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"I didn't agree with it in '91, I don't agree with it now" - John Salley admitted he didn't want to walk off the court without shaking the Bulls' players' hands
"I didn't agree with it in '91, I don't agree with it now" - John Salley admitted he didn't want to walk off the court without shaking the Bulls' players' hands originally appeared on Basketball Network.
The 1991 Eastern Conference finals marked the end of the Detroit Pistons' reign and the symbolic rise of Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls.
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What's often remembered is the defiant gesture by a bruised, proud team. There was no handshake. No final show of grace. Just a cold, calculated walk-off that became one of the most talked-about images in NBA playoff history.
The Bulls had just swept the Pistons. Four games to none. A clean execution. And as the final seconds ticked off in Game 4 at the Palace of Auburn Hills, most of the Pistons roster, including names like Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer, strode past Chicago's bench.
Salley's defense
That walk-off was a move many saw as petty and, for some, unforgivable. But according to former Pistons star John Salley, not everyone on the roster — including himself — was on board.
"I didn't agree with it in '91; I don't agree with it now," Salley said in an interview with DJ Vlad. "I understand we took a stand as a team. But personally, even though we were a team, we were 12 individual companies."
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"I literally said, 'Chuck [Daly] put me back in the game.' He was like, 'Come on, Salley, you can't get any more points.' I go, 'You gotta put me back because I don't want to be a part of what's about to happen.' And they walked off," Salley recalled.
There was always a complexity to the Pistons. On the court, they were brutal and methodical, the Bad Boys of the NBA, building a dynasty not with grace but with grit. But behind that uniformity was a collection of personalities, each navigating the fine line between loyalty and individuality. Salley was one of the few who tried to bridge that divide.
Salley understood what that moment meant, not just for the optics, but for the culture of the league. The Pistons were more than two-time champions, they were a wall that Jordan had to break through, a team that had bounced him from the playoffs three years straight. But 1991 was the season everything changed.
Jordan's Bulls swept them with clinical efficiency, outscoring Detroit by a total of 45 points across the series. It was a statement victory.
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Related: "I can't get so close to it, too, because of my competitive nature" - Michael Jordan on why he can't get himself to be a fan of any one player in the NBA
A quiet act of sportsmanship
Though the national narrative focused on the walk-off, it wasn't as absolute as it looked. Not every Piston avoided the Bulls. Salley, standing by his convictions, sought out the players he respected, regardless of the emotional weight hanging over the arena.
"When the game was over, first person I went up to that's my frat brother," Salley recalled. "And then I went to Horace [Grant] and Scottie [Pippen] who were standing together."
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That was a subtle acknowledgment in a moment that demanded more humanity than pride. For Salley, it wasn't about public perception. It was about maintaining a personal code of sportsmanship, one that he wasn't willing to compromise, even when the team moved as a unit.
The decision to leave without shaking hands has been revisited many times, perhaps most infamously in ESPN's 2020 docuseries "The Last Dance." Thomas, then the Pistons' leader, would later refer to it as an emotional, knee-jerk reaction to the sting of losing.
But that explanation never fully muted the backlash. Thomas was left off the 1992 Dream Team, a snub many attributed to lingering tension with Jordan. The moment became an often-replayed skipped handshake, a symbol of the rift between generations, between two dynasties that viewed the game through fundamentally different lenses.
Salley would go on to win two more championships, one with the Bulls in 1996 and another with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2000, becoming the first player in NBA history to win titles with three different franchises. His post-Detroit journey marked him as both a competitor and a connector, someone able to move between rival dynasties without friction.
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Related: "I don't even know where my birth certificate is, but I know where those sneakers are right now" - John Salley made sure to get MJ's sneakers after a historic night
This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Jun 21, 2025, where it first appeared.
