Isiah Thomas is one of the greatest players in NBA history. Considered to be a top-5 point guard of all-time, the 6-foot-1 legend racked up a pretty decorated resume after the conclusion of an illustrious 13-year career.
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The leader of the Bad Boys Pistons, “Zeke” managed to lead them to 2 NBA Championships and was crowned as the Finals MVP for the 1990 title. Further, the Hall-Of-Famer got selected to 12 All-Star Games and 5 All-NBA teams
Clearly, The Baby-Faced Assassin had a great NBA career. However, the success Isiah witnessed during his college days was nothing less from amazing.
Also Read: Isiah Thomas, former Knicks GM, Talked about Destroying Michael Jordan and the NBA
Before making himself eligible for the 1981 NBA Draft, the undersized guard had a pretty phenomenal stint with the Indiana Hoosiers.
IT’s brother and Bob Knight almost locked horns
The starting point guard for Indiana, Thomas averaged a staggering 15.4 points, 5.7 assists, 3.5 rebounds, and 2.2 steals per game during his 2-year college career. Further, IT also helped coach Bob Knight win an NCAA Championship.
Thomas’ first college choice wasn’t Indiana University. His entire family, being Chicago natives, wanted Isiah to attend DePaul. However, Knight managed to recruit the star prospect to his program.
It wasn’t an easy task for Bob to achieve. In fact, Bob almost got into a scuffle with Thomas’ brother.
When asked about Isiah’s safety from the racism faced in Martinsville, coach Knight had a rather funny answer. While IT found the answer pretty amusing, his brother didn’t.
In an appearance on Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay” podcast, IT detailed that the two almost got into a physical altercation:
“My brother didn’t think that was funny, and they got into a back and forth. Then my brother said, ‘Hey, we can take this outside.‘ Coach Knight stood up, took his jacket off, rolled up his sleeves, and went ‘Yeah, let’s take this outside.’”
“In our style of play, there was great freedom”: Isiah Thomas
Bob Knight was a solid coach but was also infamous for being hard on his players. While that was one of the reasons that made Zeke hesitant about committing to the Hoosiers, he later found out that coach Knight was nothing like he was wrongly advertised.
Stating that Bob allowed them to play with their own freedom, the Pistons great lauded his college coach:
“So the stories that you, that we all heard about him being a strong disciplinarian. I was waiting for that but what I found was that in our style of play the way we played there was great freedom. But with that great freedom came a great responsibility. So Shannon, we never had an under out of bounds play we never had a play there was no, we never came down and said hey ‘22 out’ you know we never.
It was all about reading and reacting knowing your teammate understanding your teammate and making the right decisions every single time.”
Clearly, this freedom helped Isiah develop his basketball IQ, which eventually helped him during his time as a professional.
