Indiana Basketball: Most underrated of all time? The case for Isiah Thomas
Thomas was the better version of Kyrie
I was born in 1998, four years after Thomas was forced to retire after blowing out his achilles (that last season was the only time he didn’t make the All-Star team in his career), but I have hardly seen any of his highlights. I watch basketball talk shows, listen to basketball podcasts, and watch basketball videos online all the time, but I’ve heard and seen more about the 5’9” Isaiah Thomas than the Pistons’ Isiah Thomas. Why does it seem like Isiah Thomas has been lost to time?
Isiah Thomas was the original Kyrie Irving. I’m far from the first one to notice the similarities. In fact, Isiah said he sees himself in Kyrie.
Kyrie Irving is a phenomenal talent who is a beautiful player to watch, but everyone in the world except Kyrie himself acknowledges his downfall is his selfishness and bizarre behavior. The idea of Irving with a team-first attitude and no ego is incredibly alluring. But that player has already played. It is Isiah Thomas. He doesn’t have the same boring legacy problem Tim Duncan has; Thomas was an extremely exciting player to watch.
However, even though he by no means played a boring brand of basketball, Thomas is not remembered as fondly as his peers in the 80s and early 90s. So what dampens Thomas’s legacy?
It can be partially attributed to his birthday. By that, I mean he was born in the wrong era. Thomas was a quintessential point guard who prioritized getting his teammates involved over making all the plays himself. He valued team success over stats. He had the gumption to sacrifice what would have been far better box score numbers in the name of teamwork. It won him two championships, but it’s not as cool as scoring 50 points.
If his team needed a spark in the fourth quarter, Isiah would play more like Irving: the offense would run through his scoring. He thrived in that position, and consistently proved his capability as an elite scorer, but it was only a quarter of the game. Irving plays that way 100% of the time, not 25%, giving him that much more time to produce highlights. If Isiah Thomas played today, where point guards are encouraged to score as much as possible and the game is played at a breakneck pace, he would have likely been among league leaders in scoring and assists every single season. Instead, Thomas finished with a career average of 19.2 points per game, never coming close to threatening for an NBA scoring title. Could he have averaged 25-30 points per game in the 80s and 90s? Definitely. Would he have still won two championships? Maybe, maybe not.
Isiah Thomas’s company also hurts his legacy. Even when the Pistons won two championships, it was viewed as crashing Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan’s party. He was always overshadowed by Johnson and would never top him as the best point guard in the league.
On top of that, the Bad Boy Pistons play style earned them status as NBA villains. Detroit loved Thomas and the Pistons. No one else did. Michael Jordan even prevented Thomas from playing for the 1992 Olympic Dream Team.
If the Pistons had played a less mauling style of basketball, maybe they wouldn’t have been as hated by NBA fans and Thomas would be viewed with less bias. Even in “The Last Dance,” the Pistons play the role of the anti-hero.