By Joël Pütz | Sports journalist
Six-time champion with the Bulls, Michael Jordan is obviously adored in Chicago since he experienced his greatest exploits there. But before His Airness, another player had been entitled to this same treatment… and he was one of No. 23’s worst enemies.
Today, it’s impossible to talk about sports in Chicago without mentioning the name of Michael Jordan. It must be said that if the Bulls are now one of the most legendary franchises in the history of NBAnone of this would have happened if the former fullback had not left his bags in Illinois following the 1984 draft.
The rest, everyone knows it: six NBA championship titles as well as Finals MVP, five regular season MVP trophies, crazy performances as you wish, as well as a return to competition after a year and half retired. All this during the 90s, and that’s without mentioning the monstrous individual domination of the person concerned during the previous decade… enough to fill several books.
Isiah Thomas, Chicago’s biggest basketball legend?
In other words, it’s impossible to find a more iconic sports figure than him in the Windy City, which nevertheless has a department. Ironically, this status could have returned to… Isiah Thomashis eternal rival and sworn enemy to the Pistons. A native of the city, the playmaker was in fact ultra-followed even before making his debut in the NBA, as former player Tim Hardaway recounted on the podcast Come And Talk 2 Me :
We say Derrick Rose now, we say Dwyane even though Dwyane Wade comes from the suburbs of Chicago. But I think you have to choose Isiah Thomas because everyone followed him. It wasn’t AAU, but he was revered like he was a god in Chicago, even though Mark Aguirre was doing all these things, but I think Isiah Thomas was the man to watch. He was the GOAT.
He’s the guy everyone looked up to and wanted to see play. He was a monster on the pitch. He is the basketball idol that I watched and on whom I modeled my game.
Of course, all that quickly changed once Zeke joined Michigan and the Detroit franchise, then with the arrival of MJ three years later.
Still, to this day, it’s hard not to consider him the greatest basketball player ever to come out of Chi-Town. Only Dwyane Wade can claim to surpass him with his three NBA championship titles and his legendary career with the Heat, but IT has no reason to be ashamed of Flash’s track record with two rings as well as a Finals MVP trophy in 1989 -90 against Magic Johnson’s Lakers.
A living legend of Chicago high schools, Isiah Thomas wrote his story far from his hometown. But he never hid his deep attachment to it, even when his extremely heated rivalry with Michael Jordan was at its peak.
