“The five players on the floor function as one single unit. Team, team, team. Right? No one more important than the other.”
— Gene Hackman as coach Norman Dale, “Hoosiers”
Every theory or even mandate about how an NBA championship team needs to be built is flipped by the one that celebrates its 20th anniversary this summer.
The 2004 Detroit Pistons are the championship exceptions of the last 45 NBA seasons.
And as the NBA moves forward, there might never be another champion like them.
Their singularity is due to one reason: Since Magic Johnson entered the NBA and led the Lakers to the 1980 championship, the 2004 Pistons are the only team to win the title without a single star. Forget the idea of multiple stars — the Pistons didn’t have even one.
Every other championship in the past 45 years has been won by a team that’s featured at least one of the following players and in some cases several of them:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Moses Malone, Julius Erving, Isiah Thomas, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Dirk Nowitzki, LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Anthony Davis, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic and now Jayson Tatum.
Some of those are the greatest of the greatest — Jordan, LeBron, Magic, Bird, Curry, Shaq, Kobe. Some are probably a slight notch below that all-time best group — Malone, Wade, Garnett, Nowitzki, Leonard, Giannis. Given Tatum’s age, we’ll see where the 26-year-old of the newly crowned Celtics ultimately lands in history, but there’s no question that he’s one of the league’s elite players – in his last three seasons, Tatum’s been an All-NBA First Team pick each year and finished in the MVP top-six each year.
The 2004 Pistons? Their starting five featured Chauncey Billups, Richard “Rip” Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace, Tayshaun Prince and Ben Wallace.
To be clear, the Pistons boasted terrific players. But they weren’t stars. Prior to the championship run, the quintet had combined for three All-Star berths (two by Rasheed Wallace, one by Ben Wallace) and two Defensive Player of the Year awards (both by Ben) – yet none of the five would have qualified as franchise players.
Detroit’s leading scorer during that regular season was Hamilton at 17.6 points per game, which ranked 37th in the NBA (Hamilton upped his average to 21.5 in the playoffs). Billups, the Pistons’ superb point guard, paced them in assists at 5.7 per game.
It feels as if the Pistons are largely forgotten — or at least relatively ignored. It’s inexplicable that not a single book has been written about the sport’s unique champion over the past four and a half decades (perhaps Malcolm Gladwell could simply repurpose his famed Outliers tome into a retrospective). The 1969 Mets own the Miracle Mets moniker, yet the 2004 Pistons stunners have no snappy tag. There’s an ESPN 30-for-30 episode about the 1991-92 “Bad Boys” Pistons. There should also be one about the Detroit hoopsters who succeeded them as champs 12 years later.
Everyone who follows the NBA hears axioms such as, “You need stars to win” and “Such-and-such player can’t be the best player on a championship team.” And while the first is almost always accurate, it clearly isn’t ironclad. And while the second is obviously debatable, depending on what player we’re talking about, there’s no way anyone would have said that any of the 2004 Pistons fit the conventional rubric of “best player on a championship team.”
“We knew that we didn’t have one guy that could carry the whole team,” Billups told The Post in a recent interview. “But that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t win.”
How did they win? Mainly with defense, durability and depth.
Defense
During the season, the Pistons tied the Spurs for fewest points allowed per game at 84.3 and ranked second in defensive rating at 93.9 (it was a completely different sport then – this past season, by comparison, the Timberwolves allowed the fewest points at 106.5 and led in defensive rating at 108.4).
In the playoffs, the Pistons were even better, allowing a postseason-best 80.7 ppg and sporting a postseason-best 90.3 defensive rating (again, for comparison, the Magic this past postseason allowed the fewest points per game at 95.9 and led in playoff defensive rating at 100.0).
In Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals, the Pistons held the Nets to 56 points. In Game 7, they limited the Nets to 69. In their four wins over the Lakers in the five-game NBA Finals, they allowed an average of just 77.5 points. And other than O’Neal and Bryant, no Laker averaged more than 6.4 ppg in that series — and even Bryant averaged his 22.6 ppg on just 38.1% shooting from the field.
Offensively that season, the Pistons were shaky. They scored the sixth-fewest points per game and tied for 18th in field-goal percentage.
“The game is so different now. It’s like a video game for me when I watch it. You see great individual play, but I coined the phrase ‘play the right way,’” head coach Larry Brown told The Post recently. “I thought that team did that about as well as any team I’ve ever been around.”
Of course, that’s another element of the Pistons’ success — they were coached by one of basketball’s best in Brown, a Hall of Famer (told this, Brown said he appreciated the compliment, but praised his coaching staff, his GM and his owner).
(Brown won a college national championship at Kansas in 1988 with a team featuring one of the great college players of all time in Danny Manning, a squad that’s been dubbed “Danny & the Miracles” and then won an NBA championship 16 years later with the inverse type of roster.)
Durability
Four Pistons starters — Billups, Hamilton, Prince and Ben Wallace — started at least 78 games during the season. Rasheed Wallace was acquired for the final 26 games of the season and played in 22 of them, starting 21. The quintet then started all 23 playoff games, each averaging between 34.6 and 40.2 minutes per game.
Depth
Brown also raved about his bench, saying that the backcourt duo of Mike James and Lindsey Hunter “could guard as well as anybody,” calling muscular power forward Corliss Williamson “a matchup nightmare for everybody” and hailing 6-foot-11 Mehmet Okur as a surefire backup to both Wallaces.
This was by design.
“It was always the model that you had to have two superstars and then build out your roster from there,” then-President of Basketball Operations Joe Dumars told The Post. “For me, my two superstars have to be as good as the two best superstars at that time if we were going to win. And that was Shaq and Kobe.”
The problem, Dumars says, was this: “My two superstars, no matter who I get, are not going to be better than Shaq and Kobe.”
Dumars opted instead to build with depth, saying he told GMs who asked of his plan, “Guys, I’m going to try to go 10 deep.” He was informed, “Joe, nobody’s done that in 20 years.”
In the Finals, the team that Dumars assembled because he couldn’t gather two stars as good as O’Neal and Bryant proceeded to clobber a roster featuring O’Neal and Bryant.
Dumars, Brown and Billups all also noted another reason why the Pistons thrived — because of who the players were before they joined forces in Detroit. Dumars outlined how they arrived.
Billups (drafted No. 3 overall), Rasheed Wallace (No. 4 overall) and Hamilton (No. 7 overall) were lottery picks — but none was drafted by Detroit. Billups joined the Pistons, his fifth team in six years of being in the NBA, as a free agent in 2002. Hamilton was acquired in a trade with the Wizards. Ben Wallace was undrafted out of Virginia Union, then traded twice, the second time to Detroit. Prince was a Pistons original, but he was the No. 23 overall pick in 2002, hardly a can’t-miss prospect.
“I don’t want to say they were castoffs, but they weren’t the marquee guys,” Dumars said. “Every single person associated with that team had that chip of something to prove. Even the coach, Larry Brown, had never won an NBA title. … And myself, trying to do something that everyone says, ‘This is not the way to do it.’”
Added Brown, “A lot of these guys, they overcame a lot of adversity, and when they got to Detroit, they forgot all about that.”
Billups said “the secret sauce” was a collective unselfishness that was geared toward winning above all.
“Everybody had a story,” he said. “Everybody came from some failures.”
To be clear, the Pistons were hardly a Cinderella. The season before, under coach Rick Carlisle, they had advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals, losing to the Nets.
In training camp before the 2003-04 season, Billups was confident that the Pistons were at the very least an Eastern Conference Finals team. Fifty-six games into the season, they were 34-22 when Dumars traded with the Hawks for Rasheed Wallace, whom he now characterizes as “the final piece.” Billups agrees. After the first practice with their new big man, Billups says he told his wife, “We’re gonna win a championship this year.”
“What we needed was exactly what Rasheed brought,” Billups said, pointing out Wallace’s communication defensively, his intelligence, his scoring acumen and his value as a teammate. “We found those things out in one practice.”
The Pistons went 20-6 after the deal, finishing 54-28 to take the East’s No. 3 seed. They then rolled through the sixth-seeded Bucks in the first round of the playoffs (4-1); avenged the previous season’s playoff loss by beating Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson and the No. 2 Nets in the second round (4-3); captured the East title by knocking out Jermaine O’Neal, Metta World Peace and the top-seeded Pacers (4-2); then ripped the star-studded Lakers in the Finals (4-1).
Billups earned Finals MVP, averaging 21.0 points and 5.2 assists while shooting a blistering 51% from the field and 47% from 3.
The next season, they advanced to Game 7 of the NBA Finals before losing to the Spurs.
The unlikely champions were this close to becoming a dynasty.
The 2004 Pistons are outliers — and that prompts two questions.
1. Should NBA organizations think about building teams using them as a model?
2. Can a team built this way ever win a championship again?
Let’s start with the first one.
This is tricky. The 2004 Pistons indeed won the championship — but they’re the only team built like this in the last 45 years to accomplish that feat. If you’re an acolyte of their philosophy, you can say that their title shows that the model can work. On the other hand, 97.8% of the time in the last 45 years a different formula worked. To borrow from Chris Rock, “You can do it, but doesn’t mean it’s to be done. You can drive a car with your feet if you want to — that doesn’t make it a good f–king idea.”
Billups is now in a team-building capacity as head coach of the Trail Blazers. So does he abide by the “it’s a stars-driven league, and you should prioritize trying to acquire stars” philosophy? Or does he want to build in Portland the way the 2004 Pistons were constructed?
“The beauty of it to me is this: No, you can’t win without stars. But when you’re rebuilding, you can raise some,” he said. “You don’t always have to go out and get ‘em. You can raise ‘em.”
He points to the Thunder, citing their development of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams (“they’re raising them to be stars and they’re well on their way”).
Brown believes that organizations should focus on players who are more team-oriented.
“I look at [Pat] Riley — there’s something about Miami that I smile every time I see them play. Because they’re all about the right things. If you don’t do it the right way, they move on from you. I think that everybody should think that way,” Brown said. “If you want to be in an individual sport, play tennis or run track. You want to play basketball, to me you need those grunge kids that are so unselfish that will do anything to see your team succeed.
“That’s what I saw with the Knicks with the Villanova kids. I think we don’t put enough stock in that.”
Dumars won’t rule out the possibility that a team built like the 2004 Pistons could win it all again.
“The teams that prioritize depth are the ones that are generally more successful now,” he said. “Even though they may have a superstar or two, I think teams value depth more than ever before.”
Billups, however, doesn’t think there will be another champion like the 2004 Pistons.
“I don’t see it in today’s game,” he says. “I just don’t see it.”
While Billups concedes that fewer stars are needed now to win than was the case several years ago, he notes the Pistons didn’t have a single “max player,” which in his mind is an anomaly. And he says that having a bunch of players who didn’t care about All-Star teams or money is “never gonna happen again in today’s game.”
Brown does make an argument that the 2004 Pistons had stars, saying, “My whole thing was, I look at Rasheed, I look at Chauncey, I look at Ben, I look at Rip. . . it’s hard for me to not think of those guys as being stars.” Billups adds: “We had All-Stars, but we didn’t have a superstar.”
He also noted that “it’s aged very well. You’ve got two Hall of Famers that were on that team” — Ben Wallace was inducted in 2021, Billups was elected two months ago — “that back then all everybody talked about was we didn’t have a superstar, et cetera. Which, in my opinion, was true.”
Out of the 44 other champions since 1980, the team that most resembled the 2004 Pistons might have been the 2014 Spurs. The legendary Duncan was on the team — but he was 38 years old. Then again, he was still Duncan and he still finished 12th in the MVP voting that season. That team also had a young future superstar in Leonard, who won NBA Finals MVP. And Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili were still on the team. That’s four Hall of Famers. And that’s perhaps the closest team.
Semi-close. Nowhere near the uniqueness of Dumars, Brown, Billups and Co. Since the Magic-Bird era, there’s been no other team like them.
