Isiah Thomas led with a smile and a knife. He could pass like Magic, score like Iverson before Iverson, and bend an entire defense by raising one eyebrow. The smile was real. So was the knife.
Joe Dumars guarded with a kind of monkish concentration the league had not seen before and did not see again. He was the only Piston Michael Jordan ever publicly respected — which was, in those years, a higher honor than any individual award.
Bill Laimbeer was loathed in nineteen American cities and beloved in one. The math worked out. He set screens that left bruises and took charges that left lawsuits. He could shoot from the perimeter before the perimeter had a name.
Dennis Rodman rebounded as if the floor had personally wronged him. Vinnie Johnson came off the bench in a phone booth and walked back to it on fire. John Salley made everyone laugh, then blocked the next shot. James Edwards was seven feet of patience.
Mark Aguirre arrived mid-1989 and completed an arithmetic problem no one had finished writing down. Rick Mahorn was lost in the 1989 expansion draft that summer and broke the team's heart, then the league's heart, in that order.
Chuck Daly coached the way an editor edits — by letting the writer write, until the writer needed editing. Then with surgery. The Jordan Rules were not a rule book. They were a philosophy of limits, applied carefully to a man who had been told there were none.
The Pistons won the 1989 Finals against the Lakers in a sweep. They won the 1990 Finals against the Trail Blazers in five. The third year, the torch passed without ceremony to Chicago, the way torches usually do — quietly, and at someone else's convenience.
They were called bad and they were good. They are still good. The Vault keeps the tape.