Rasheed Wallace blames Detroit Pistons NBA Finals 2005 loss to San Antonio Spurs on league’s China push
- San Antonio Spurs were ‘NBA’s team’, Wallace claims, with commissioner David Stern calling them the ‘United Nations’
- Detroit Pistons star tells Knuckleheads podcast that favouritism was because of NBA ‘push to get into China’
Former NBA star Rasheed Wallace has accused the NBA of “playing favourites” to appeal to China during the 2005 finals between his Detroit Pistons and the San Antonio Spurs.
Talking to the Player’s Tribune’s Knuckleheads podcast, hosted by former NBA players Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles, Wallace explained why the defending NBA champions lost the finals to the Spurs.
“Number one, we knew that they were the NBA’s team,” Wallace said of the Spurs. “David Stern loved them because, at the time, and y’all can go back and look this up, he called them ‘his team of United Nations’ during pre-games and this and that.”
That’s when he was trying to make a whole push and whole move to get the NBA over in China. He’s glorifying the fact that we have a team playing for the world championship in the NBA and there’s only two or three Americans on there out of 15 guys. We already knew what we was up against.”
The Spurs line-up included the “Big Three” of France’s Tony Parker, Argentina’s Manu Ginobili and the US Virgin Islands-born Tim Duncan. Slovenia’s Beno Udrih and Rasho Nesterovic were the only other foreign players on the 17-man roster.
The Pistons roster included Puerto Rico’s Carlos Arroyo, Argentina’s Carlos Delfino and Serbia’s Darko Milicic.