Sports Poets Society

https://www.vintagedetroit.com/aguirre-final-piece-bad-boys/ by DAN D'ADDONA on FEBRUARY 26, 2018 Mark Aguirre and Isiah Thomas were selected #1 and #2 in the 1981 NBA Draft. The Bad Boys had finally broken through and won an NBA championship. In 1988-89, the Detroit Pistons finally were the best team in the world, no more Celtics, no more Lakers. Detroit fans remember the Bad Boys winning again the very next year. After all, going back-to-back was something the Celtics of that era didn’t accomplish. Just as when the Pistons won with a trade for Rasheed Wallace that gave the Pistons a spark fifteen years later, the original Bad Boys had a similar situation. In the middle of the 1988-89 season, after making it to the NBA Finals the previous year, the Pistons were in a bit of a chemistry battle as internal rifts were starting to show. Two-time NBA scoring champion Adrian Dantley was in the middle of it, wanting to be the go-to player on a team full of great players, most notably Isi...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-03-13-sp-1842-story.html BY GENE WOJCIECHOWSKI  TIMES STAFF WRITER CHICAGO — MARCH 13, 1988 12 AM PT The dream had such humble beginnings. Ziggy--that was Mark Aguirre’s nickname back on the West Side--would borrow his grandfather’s pickup truck. Then he’d find Skip Dillard, his without-a-doubt, positively best friend of all time. Then they’d dig up the Dolph, short for Bernard Randolph, another teammate from Westinghouse High School. Then they’d cruise, looking for the purest game of basketball the streets could offer. They were something, those three. Discriminating, too. Sometimes they’d drive for hours and not find a game worth their trouble. Everything had to be just right: The competition (the taller the better), the pace (frantic), the attitude (cooool--no use getting your brains blown out because you fouled a guy). They looked for telltale court signs. If someone called charging, they got out of there quick. No game worth its wei...

https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/coaching/signs-coaching-genius.html The late Chuck Daly was a Hall of Fame coach. He was the Head Coach of the original Dream Team that won the Gold Medal in the 1992 Olympics and guided the Detroit Piston "Bad Boys" to back to back NBA Championships. When he took over the Pistons, they were not a very good team . Over the first couple of years he started to mold what has become one of the legendary NBA eras. Drafting Joe Dumars, he showed a unique eye as to how to fill the parts of his team that would fit together and create a winning team. Daly was always a defense first coach . His teams defended with tenacity as they started to climb the NBA ladder. While their offensive production remained largely the same, defensively they got better and better, often ranking in the top 5 in most NBA defensive stats . However, they just couldn't get over the hump. They became a perennial playoff team, but not a championship contender . They di...

https://michiganchronicle.com/2020/04/30/the-forgotten-bad-boy-mark-aguirres-championship-sacrifice/ Kory Woods April 30, 2020 - Michigan Chronicle Whenever there’s public criticism of the “Bad Boys” era Detroit Pistons, expect to hear from Isiah Thomas. Publicly. Thomas made an appearance this week on ESPN’s Get Up and First Take, defending himself and former Pistons teammates from remarks made against them by Michael Jordan (and his teammates) in episodes 3 and 4 of “The Last Dance”, an ESPN “30 for 30” a documentary chronicling Jordan’s last season with the Chicago Bulls. Thomas’ remarks on both shows have garnered a lot of attention. Interestingly enough, they weren’t even his most poignant ones in recent memory. Those came about a month ago. That’s when he was a guest on Knuckleheads, a podcast that’s hosted by former NBA players Darius Miles and Quentin Richardson. On their show, Thomas spoke candidly about his basketball career for nearly an hour and a half. He also spoke on his...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1989/05/03/aguirre-the-terrible-making-a-new-mark/3cac9ee6-b1ad-49db-a343-b08147d3447c/ By Peter May May 3, 1989 -  AUBURN HILLS, MICH. -- Haven't heard much about Mark Aguirre lately, have you? No obscene gestures. No pouting when he comes out of a game. No tantrums. No ultimatums. No phantom injuries. Aguirre has gone from enfant terrible in Dallas to Mother Teresa in Detroit . He's playing fewer minutes, scoring fewer points, being told that defense comes first -- and couldn't be happier. And, oh yes, since joining the Pistons, Detroit went a spiffy 30-6, winning 30 of its final 34 regular season games. So for those who expected Aguirre to derail Detroit on its way to the NBA title, he advises everyone concerned that there is a better chance of the Greater Hartford Open getting snowed out.  "Never. It'll never happen. Never, ever," Aguirre said after the Pistons' final workout before the playoff opener wit...

https://vault.si.com/vault/1979/03/26/out-west-depaul-had-a-ball JOE JARES Sports Illustrated -  MARCH 26, 1979 TABLE OF CONTENTS ORIGINAL LAYOUT For the first time since World War II, DePaul is in the final four of the NCAA tournament, and as if a wait of 36 years wasn't enough, the Blue Demons found their road to Salt Lake City to be the most rugged traveled by any of the four teams that will compete there. Because of the vagaries of the tournament selection process, they had to travel far from their Chicago home to play in Provo, Utah . They had to get by UCLA, not only the best shooting team (.555) in college basketball history , but also a team that had beaten them by 23 points in November. And, in an era when most good college teams use platoons of substitutes, they had to rely on only five men. DePaul's bench, you see, consists of seven fellows whose toughest chore seems to be standing up during time-outs so that the members of the Fatigued Five can take a seat . The su...

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-05-21-8902030331-story.html By Skip Myslenski and Chicago Tribune • May 21, 1989 Chicago Tribune - Copyright ©  AUBURN HILLS, MICH. — No one, not even a teammate, is immune from the treatment, and Mark Aguirre learned that the hard way after his trade to the Detroit Pistons. They are, of course, the National Basketball Association`s self-proclaimed Bad Boys , a band of brigands who promote themselves with a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones, and here they set out, in their singular style, to learn about this newcomer from the Dallas Mavericks. They were in San Francisco, practicing on an off-day, and suddenly their coach, Chuck Daly, called them together. ''I normally don`t scrimmage during the season,'' he says now, ''but I wanted to learn about Mark.'' ''I got him,'' Dennis Rodman announced on that afternoon in February, and over the next minutes he guarded Aguirre with his ...