No Sheed – It’s Time For Wallace To Move On

It got to the point where they called it “the black hole.” The basketball would get tossed into it, and, basically, would never come out again. The derisive nickname came from the coaches and teammates, and leaked out.

Basically, the Pistons half-court offense would go like this: Isiah Thomas, slapping the ball against the floor, boogying left and then right, and maybe a pass to Joe Dumars or Bill Laimbeer would ensue. Then, the shot clock ticking away, the ball would end up in the hands of Adrian Dantley – somewhere on the wing. The Black Hole.

Dantley would hold the ball, rocking back and forth on his heels, and the only thing that was certain was that no one was getting it back. He either would drive to the hoop or launch a set shot from 20 feet away.

It was abided, Adrian Dantley’s ball-hogging ways, for a time after the Pistons acquired him from the Utah Jazz in the summer of 1986 for another who was infatuated with touching it, Kelly Tripucka. The Pistons, behind Dantley’s post presence to complement the whirling dervish Thomas and the tough but flat-footed Laimbeer and the smooth as silk Dumars, became a force in the NBA almost overnight. They went to the conference finals in 1987, Dantley’s first season in Detroit. Then they made it to the league finals in ’88, coming a whisker from beating the Lakers.

But the Pistons brass and the others who shared the court with Dantley began to get mystified and maddened at the Black Hole the following season. The offense was coming to an absolute halt whenever Dantley touched the ball. You could practically hear the THUD in the brand-new Palace of Auburn Hills when Adrian Dantley was given the basketball.

So the day after Valentine’s Day, 1989, GM Jack McCloskey stunned the basketball world by trading the Black Hole to the Dallas Mavericks. Coming to Detroit would be another problem child, Mark Aguirre – like Dantley, a prolific scorer. And, like the multi-traded Dantley, Aguirre tended to try the patience of his coach. Dick Motta was the coach in Dallas, and over the years he’d used words like “coward” and “jackass” to describe Mark Aguirre.

And yet here came Aguirre to the Pistons – a team many thought were world title contenders, despite the Black Hole portion of their offense. McCloskey was upsetting the apple cart, purposely.

“The trade had to be made,” he told me a couple years ago when I asked him to, you know, explain himself. “There were issues. Let’s leave it at that.”

The issues were solved when Dantley’s equipment bag and sneakers were shipped out of Detroit, for with Aguirre now on the team and behaving, the Pistons cruised to the NBA championship. And they won it again next year, also with Aguirre.

Rasheed Wallace has become the current Pistons’ Black Hole.

Wallace has more in common with Dantley (above) than you think

It’s not the same kind of thing, really – in the sense that Wallace doesn’t keep the basketball all to himself. But the welcome mat beneath his flippers is wearing away.

Wallace has just authored another chapter in the Book of Rasheed, and like so many others before it, it’s gothic and grotesque and self-defeating. And it carries the rest of his team down with him.

The Pistons are done for the summer, vanquished by the new-look Boston Celtics in six frightful games in the Eastern Conference Finals. Wallace and company worked like mad to wrestle home court advantage away from the Celtics in Game 2, then regurgitated it back up in a Game 3 performance so awful that it almost defies description. But not scapegoats.

Rasheed Wallace, throughout the Boston series, made a lot of news. None of it was very good. His play was horrific, his actions perplexing. From tossing up more bricks than the masons to carelessly handling the basketball to hugging Celtic opponents after games to being on the verge, yet again, of earning a suspension due to too many technical fouls, Wallace has just shown us in one playoff series why he should be politely shown the door, never to wear the Piston uniform again.

I don’t hate the guy. I’m not blaming the Pistons’ failure in the conference finals over the past three seasons solely on him, but I am suggesting that he shoulders most of it. Wallace can no longer be a Piston because he is simply becoming too much for the team to handle and overcome. He shows up flat – or not at all – at too many inopportune times. He has been, frankly, why the Pistons have lost in big games far more than he’s been the reason why they’ve won. His cashiering would be a classic example of addition by subtraction.

Game 6 sealed it for me. Wallace threw the ball away several times, handling it with all the care of a child with someone else’s toy. He rattled shot after shot off the rim in ugly fashion. He played as if in a fog most of the night – matching his countenance for most of the series. The Pistons, sadly, were not only playing the Celtics in this series, but their own No. 36 as well. And Lord only knows who, or what, Rasheed Wallace was competing against. I suspect there are some basketball demons in there. The world according to Wallace is a world that I don’t think any of us have ever inhabited.

It’s time for Pistons GM Joe Dumars to pull a Trader Jack McCloskey and rid the team of Rasheed Wallace while he still has some market value. The dude was fun and all, but he’s just not worth the trouble anymore. No Sheed.