Lakers-Pistons: A Far Cry From the Old Rivalry

No Bad Boys, Just Bad Basketball

You see the Pistons playing the Lakers on the schedule and, if you're like me, you immediately flash back to the late 80s. Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, Coop, Rodman, Dennis Johnson. Those were actual rivalries. Teams hated each other. Detroit won back-to-back titles in '89 and '90, beating the Lakers in '89. That was basketball, man. What we saw the other night, with the Lakers beating Detroit 124-117, was a different animal entirely.

Real talk: it wasn't a game that's gonna live in the memory bank. LeBron James dropped 25 points, sure, and Anthony Davis added 28 points and 16 rebounds. Good numbers, no doubt. But the Pistons? They're sitting at 8-43, the worst record in the league. Cade Cunningham had 20 points and 6 assists, but it just felt like another loss in a long, long line of losses. There's no grit, no edge to this Pistons team. You remember Bill Laimbeer? He wouldn't have stood for this.

The League's Soft Spot and LeBron's Longevity

Here's the thing: everyone's so focused on LeBron's age and how he's still putting up numbers. He's 39 years old, and he's averaging over 25 points a game. That's incredible. But you gotta ask yourself, is the league as tough as it used to be? Could a 39-year-old Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan be doing this night in and night out against the kind of physicality we saw in the 90s? I'm not so sure.

And let's not even get started on the officiating. Every touch is a foul now. It slows the game down, makes it choppy. You watch a replay of a Pistons-Lakers game from 1989 and you see guys getting hammered, getting up, and playing on. Dennis Rodman played 80 games that year and averaged 9.3 rebounds. Now, guys get load managed after two hard screens. It's a completely different sport.

I predict that until the league gets back to letting players play, without calling every little bump, we'll keep seeing these one-sided affairs disguised as rivalries.