainer for us.”

Nobody could have known for sure how emphatically Rasheed Wallace completed the Pistons – five fingers of an iron fist – at the time, though Dumars and Brown loved the idea of adding his elite skill level and versatility to the mix. Dumars waved away concerns of Wallace’s past – the league-record 41 technical fouls from three years earlier, the seven-game suspension for threating an official, the snarling countenance.

Character issues “never entered into our decision-making process,” Dumars said. “Everywhere he’s been, his teammates and coaches rave about him as a teammate and as a guy to coach. His issues have always been about getting calls.”

The ace Dumars held in his pocket was Brown, whose shared North Carolina roots – and shared admiration for the man who’d coached them both there, Dean Smith – made any questions of the defiance skeptics expected from Wallace a moot point.

As in all significant transactions, the Pistons brought in their owner, Bill Davidson, for a veto opportunity. Davidson famously allowed his executives wide latitude, but he wasn’t one to tolerate lawlessness or impudence. But he was an easy sell on Wallace.

“Mr. D told me he’d rather have a guy who cares,” Brown said as he sat alongside Wallace when he arrived at The Palace just in time to suit up the day following the trade for a game against Kevin Garnett and the Minnesota Timberwolves, who at the time had the best record in the Western Conference and were a team the Pistons now viewed as a potential Finals opponent. Brown, somewhat adoringly, said Wallace was “in the top five players in the league.”

A footnote to that crazy night: Wallace came off the bench to play 12 first-half minutes, then was told at halftime he couldn’t re-enter the game. A snafu in the paperwork required to finalize the trade became known at some point after tipoff.

“I went up to Rasheed and said, ‘You and Mike (James) can’t play (in the second half),’ ” Brown said. “He kind of laughed and I said, ‘No, I’m serious.’ We’re on national TV with the team with the best record in the league against you, all this attention, a full house … it’s crazy. It’s not right.”

Wallace’s impact was immediately felt, just as the Pistons’ contender peers feared. They went 20-6 after the deadline despite losing to Minnesota by a point in Wallace’s semi-debut. Two weeks after the deal, they began a streak of holding five consecutive opponents under 70 points, a record that is most unlikely to be challenged, and made it eight straight held under 80.

The Pistons finished with the second-best record in the East at 54-28, seven games behind Indiana. They beat Milwaukee in five games in the first round of the playoffs after splitting the first two games at home, then went seven games in the second round to beat New Jersey, winning a critical Game 6 on the road after falling behind 3-2 by losing an epic triple-overtime Game 5 at home.

The Eastern Conference finals with Indiana was a slugfest in which the winning team never scored more than 85 points in any game. The Pistons needed to win a Game 6 at The Palace to avoid a Game 7 on the road and they got it – a 69-65 mud battle on June 1 to set up their third NBA Finals matchup against the Los Angeles Lakers in franchise history.

It seemed almost anticlimactic when they knocked off the star-studded Lakers – Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone and Gary Payton – in the “five-game sweep” just ahead of free agency.

By that time, what seemed likely to be the trade-deadline rental of Wallace became a mission to retain him and keep intact the Goin’ to Work Pistons. One of the purposes of the Wallace acquisition was to create the cap space that would enable the Pistons to have a shot to retain their promising second-year forward/center, 24-year-old Mehmet Okur – the player Wallace replaced in the starting lineup. A since-rectified loophole meant the Pistons had to sign Okur with cap space, putting them at a disadvantage.

At the time of the Wallace trade, Dumars said it was his intention to keep both in free agency, but that was always going to be a stretch. And the common assumption was that the Pistons would prioritize keeping Okur given his youth and potential. But by the time their Finals appearance was achieved, there was no breaking up the five that melded so seamlessly and produced the third NBA title in franchise history. I mean, ball don’t lie.

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A Big Deal: Pistons deadline acquisition of Rasheed Wallace shook the NBA – and brought another banner to Detroit

Late in the 2012 season, Ben Wallace and I sat in the coffee shop of a Charlotte hotel. I was writing a Courtside Quarterly article to send him into retirement and he said he could give me 30 minutes after we landed late that afternoon from Orlando. We wound up talking about three times that long.

It’s because the subject turned to the Goin’ to Work Pistons he anchored as the four-time Defensive Player of the Year. And he turned nostalgic, philosophical and wistful while choking up once or twice along the way.

“I don’t think there are too many teams in any sport that ever won a championship with a team like we had,” he said. “Guys that truly cared about each other and didn’t care who scores as long as the points were going up on the board, don’t care who’s getting the stops as long as they’re not scoring.”

Early last season, I pushed the 45-minute locker room rule while sitting in a corner at Staples Center with Chauncey Billups, talking about the same thing.

“We all literally became brothers,” he said. “People say that. It’s a good cliché, but it was real with us. It was real. Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t ever see that happening like we did it. I think that’s the last time it’ll happen like that.”

Not all championship teams – Sunday was the 10th anniversary of the Game 5 title-clinching win over the Lakers – are created equal. They all take home the same trophy and get the same historical one-line acknowledgment on the list of champions, but they aren’t all held as dear as the 2004 Pistons title team. They so perfectly reflected the city they called home.

Detroit was Wallace’s third NBA stop and Billups’ sixth. So they knew that what they experienced – no, what they created – with the Pistons was rare, if not downright unique.
And when they left the Pistons – Wallace as a free agent in 2006, Billups via trade two years later – they knew the likelihood of recapturing that level of unity anywhere else was slim.

A big part of what hardened them and accelerated their closing of the ranks – five fingers becoming one iron fist – was their common denominator of having been castoffs and misfits.. Billups had gone from the No. 3 pick in 1997 to a human pinball, rolling through Boston, Toronto, Denver, Orlando and Minnesota before landing with the Pistons as a free agent in 2002.

Wallace went undrafted before trying to convert to shooting guard (!) with Boston’s Summer League team and subsequently hooking on with Washington, which traded him to Orlando, which in turn peddled him to the Pistons in the sign-and-trade deal for Grant Hill.

(Interesting sidebar: Orlando wanted to sign both Hill and Tracy McGrady to free-agent deals and brought both to town selling them on that idea. Hill wanted to sign with the Magic but for the seven-year, $93 million maximum deal he could only get via a sign-and-trade agreement that would require the cooperation of the Pistons. The Pistons wanted Ben Wallace in return, but Doc Rivers didn’t want to give him up. Orlando offered a package that didn’t interest the Pistons. They essentially said good luck and were ready to move on. The best Hill could do without a sign-and-trade would have been a six-year deal with 10 percent annual raises, not the 12.5 percent hikes the old bargaining agreement allowed. So, six years with 10 percent raises or seven years with 12.5 percent raises – the difference was about $20 million. Hill’s agent, Lon Babby, told Orlando they would think about it and go to on their next recruiting visit. That’s when Orlando relented and agreed to give up Wallace so they wouldn’t run the risk of losing Hill altogether. Only by calling Orlando’s bluff did the Pistons come away with the first piece of their five interlocking parts.)

Same with Rasheed Wallace and Rip Hamilton. Rasheed, always a volatile personality, became tainted by the Portland “Jail Blazers” slur. The Pistons were his third NBA stop – fourth, technically, though he played only one game for Atlanta before the Hawks flipped him to Detroit at the ’04 trade deadline. Hamilton had spent three years in Washington under the withering scrutiny of player/team president Michael Jordan, an impossible situation for a young shooting guard trying to emerge from Jordan’s immense shadow.

Even Tayshaun Prince had reason for a chip-on-the-shoulder mentality. In a 2002 draft that produced very little star power, Prince – despite spending four years under the NCAA’s brightest lights at Kentucky – lasted until the 22nd pick, watching these seven players go directly in front of him: Jiri Welsch, Juan Dixon, Curtis Borchardt, Ryan Humphrey, Kareem Rush, Qyntel Woods and Casey Jacobsen.

They were a solid team but less than a contender until Joe Dumars twisted arms in Atlanta and Boston to beat the clock by minutes in a three-team deal that cost the Pistons ridiculously little, on balance, to add Rasheed Wallace at the ’04 trade deadline.. (Bonus: They also got Mike James in the deal, and he proved a key figure in the playoff run.)

And for as wondrous as the package he brought to Detroit truly was, it was really more about how dropping him into the puzzle completed the picture. He took them from a good defensive team to an all-time great one. His low-post presence complemented the offensive rebounding of Ben Wallace and the perimeter precision of Billups, Hamilton and Prince.

Remarkably, their personalities suited the whole just as their skill sets meshed. In both respects, the total exceeded the sum of considerable parts.

Theirs was a collective leadership. When a need arose, either during a game or within the dynamic of the locker room, whoever had the ability to fill it instinctively stepped forward to do so. Larry Brown was the ideal coach for them, not only brilliant at fitting the puzzle pieces together but – as a guy who so naturally commanded respect – among the very few who could push as hard as he pushed without turning off a bunch of players who came to Detroit feeling unappreciated.

That was what always resonated with their fans about that team. It was an underdog team for an underdog town. They’ll always lament the near-miss repeat – the Game 7 loss at San Antonio in the 2005 Finals – and always regret not matching or exceeding the Bad Boys’ two titles. But they won the hearts of their fans, a hold on their city that isn’t showing any signs of lessening a decade out.

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The Goin’ to Work Pistons: 5 fingers became an iron fist

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2004 NBA Finals, Game 5

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2004 NBA Finals, Game 4

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2004 Eastern Conference Semifinals, Game 6

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2004 NBA Finals, Game 3

The 10-year anniversary of the 2004 NBA championship won by the Pistons comes Sunday. If you’ve got a 10-year-old bottle of bubbly saved for the occasion, Father’s Day sounds like a good day to pop it.

But if it’s looking good to you today, well, today’s not a bad day to uncork it, either.

Because today marks the 10-year anniversary of Game 3, and when it ended – an 88-68 demolition of a Lakers roster dripping with future Hall of Famers – the series was over.

It really didn’t take much of a shove. When the series left Los Angeles, the Lakers were showing glaring signs of a fragility nobody believed possible when the ’04 Finals matchup was set.

The teams split the first two games at Staples Center, the Pistons winning Game 1 87-75 with a dominant defensive second half, limiting the Lakers – Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Karl Malone and Gary Payton – to just 34 points. The Pistons were poised to take a 2-0 lead out of Los Angeles when Kobe Bryant hit one of the shots that built his career, a game-tying triple to force overtime.

So the Pistons were the better team for about 100 of the 101 minutes they played in those first two games, but the 1-1 tie the Lakers took to The Palace – and the euphoric way the Lakers managed that tie – at least gave the perception that there was some suspense left to the ’04 Finals.

I hung around Los Angeles for Lakers practice the day after Game 2 just to get a sense of which way the wind was blowing. It was a strange mood at their El Segundo practice facility that day. Phil Jackson almost seemed to be distancing himself from the product he was putting out there. Shaq was grumpy. Kobe was terse. Payton and Malone seemed wrung out.

On the red-eye back to Detroit that night for Game 3, I couldn’t help but think the Lakers had almost no margin for error. They were going to come out smoking in Game 3, maybe, like a heavyweight who knew he had one round to get the kill shot launched, and if that didn’t work they could start changing the street signs to Four Championship Drive off of Lapeer Road in Auburn Hills.

The Lakers played that night like a bunch of strangers, as Larry Brown might say. O’Neal led them in scoring – with 14 points. Bryant was held to 13 shot attempts in 45 minutes, made four and scored 11. The Lakers bench was exposed for the weak link it was, a fatal blow when Payton and Malone were on their last legs and Devean George was the fifth starter.

The Pistons held the Lakers to under 20 points in all four quarters and just ground them down into powder. The series was five days old and it was remarkable how the perception of the two participants had turned 180 degrees in that time.

When the Pistons flew west to open the Finals, the prevailing wisdom was that they were a young team with better days ahead but simply weren’t ready to knock off the Lakers. For as much of a gap as there appears to be between West and East today, back then it was even more pronounced, especially at the top of each conference. West teams had taken five straight NBA titles and the East’s winners had won only six Finals games in that span.

It wasn’t a question of who would win the 2004 Finals, but how many games it would take the Lakers to spank the baby Pistons.

I’m not sure if the Pistons went into the Finals believing they were the better team, but it was clear that they believed it fully after the first two games. That overtime loss might have broken their spirit or made them question their title readiness. Instead, it emboldened them. They properly considered it a fluke that they weren’t ahead 2-0 and came to The Palace determined to avoid a return flight west. In fact, that’s what Chauncey Billups said to the team on the bus ride to the airport. They weren’t coming back to LA.

The Finals turned out to be as one-sided in the other direction as it was anticipated to be for the Lakers. Later this week, I’ll look at what forged that Pistons team in the moments leading to the Finals.