If there is a Mount Rushmore for NBA teams that feel like symbolic soulmates for their city, then the 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons are on it.
This was a Motown team in every sense, and they played like an orchestra or jazz ensemble that season. Everyone had a role, but a role constantly being calibrated and re-calibrated toward lifting the collective someplace higher. And they played with the kind of qualities that fans from a tough city in the middle of an impossibly tough time hope for: Nerves as hard as steel. An unshakable belief in themselves and each other. Guts a mile long and a burning desire to defy expectations.
“They were ‘Grit’ before The Lions made it popular around here,” as fan Justin Roberts put it on X.
All this made it easy to root for them twenty years ago this month, when the Pistons stood at the brink of a bruising but ultimately dominant championship march over a Los Angeles Lakers squad stacked with four future Hall of Famers, all of them top 75 players. To this day, the Pistons’ 4-1 gentleman’s sweep is considered the greatest upset in NBA history.
Looking back, if you’re a sucker for romantic sports stories like I am, it’s hard to imagine this happening anywhere but Detroit. From the drifters who made up the starting lineup, to the ultimate triumph over a flashier, more celebrated opponent, Detroit feels like the only landscape our unlikely heroes could have blossomed from.
“That team showed what you can make happen when you give overlooked talent a place to be able to grow and succeed,” my friend Denzell Turner, a marketer from the city and lifelong fan, tells me. They also “serve as this sort of parable for working-class struggle overtaking the ruling class,” says Kamau Jawara, another friend and local organizer whose obsession with basketball began with the ’04 Pistons. They brought “the NBA’s mega-market darlings to a dogfight they weren’t ready for and absolutely broke their spirit.”
The question now is, how will we embody the best of what they represent for ordinary working people and fans in the city, while adapting to a league completely dominated by corporate interests?
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The Pistons’ Richard Hamilton blocks a shot by the Pacers’ Jermaine O’Neal in the Eastern Conference Finals, May 24, 2004.
Starting over
As the Grant Hill era came to a close in 2000, Pistons president Joe Dumars went into rebuild mode. An undrafted Ben Wallace whose full talents had yet to be tapped came first as a throw-in consolation for losing Hill to a trade with Orlando.
The year 2002 was even more pivotal. The Pistons traded Jerry Stackhouse to the Washington Wizards for Richard “Rip” Hamilton, a nightmare from mid-range. Chauncey Billups, a late bloomer who had been ricocheting around the league since the 1997 draft, was signed as a free agent. And with a late pick in the draft’s first round, they scooped up a lanky forward named Tayshaun Prince.
“When we got together, we all came from different places,” Billups, the starting point guard, 2004 NBA Finals MVP, and now head coach of the Portland Trailblazers, said at a March 17 ceremony honoring the championship team at Little Caesars Arena.
“As fate would have it, we landed here in Detroit,” he said. “What we did on the floor embodied what y’all do every single day in life.” What Billups does so well here, as he has in the past, is connect the dots between the towering odds facing both the city and its NBA franchise. When Billups arrived in 2002, Detroit was reeling from decades of corporate plunder and municipal abandonment. Residents had just elected a young mayor named Kwame Kilpatrick who was seen as a symbol of promise to many, but ultimately never posed any real threat to a status quo that placed wealthy developers and personal greed ahead of ordinary people in the overwhelmingly poor and working-class Black city.
You can see the movie posters now. A group of guys hungry for a fresh start all land in the Midwest’s quintessential fallen city, desperate for its own breakthrough.
After getting swept by the Nets in the 2003 conference finals, Dumars replaced Rick Carlisle for Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown. They played solid ball throughout the first half of the ’03-’04 season, but never hit a stride with enough consistency to strike fear in anyone. Which means that almost no one saw what was coming.
And then came Rasheed Wallace at the 2004 trade deadline. Sheed was a solid big man who could play both sides of the floor. But he was also called a “walking technical foul,” and it seemed like his talents might be eclipsed by some combo of his on-court challenges, a racist traditional media system (the “Jailblazers” stuff should haunt every one of their careers), and NBA executives like David Stern who plainly hated his guts and wanted him out of the league. Eight years into his career, it wasn’t clear if he would ever find a system that could harness his powers and passion for good.
He had come to the right place this time. Sheed was a Philly boy Detroiters could recognize. And he turned out to be the final piece the team needed to really take off.
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UPI Photo/Jon Adams
The Pistons’ Rasheed Wallace attacks the net in Philadelphia on Feb. 23, 2004.
Finish strong
After picking up Sheed, the Pistons were an almost unstoppable locomotive. They went 20-6 for the rest of the season, and finished 54-28. They were solid offensively, but dismantled opponents with a defense that could pick apart any team in the league.
Big Ben was now firmly cemented as one of the all-time great defenders. Prince’s length made him a nightmare in his own right. And with Sheed in the mix down low and Rip and Billups on the perimeter, teams had to fight for their lives on every inch of the floor. Famously, the Pistons held 11 teams under 70 points that season. As ESPN play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico put it during the playoffs: “Every pass, every shot defended like it’s the last.”
They entered those playoffs with the third best net rating in the league. And still almost no one had them going the distance.
Before they could defy gravity against the Lakers, they had to make it through a notoriously scrappy Eastern Conference. After wiping the Milwaukee Bucks 4-1in the first round, they slugged it out for seven games with the Nets before advancing to the conference finals, where the Pistons knocked off the Indiana Pacers, the team with the best record that year, in six bruising games. In game 2, the teams combined for an astonishing 26 blocks, 19 of them by the Pistons.
One of those blocks would go down as perhaps the most iconic in playoff history. Ahead by two, the Pistons have possession with just seconds to go. After a Billups turnover, Reggie Miller breaks out for what looks like an easy layup. And then our lanky hero appears, destined for greatness. Miller is in the air alone until he’s not — until Prince flies in to get a piece of the ball with so much momentum that he lands somewhere in the rows behind the basket. It was such an incredible block that it is now known simply as “The Block,” the one that every other block must bow to.
The Pistons were now on their way to the finals for the first time since the Bad Boys’ legendary back-to-back 1989-1990 wins.
But even after all that, popular opinion was that the Lakers might sweep. L.A. just had too much star power. The Pistons “shouldn’t even show up in L.A.,” Ben Wallace remembers hearing.
As Marlowe Alter writes in the Free Press, “nobody gave the Pistons a chance in the Finals — the Lakers were minus-700 favorites, meaning a bettor would have to put down $700 to win $100.” That’s almost right. Nobody, of course, except the Pistons themselves, and the dedicated fans who knew what they were capable of.
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Jun 08, 2004: The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Detroit Pistons 99 to 91 in overtime to tie the series 1-1.
“David conquered Goliath”
“If you look at the names on the back of the jerseys, yeah, they should have swept us,” Billups said in a 2020 interview. After all, the Lakers were that era’s most feared franchise. Kobe and Shaq were still the best players on any court. They had also picked up Gary Payton and Karl Malone, stacking a team with three championships and two Hall of Famers with two more Hall of Famers, both on their way out but still capable of contributing.
What everyone missed though is that you can have all of the star power but none of the chemistry. And you’re going to need chemistry in order to overcome a team that has a metric ton of it and braids it together with elite game-planning — a team, like the Pistons, that knows it lacks a traditional championship-caliber lineup, and so also knows their only chance is by elevating everyone to the height of their powers. Which is exactly what they did against the Lakers, who had their own clash of the titans thing going on internally, making it impossible for them to deal with a team that “played the game the right way,” to use Larry Brown’s famous standard.
The Pistons knew L.A.’s weaknesses and exploited them relentlessly. They let Shaq do his thing one-on-one against Wallace, but dogged everyone else across every inch of the floor. They knew this would frustrate the hell out of Kobe, who started playing the worst kind of hero ball imaginable, jacking up chaotic jumpers over Tayshaun.
Making the best of it during a halftime interview in game 1, Kobe compared the contest to “two heavyweight boxers feeling each other out.” It wouldn’t take long to see the difference. The Pistons plainly outsmarted and outhooped the Lakers — getting stops, generating second-chance points wherever they could, and getting important minutes out of role players like Corliss Williamson, Mehmut Okur, and Elden Campbell.
Outside of Shaq, who really was unstoppable, the Pistons jammed the Lakers’ entire offense up all series, holding them to 81.8 points per game.
After a convincing Pistons win in game 1, the Lakers squeaked out game 2 in overtime in L.A. The Lakers wouldn’t see their arena again that season. After the loss, the team reportedly told Larry Brown “we’re not coming back to L.A.” They swept the next three games, slamming the series shut in game 5 in Detroit.
“I knew we’d get exposed,” Lakers forward Rick Fox said in a 2015 oral history. “…I personally felt we didn’t have enough respect for the Pistons. We thought we were going to steamroll them.”
The Pistons also knew otherwise. “When [Los Angeles] beat Minnesota, I was happy,” Billups said. “Because I felt like there was no way the Lakers could beat us.” Billups averaged 21 points, 5.2 assists, and 3.2 rebounds, and won the Finals MVP.
A day before game 1, an exasperated Sheed let everyone know how he felt about their predictions: “Ain’t nobody scared here. Ain’t no punks on this team!”
Seeing a squad like that reach the mountaintop after telling everyone they could do it, and then exploding with exhilaration as if part of them still couldn’t believe it themselves, is some of the best of what sports has to offer us. “We shook up the world! We shook up the world! We shook up the world!” backup guard Lindsey Hunter, his championship hat tilted to the side, shouts into a flip phone moments after the trophy presentation.
“98% of the people didn’t believe in us, but guess what?” Sheed says in a post-game interview with Jalen Rose. “David conquered Goliath.”
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Olivier Douliery/ABACA
The 2004 National Basketball Association champions: from the Motor City to the White House.
20 years later
It’s hard to properly account for everything that ’04 squad meant. For starters, fans will tell you that it just feels flat-out good to see a team full of overlooked players bring a championship to an overlooked city. And they take enormous pride witnessing those players be so loudly defiant and refusing to stay in their assigned place against more polished and decorated opponents who are right at home under the nation’s brightest lights.
Whether it’s Big Ben, his ‘fro piled to the ceiling, swatting a shot into rows of fans wearing afros of their own in his honor, or Sheed, whose signature Air Force 1 would become a staple in the city, shouting “BALL DON’T LIE!’’ when an opponent misses a free throw after a bad call, a ruling you can still hear players roar in any open gym or neighborhood court run. And then to top it off, Jawara adds, we got to see Sheed, “the eventual all-time leader in ejections hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy.” Magnificient.
“You’re talking about … a lot of throwaways that came together and played great basketball, loved each other, became brothers,” Billups said on a 2016 episode of the Vertical podcast.
Sports fandom, like any fanaticism, has its share of absurdities and devastations. But at its best, it can help us imagine a version of ourselves and our communities achieving everything we deserve. The ’04 Pistons were throwaway players in a city where almost everyone knew the feeling. Guys with nowhere to go landing in a city filled with Black families who fled as far and as fast as they could from the brutality of Southern apartheid toward the promise of jobs and greater freedom in northern cities like ours.
“Nobody gave Detroit credit,” Turner says. “The Pistons gave a lot of people hope about how bright the future could be for the city. As a young Black boy, I felt like the world was my oyster. There was no better place to be. I still feel like that to this day.”
And there’s also the question about what this city’s largely working-class fans deserve all these years later from both the franchise’s owner and the city’s leadership as both drape themselves in the team’s romantic underdog legacy.
Jawara warns against over-romanticizing “blue-collar basketball,” which is “something that allowed us to get in the ring with the biggest and the best, but no longer sustains us.” The NBA, after all, is a “global money machine” in which “you’re gonna absolutely need a ton of firepower [on the court] to survive” night to night.
Not to mention, by coasting on the ’04 Pistons heroic blue-collar story, we risk letting the team’s massively wealthy owner Tom Gores off the hook for failing the its actual blue-collar fan base, Jawara argues. Gores has allowed the team to “flounder year after year while fans still show up faithfully” with “no accountability, no restoration, and most of all, little to no winning.”
“Detroit can be more,” he adds. “We can preserve our scrappy DNA while showcasing our other beautiful traits: fashion and flashiness,” traits that also translate well to today’s game. “And we can hold the architect of this team accountable” for giving fans the team they deserve.
And in a way, this is also an important aspect of the ’04 legacy. This was a squad that loved its fans as much as they loved playing together. They undoubtedly would want the city and Pistons’ ownership to take those fans seriously enough to put forth a genuine effort to build a competitive team.
The ’04 Pistons are rightly remembered as conquering underdogs at a time when Detroiters desperately needed to see ourselves that way. And as the city evolves, they serve as a powerful reminder of what kind of city we should aspire to be. One where the communities who actually built that underdog reputation, and lifted its scrappiest franchise to immortality, be given everything they deserve from the city they’ve given everything to.
