Knicks, Pistons both forged with the same Bad Boys DNA: Isiah Thomas

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.“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 rea...