The path to win an NBA Championship usually requires the acquisition of star players. NBA Championship teams are littered with MVPs and All-NBA players including players that are known worldwide. There is one team that was able to win without an elite player and we don’t talk about them enough: The 2004 Detroit Pistons.
Looking back through championship teams, each one has a top 10, or even top eight, player in the league. LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Larry Bird are some common names on that list. The Pistons may be the only team in NBA history (although it is obviously subjective) to win the title without a player in the top 10 in the league. They won because of their defense and teamwork.
Point guard Chauncey Billups was acquired before the 2002-2003 season and was on his fifth team. He had never averaged more than 12.5 points per game before joining the Pistons. Richard Hamilton played shooting guard and led the team in scoring, but didn’t make the All-Star team that season, despite making it three times in his career. He led the team in scoring at just 17.6 points per game. Tayshaun Prince was a second-year player who was drafted in the back half of the first round the year before. He provided great defense. Ben Wallace was an undrafted player from D-II Virginia Union and became the anchor of one of the more effective defenses in NBA history. He was the only All-Star in 2003-2004 for the Pistons. Rasheed Wallace made four All-Star teams in his career, but wasn’t quite the level of a top 10 player in the league.
So the Pistons put a team together with no bona fide superstar, but players who excelled in their roles. Larry Brown did a good job of getting them to play at a slower pace and to lock in on defense to overcome that. The defense was particularly impressive. They allowed a league low 89.2 points per game. In the finals, they stepped up the defense against the Lakers and allowed just 81.8 points per game This Lakers’ team was stacked with Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Karl Malone and Gary Payton, four future Hall of Famers. They never got to 100 points in a game during the NBA Finals and held the Lakers to 68 points in Game 3, which made it feel like an old Big Ten game. That is impressive considering they were playing one of the first “super teams”, even if the term wasn’t popular yet.
Ben Wallace was crucial for the Pistons defense and had the best defensive season of all time. He averaged 3.0 blocks per game and 1.8 steals per game in the regular season and kept those up in the playoffs. The advanced stats love his season even more. Wallace had a defensive rating of 87 that season, the lowest in NBA history. It was the one year in a five-year stretch that he didn’t win the NBA Defensive Player of the Year Award, even though he was deserving.
While the offensive output wasn’t always the greatest, the defense and chemistry of the team really helped push things forward. There were clear roles and players elevated their games to fit those roles. Billups ran the offense and hit clutch shots as only Mr. Big Shot can. Rip Hamilton led the team in scoring and ran around the floor to get open, showing off his good conditioning in the process. Prince was a lockdown perimeter defender who had to guard Kobe in the NBA Finals. Rasheed Wallace scored in the post and really elevated the Pistons once he was acquired mid-season, as they went 20-6 down the stretch of the regular season and 15-7 in the playoffs, including only needing five games to beat the heavily-favored Lakers. Ben Wallace anchored the defense in the paint and would give sporadic scoring from the interior. The bench, which included Lindsey Hunter, Corliss Williamson and Elden Campbell, helped provide a punch off the bench. Detroit didn’t often fight over shots, but had a singular goal and were able to achieve it.
The 2004 Pistons aren’t one of the best championship teams of all time. They were a team that locked in defensively and played unselfish basketball. The defense was suffocating and they completed the best upset in NBA Finals history, taking into account how much talent the Lakers had. And they did it in five games. While General Managers around the league won’t replicate how the Pistons put this team together, the Pistons are a statistical outlier that deserve even more recognition historically for what they were able to achieve.
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