Why Michael Jordan Never Forgave Isiah Thomas

You can show me anything you want. There's no way you can convince me he wasn't there. The bench, although there's seven and nine tenths seconds remaining. I met the criteria to be selected, but I wasn't. All these years, you've been standing behind a tree throwing stones. Now, if you didn't mean it, get on national television and apologize for it. You know the guy from work. Cordial at every party for years. Then comes his big farewell. He grabs the mic, says your name, and calls you something we'd have to bleep. With your family watching. Swap the office for ESPN. The farewell is the last dance. Ten episodes. You're Isaiah Thomas. And you put on a suit. You see me sitting there in a three-piece and a tie. I dressed up. This is why Michael Jordan never forgave him. And what 35 years of it cost. Isaiah believes it cost him a spot on the Dream Team, and the gold medal that came with it. Jordan has never said it cost him a thing. So who's telling the truth? And who's the one who can't let go? Jordan said on camera it wasn't him who kept Isaiah off the Dream Team. Then a tape turned up, in Jordan's own voice. Start in Indianapolis, February 1985. All-Star Weekend. A rookie named Michael Jordan walks into the dunk contest in his own Nike warm-ups and a pair of gold chains. Not Bulls gear, his sponsor's gear. The veterans clock it and they are not amused. Hold on to those warm-ups, they come back. The next day, the game. Jordan scores seven points on two-for-nine shooting, the lowest scoring night of his All-Star career. Jordan's version is that the veterans froze him out, stopped passing him the ball. And he says the man behind it was Isaiah Thomas. If you go back and look at the film, you can see that Isaiah was actually doing that. So go look at the film. It exists. Thomas passes a little bit behind him. Good recovery by Isaiah Thomas. A little behind him. Freeze out? Or a bad pass? Depends who's watching. Isaiah has denied it from the start. Decades later, he was still at it, on X. George Gervin called it a joke, too. How am I going to freeze you out when I'm playing against you? Same game, two movies. But the grudge wasn't instant. Right after the game, Jordan himself said this. I think Isaiah played it correctly. Jordan's agent, David Falk, split the difference. Not a provable fact, but everybody knows it. Nobody has ever settled it. Two days later, Detroit came to Chicago Stadium. Even the TV crew brought up the freezeout before You can hear about how much Michael Jordan did and didn't get the basketball in the All-Star game, David, and whether Isaiah had anything to do with it. Jordan answered it on the floor. 49 points, 15 rebounds, and Detroit went home a loser. Good head and shoulder fake, froze Isaiah, took it all the way in. Michael Jordan doesn't forget. He files it. But that was a rookie with a chip on his shoulder. What happens when the guy he blames becomes the best team in basketball? Easter Sunday, the Pontiac Silverdome. Jordan drops 59 on Detroit, and the Bulls win by two. Chuck Daly watches that game and makes up his mind. We made up our minds right then and there that Michael Jordan was not going to beat us by himself So the plan becomes the Jordan rules. Force him left, double him, and any time he goes by you, you nail him. That's the whole secret. Three sentences. Joe Dumars later compared it to the formula for Coca-Cola. It worked. Three springs in a row, Detroit sent him home. Five games, then six, then seven. Two championships along the way. And it was ugly. Laimbeer, Mahorn, Rodman. Elbows, floor burns, a brawl at Chicago Stadium. So when Jordan says they made it personal, he doesn't mean the trash talk. And the leader of the bad boys? The point guard with the choir boy smile, Isaiah Thomas. The Pistons' version is that they were misunderstood. John Sally says they were essential to Michael Jordan becoming Michael Jordan. We toughened him up. He got stronger because of us. Once you get through us, you can get through any." Which is a lovely way of saying, we beat you up. Michael's version of that era, from the documentary. Oh, I hated him. And yeah, he carries even to this day. They made it personal. Decades later, and it still sounds fresh. Watch the same man the night they beat him. All you can do is wish him good luck. I mean, you know, we fought hard. You know, they were the better team. Gracious. Honest. Not a grudge in sight. That's the respect he gave them. A year later, they had a chance to give it back. They had 7.9 seconds. Monday night, May 27th, 1991. The Palace of Auburn Hills, Detroit's own building. The Bulls lead the series three games to none. The two-time champions are down to their last seconds. With 7.9 seconds left, Isaiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, and Mark Aguirre walk off the floor, right past the Bulls' bench. No handshakes from them. Joe Dumars and John Salley stay and shake hands. The rest are gone. Their own coach did the post-game interview. Well, first of all, they deserved to win. Any club that beats you four straight is a better club than you are, at least this year. Class. Would you have stayed on that floor? His players had other ideas. They whined and cried for a year and a half about how bad we were for the game. But more importantly, they said we're bad people. We weren't bad people. Ten days later, in Los Angeles for the finals, Jordan sits down with Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom. That's long enough to cool off. He hasn't. If they were sportsmanlike champions, why would they walk off the floor like they did? They showed respect. They showed class. The others didn't. Then comes a line that reads like an afterthought. And Isaiah's the head of our Players Association. That should tell you something. Remember that one. It comes back. Albom asked if he'd take any of it back. No, I meant what I said. Almost 30 years before the last dance, and he's already taking nothing back. Isaiah's side is that his team spent a day and a half being called bad people, and he says Jordan and Phil Jackson led the tirade. They went on a day and a half tirade about how we were bad for the game, how we were bad people. Later that year, even Isaiah admitted it was a bad look. But listen to the last part. Was it unsportsmanlike? Yes. Was it the wrong thing to do? Yes. But at the time, is that the way we felt? Yeah. One skipped handshake. Isaiah believes it followed him all the way to the Olympics. Four months after the walk-off, USA Basketball names its first 10 players for the Barcelona Olympics. Magic Barkley Malone Stockton Ewing Robinson Bird Mullin Pippen Jordan Ten names. No Isaiah. On paper, Isaiah belonged. A decade of All-Star games, two rings, a Finals MVP. His argument is simple. I know the criteria for selection of making a team. I had fit all the criteria. And that's a big hole in my resume. The part Isaiah fans won't love. Stockton made All-NBA four years running. Isaiah, not once in those four years. This wasn't only about Michael. Isaiah's theory is something else. The handshake. That's the reason why I didn't make the Dream Team. And I am more disappointed today than I was back then when I wasn't selected. The weird part is who was coaching that team? Chuck Daly. Isaiah's own coach. So who kept him off? In the documentary, Jordan says Rod Thorne, a member of the selection committee, called to ask him to play. Jordan asked who else was on the team. Thorne said, "...the guy you're thinking about wouldn't be." Jordan's next line is the one that matters. Now, it was insinuated that I was asking about him, but I never threw his name in there. You want to attribute it to me, go ahead, be my guest. But it wasn't me. Rod Thorne says the same thing. There was never anything in my conversation with him that had to do with Isaiah Thomas. Case closed, except for a tape. In 2011, author Jack McCallum sat down with Jordan for a book on the Dream Team, and he kept the tape. Nine years later, right after The Last Dance ended, that recording came out. This is Jordan. He was here and he said, you know what? Now put that next to what he said on the show. I never threw his name in there. Shannon Sharpe had a word for it. There were some semantics going on in the answer Jordan gave on The Last Dance. There was some plausible deniability going on there. Semantics or not, you can't call it the same story. And Jordan wasn't the only one. Magic Johnson put it this way in his own book. Michael didn't want to play with him. Michael got singled out as the guy that kept Isaiah off. But that really isn't fair. It was everybody. So, a TV denial, a tape in Jordan's own voice, and a hole in Isaiah's resume. Back then, none of this was public. On the record, Isaiah sounds like a fan. When Jordan retires for the second time, Isaiah tells Sports Illustrated this. From all the players I have seen and played against, he's definitely the best player ever. Then comes Jordan's Hall of Fame speech, and a rookie year score gets settled, politely. One headline called the night petty. Listen to who he thanks. And I'm going to thank a couple of people that you guys probably wouldn't even think that I would thank. Isaiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, George Gervin. Now, they say it was a so-called freeze out in my rookie season. You guys gave me the motivation to say, you know what? Evidently, I haven't proved enough to these guys. Most of us can't remember who guarded us last season. Michael thanked his rookie year rivals by name at his own Hall of Fame induction. Michael Jordan doesn't forget. He files it. Years later, Jordan's producers call Isaiah about a documentary on the Bulls. By Isaiah's account, the pitch is, We can't tell this story without you. Now, if you notice, he asked me to be in his documentary. He asked me to be in The Last Dance. His producers asked me to be in The Last Dance. Remember the suit? He says he wore it thinking they had no problem. Then, episode four airs. Nearly five million people tune in. Isaiah is at home with his family. Me, my family, everybody, everybody locked down because you can't go outside. So now I'm sitting there watching like everybody else. In the episode, the producers put an iPad in front of Jordan with Isaiah's explanation for the walk-off. Michael watches. Then he answers. Whatever he says now, you know it wasn't his true actions then. You know, it's time enough to think about it. Or the reaction of the public that's kind of changed his perspective of it. You already know how that sentence ends. He says it in a documentary his own company helped make. That is not a slip. And in the same documentary, he says the word hate. Isaiah, at home with his family, hears all of it. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out. From that night on, his position is simple. I never knew. I never knew this dude felt the way he felt until the last dance. I can't. Plenty of you are thinking, how could you not know? Isaiah says he only knows how people treat him to his face. Fair. But Jordan went after him in the free press, in Playboy, by name, at his own Hall of Fame speech. It's Isaiah's account against the paper trail. The Last Dance changed how Isaiah does documentaries. On Sirius XM NBA radio, he was blunt. They totally set me up and blindsided me. He turned down HBO's Celtics documentary. His reason? I wasn't going to get fooled twice. And the demand never changes. And until he apologizes on international television, we ain't no conversation. He even says the apologies already came, privately. Nobody has named these people. It's Isaiah's claim, and Jordan has never confirmed it. Remember Jordan's Players Association line? Isaiah has a comeback. And by the way, All them years that you supposedly hated me, you voted for me to be the president of your union. Compare that with Magic Johnson, who had his own falling out with Isaiah. On NBA TV, he apologized. Let me apologize to you if I hurt you that we haven't been together. Hugs, tears, done. That is the template Isaiah has been asking for. Jordan hasn't said a word. Stephen A. Smith, who says he loves them both, thinks he knows why. Michael Jordan doesn't give a damn. He doesn't care if he ever speaks to Isaiah Thomas in life again. Isaiah has been asking for years. Be honest. At some point, it stops being a request and becomes a hobby. But the sharpest part isn't the apology Isaiah wants. It's what happened to his opinion of Jordan. Remember the 90s, when Isaiah called Michael definitely the best player ever? Watch where that goes. Three days after episode four, Isaiah ranks the five best players he ever faced. Jordan is fourth. By September, he's telling Sports Illustrated that LeBron will be the best ever. Later comes a post. The two GOATs, Kareem and LeBron, no Jordan. Can't prove it's personal, but the timing is something. To be fair, Isaiah has given Michael flowers too. Michael Jordan was good for business. He was great for business. And LeBron's case is real. He owns the scoring record. January 2026. Isaiah goes on Run It Back and makes that stat sheet argument. I know we talk about Jordan, but he leads in no statistical basketball category. And this is the line that went everywhere. But then when y'all say who the greatest, I'll talk about the guy that gave you some shoes and, you know, gave you some more. Go back to Indianapolis, a rookie in his own Nike gear and the veterans bristling. 41 years later, it's still about the shoes. In June, he's back at it. Anyone who leaves LeBron out of a top five is jealous. Jealousy. Envy. Guys are jealous. They get envious. Funny word to pick. On Hall of Fame Day, Jordan used it himself, about those veterans. A lot of competitive jealousy in terms of me. In 1985, it was warm-ups. In 1991, a handshake. In 2026, shoes. What did it cost? In Isaiah's eyes, a dream team gold medal and a Michael Jordan question in every interview. Jordan? Nothing he'd admit to. Isaiah has talked about a documentary of his own to tell his side. So far, nothing has come out. And Jordan, as far as anyone can find, hasn't said a public word about Isaiah since the last dance. Both men were part of the NBA's 75th anniversary celebration at the 2022 All-Star Weekend in Cleveland. Same weekend, same building. By Isaiah's account, they haven't spoken since right before the Dream Team. Settle it in the comments. A man thanks you by name at his Hall of Fame speech, then says on camera he hates you. Does he owe you a public apology? Or are you the one who can't let go? Michael Jordan doesn't forget. He files it. And the file on Isaiah has one page that isn't hate. The best point guard of all time is Magic Johnson, and right behind him is Isaiah Thomas. No matter how much I hate him, I respect his game.