Michael Jordan was nearing the top of the basketball world but still couldn’t quite break out of the Eastern Conference.
In 1990, Jordan’s Bulls fell to the Pistons in the playoff for the third-straight season. This time, Chicago took Detroit to seven games after the Pistons eliminated the Bulls in five and then six games in 1988 and 1989.
Nuggets television analyst Scott Hastings was a member of the Pistons from 1989-91. He knew Detroit and the rest of the East could only hold Jordan off for so long.
“He was at the top of his game and you knew it was only a matter of time,” Hastings told DNVR. “You just knew.”
Jordan was coming and he was coming fast. In 1991, Jordan and the Bulls swept the Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals before winning what would be the first of three consecutive NBA Championships.
Hastings and Jordan’s careers overlapped for nine seasons, seven of which came when the two played in the Eastern Conference. Hastings was drafted in the second round by the Knicks in 1982 but spent most of the next six seasons with the Hawks. He played the 1988-89 season with the Heat before joining the Pistons a year later. Ahead of ESPN’s highly anticipated documentary, ‘The Last Dance,’ which chronicles Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ 1997-98 season, Hastings spoke with DNVR about what it was like to go up against Jordan and his unparalleled competitive spirit, his greatest Jordan memories on and off the court, what he hopes the younger generation of NBA players will take away from watching the documentary, and much more.
DNVR: Are you looking forward to the documentary?
Scott Hastings: I’ll be interested to watch. I gained a lot of respect for Jordan when the Bad Boys 30 for 30 documentary came out because I was told (Larry) Bird refused to be interviewed for the documentary. Magic (Johnson) refused to be interviewed for the documentary, and Jordan was prevalent in there. Having lived that rivalry with him, and when I was in Atlanta first and then in Detroit, hatred isn’t the right word, but it was like a very competitive dislike for him. So to see him to kind of honor that and taking the lumps that he took for those number of years, first by the Celtics and then the the Pistons. There had to be a driving force behind it. I think the Pistons helped bring it out of him to be honest with you.
DNVR: Where did that dislike come from?
Hastings: I think it was the competitive nature. It was in an era where you didn’t have AAU, you didn’t have guys that played against or played with each other for five or six years even before college, and then all the college stuff and then the pros and everybody’s best friends. It was you chiseled out a piece of your own territory, and then you defended the hell out of it. No usurpers, if you will, were allowed a free pass. And to be honest with you it’s the reason I picked Jordan as the greatest of all time. Because I know what he went through to win six championships. I know how he had to drive himself and his teammates to win six championships. And it was forged out of fire from that era. And for him to come out and do the things he did and win the way he won with the pressure where you could literally beat the hell out of him every single night, I will always say he’s the greatest of all time.
DNVR: Do you have a go-to Jordan story, on or off the court?
Hastings: I’ve got two go-to stories. One real go-to is I was playing with the Pistons and he was guarding Joe Dumars. He was playing Joe 94 feet, so I peeled back to about half court and whoever was guarding me didn’t shout out (the screen). I think it was Horace (Grant). I was able to just get a devastating screen on Jordan, and it kind of crumbled him. It got Joe free and he went in and shot a wide-open free-throw jump shot. Very next play it was the same situation. He’s still up there. And this time I said, ‘Oh man, I’m going to really hit him this time.’ And so I get in and get set and I usually cross my hands in front of my private areas to protect myself. But this time I had my my arms up and I was gonna pop him. And about a half step before he hit me on the screen, he squares up to me and throws an uppercut right in my nuts and knocks me down. He takes a foul. He looks at me and shakes his head, and I go, ‘OK. I get you.’ It wasn’t dirty. I wasn’t gonna fight. I was like, ‘I got a shot, thought I could get a second shot.’ It’s the old Abe Lincoln. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. He wasn’t fooled the second time and paid me back a little bit. I did get two free throws so that was good.
DNVR: Did he say anything to you?
Hastings: He looked at me and smiled. It was just a look like, ‘Uh huh. You were gonna try and get me, weren’t you?’
DNVR: What was the other one?
Hastings: The other one almost felt like a nod of respect from Michael. I was playing with the Nuggets. We’re at old McNichols Arena. Before the game my routine was I would go in and get on the bike for 30 or 45 minutes, get my legs loose and get a workout in because I didn’t know if I was going to play or not. So I always did that every home game before the game.
A local reporter comes right in and he had somehow wrangled a sit-down interview with Michael. And they have it set up in the corner of the little weight room. The reporter keeps coming at me and saying, ‘OK. You’re going to have to get off now. I’ve got to interview Michael.’ And I said, and I’ll clean it up, ‘I don’t give a crap. This is my job. This is my profession. I don’t care who you’re talking to. I’m not getting off the bike early so you can sit down with Jordan.’ He came up two or three times and it kind of pissed me off. I still had that Detroit Piston kind of mentality where I didn’t care that it’s Michael Jordan. Like this is my craft. This is what I do to get ready.
So Jordan sees me, comes in, does the interview with the guy, gets done and comes over and pats me on the side and gives me a nod, almost like he appreciated me not moving. I always took the glance and nod he gave as him appreciating what I did. Michael wouldn’t have moved for somebody else and he didn’t expect other people who he was competing against to move either.
DNVR: What was your impression of Jordan playing against him early in his career?
Hastings: The first time I saw Jordan play live was at the 1982 Championship Game in New Orleans. I played in the coach’s All-American game the night before. I was sitting in the stands, Boomer Esiason was sitting in front of me, David Falk was sitting right behind me, and we watched Jordan hit the shot to beat Georgetown. And you’re like, ‘Whoa. That dude’s a freshman. A freshman just did that.’ You’re like, ‘OK. That guy’s gonna be special. He’s a freshmen and not afraid to take the biggest shot of the year.’ When he came into the league he was just a really skinny kid that could do so many things and there were some great battles with him and Dominique (Wilkins) during those Atlanta years. And then of course in those battles with Detroit he was starting to come into his own and be respected. But he still hadn’t gotten over the hump of either the Celtics or Pistons.
DNVR: So he had shown flashes, but at that time you didn’t look at him as the guy who could become the greatest player of all-time
Hastings: No, but he could score. He had this great shot. He played hard. We watched him beat Dominique in the Dunk contest in 1988, and we thought Dominique got robbed. He was just this great scorer. But you could see it by the time we beat him in 1989-90, when the Pistons went back-to-back. We had to take him to seven games to do. it. And that seventh game was the iconic (Scottie) Pippin migraine game. You just saw a different dude. If not for him, they wouldn’t even have been in that series. He was so dominant you just knew. And then the next year when they swept us in the Eastern Conference Finals, we were a pretty good team, but a mentally tired team that was getting a little older and Jordan was a beast, just a beast at that time.
DNVR: I wanted to ask you about the ‘Jordan Rules.’ Were they actually a defined set of rules those Pistons teams talked about and lived by, or was it something that the media blew out of proportion?
Hastings: I think the media increased it to make it a juicy storyline, but Hank Iba at Oklahoma State had a rule that you deny the ball for great players, you double-team that player if he gets it, and if they go in to shoot a layup you put them on the ground. One of the guys who played for him told me that Hank said if they went in for a layup they better be looking at the rafters.
The ‘Jordan Rules’ were very similar. They were, deny him the ball, double him when he gets it, and if he goes in the lane you put him on his ass. You don’t let him get a layup. And we had good players. I mean we had Joe Dumars. He was a great defensive player. Dennis Rodman was a great defensive player. John Salley was a great rim protector. You had enough bodies that could play him and make it tougher for him to get to the rim than it was against a lot of other teams.
DNVR: How did the ‘Jordan Rules’ get explained to you when you got to Detroit?
Hastings: We had a mindset. It wasn’t just Michael. It was the league. The second day of practice at training camp, Bill Laimbeer takes me and David Greenwood out for dinner. It was right out of a scene with Sean Connery from The Untouchables. He sat on a side of the table by himself and we’re like two school kids looking at him. It was David’s 10th year in the league and it was my eighth and he’s sitting there talking to us like we’re kids. He says, ‘Listen. Our guards run this team. If they knock one of our guards down, we take one of their guards out of the game.’ It was literally like that. With the Pistons and how we played, that was our mindset. We don’t let people touch our guards. And we don’t bow down to anybody. We don’t bow down to Bird or Magic or Michael or anybody. It was a take no prisoners give no quarters kind of speech by Bill Laimbeer.
DNVR: You guys beat Jordan in seven games in 1990 but then he sweeps you in 91. Did that feel like Jordan was grabbing the torch?
Hastings: That was the torch. Who was Jordan’s biggest rival? His biggest rival was the Eastern Conference. It was the Knicks. It was the Celtics. It was the Pistons. It was the Eastern Conference. He was beat on and he was pummeled and he was hip checked and forearmed into the player he became, and if you look at those six years he was winning, and had he not stepped aside from basketball he probably would have won seven or eight in a row. Look at how his body changed from his first couple years. In fact, look at how his body changed from when he scored 63 against the Celtics in the playoffs to when he beat the Pistons in that Eastern Conference finals to win and go on to win their first championship. Just look at his strength. I know it’s not as physical of a game now, but for the most part, you still got to have the strength to play in this league, to finish at the rim, to two get through the rigors of 82 games and then another 20 or however more in the playoffs. But yeah that was him taking the torch.
DNVR: How would you describe Jordan’s on and off-court competitive nature?
Hastings: Joe Kleine said that when he played Michael in ’84 he was just a college kid. But he would say that by the time he joined the Bulls in ’94, he was a pro. He said everything he did he won. He would get on guys in practice because he didn’t want to lose a practice game. He would get on guys on the plane playing cards because he didn’t want to lose at cards. He didn’t want to lose dominoes.
Joe’s an interesting guy because he played with Michael and Scottie in Chicago. He played with Bird and McHale in Boston. He played with Kobe and Shaq in L.A., and he said all them cats had the same thing. You’ve covered this game long enough. There’s a lot of great talent in every era. Why are there only ever just a handful of superstars in each era? It’s because there’s something in these guys. I don’t know what it is. They just have a different mindset and then on top of that they’ve all got skill. I mean I’ve always said that when you get highly skilled, athletic people and they have a win at any cost mentality, those become your superstars. They become your Michael Jordan’s or your LeBron James’ or Kobe Bryant’s or your Kevin Garnett’s or your Tim Duncan’s. Even though Tim Duncan did it quieter, he had it too.
DNVR: Would Jordan have liked playing with Jokic?
Hastings: Unselfish and tough. Plus you look at the centers he played with, probably the most talented center he won a championship with was Bill Cartwright who was a better player than anybody knows. Be not one center he played with could pass like Jokic. You put Joker in the triangle? Holy cow.
DNVR: I’m guessing Dominique is your best dunker of all-time?
Hastings: Best in-game dunker, I’ve gotta go with Dominique because I’ve seen him dunk on 290-pound dudes while he’s getting hit and he could still put his elbow through the rim. I watched him dunk so hard in practice one time with one hand that his feet flew up in the air and his right foot ended up inside the net. The ball went through the rim and hit his foot while he was in the net and it kicked up to the rafters. I still don’t know how his foot got in the net or how high he had to be to do that. But it was so impressive Mike Fratello actually ended practice on that dunk because no one could explain it. In a game I got to go with Nique out of the guys I played with.
DNVR: What do you hope the younger generation of players takes from this documentary?
Hastings: If you listen to Coach Malone, remember he hung around those Bad Boy teams as a youngster. He had conversation was Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars. Malone’s always saying that until a team’s willing to self-police themselves or at least somebody is willing to take those reins and call teammates out, you’re not going to win. Kevin Garnett, and I’ve talked to Doc Rivers, changed the direction of Paul Pierce’s career because he would call Paul out when he first got there. And now everybody loves Paul Pierce. He was going to be to me just another really good player who didn’t do nothing.
What I’m hoping is all these young guys are going to watch this and go, ‘Damn. He was a bit of an asshole at times.’ And then say, ‘But he’s an asshole with six rings who built a billion dollar brand. I know I sound like the old get off my lawn guy, but I think there’s a lot of great talent right now in the NBA, more than there’s ever been. But I also think there’s a softer mentality with guys than there’s ever been. I still think you can be hard on guys mentally and demanding as long as you’re walking the same walk.
And that’s another thing guys who have played with Jordan have told me. If he didn’t think you were practicing hard he’d call you out. And you had to listen to him because he always practiced hard. Same thing about Bird. Bird loved to practice. That, ‘We’re talking about practice?’ clip with Allen Iverson. Well, Allen Iverson was a great talent. What did he win? No rings. I hope these guys sit there and go, ‘This guy’s a butt head, but wait a minute. He won six rings.’
