The decades-old beef between Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan lives on.
The Pistons legend made it clear that he isn’t backing down from his long-standing feud with the Bulls icon without an apology while discussing Jordan’s ESPN docuseries, “The Last Dance.”
On Tuesday, Thomas took to Twitter to share comments he made to the Greek NBA rights holder COSMOTE TV during the Abu Dhabi NBA games last month, when he was asked about how his relationship with Jordan was portrayed in the documentary.
“When I was watching ‘The Last Dance,’ I’m sitting there and I’m watching it with my family and I’m thinking everything is good,” he said, per Euro Hoops. “And then this guy comes on television and he says that he hates me and then he calls me an a–hole.
“And then I proceed to watch a whole documentary about him being an a–hole. I’m like wait a minute, time out. Until I get a public apology, this beef is gonna go on for a long, long time, ’cause I’m from the west side of Chicago.”
In “The Last Dance,” which premiered in April 2020, one of the storylines depicts the rivalry between Thomas’ Pistons and Jordan’s Bulls in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Thomas also appears in the series.
Jordan, in the documentary, called Thomas an “a–hole” while reflecting on the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals when the Bulls swept the Pistons — and in the final game of that series, Pistons players, including Thomas, infamously walked off the court without shaking hands while there was still time on the clock.
Jordan said Thomas’ explanation for walking off before the buzzer sounded like “bulls–t” during the documentary.
“Whatever he says now, you know it wasn’t his true actions then,” he said. “He has time enough to think about it, or the reaction of the public has kind of changed his perspective of it. You can show me anything you want, there is no way you can convince me that he wasn’t an a–hole.”
It was long believed that Jordan then kept Thomas from playing on the 1992 Olympic Dream Team, giving Rod Thorn — the GM of the team — a him-or-me ultimatum. Jordan denied that was the case in the documentary.
This isn’t the first time Thomas has discussed his feud with Jordan.
In July, Thomas took to Twitter to call out a story by The Inquisitr explaining the origins of his rivalry with Jordan — and the longstanding theory that the Pistons legend froze him out of his first NBA All-Star game in 1985.