McHale defends 'Bad Boys' Pistons: 'The Bulls complained all the time'

"The Last Dance" documentary is reigniting the old rivalry between Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls and the Detroit Pistons' "Bad Boys" team.

While Kevin McHale's Boston Celtics also didn't see eye to eye with the Pistons, the Hall of Fame forward is defending Detroit's physical style of play.

"First of all, you can see why the Pistons didn't like the Bulls," McHale told Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald. "The Bulls complained all the time. That's one thing that came across (in the documentary). Like, 'This is not basketball. This is thuggery.' All that stuff.

"I thought the Bulls really disrespected what the Pistons were able to do. But, hey, when you kill the king, you can talk (expletive)."

The 10-part series shows footage of the Pistons' infamous walk-off before the final buzzer of their season-ending loss to the Bulls in Game 4 of the 1991 Eastern Conference finals.

Boston did something similar when Detroit eliminated the Celtics in Game 6 of the 1988 Eastern Conference finals. However, McHale maintains that he and his teammates rushed off to avoid a court storming from the Pistons' home crowd.

Isiah Thomas expressed remorse in the documentary for the way his Pistons squad reacted, but Jordan didn't buy his apology.

McHale, on the other hand, doesn't take issue with how the Pistons conducted themselves, as their behavior was in line with the NBA's culture at that time.

"I'm going to tell you this: of all the series that I played in all through the '80s, after a close-out game, unless you were walking with somebody you knew, you almost never said anything," McHale said. "You might congratulate them if you saw them later, but there wasn't a lot of talk, I mean, congratulatory or (expletive) talking or anything.

"You just kind of went in the locker room. Ninety percent of the series we won, I didn't talk to anybody. They didn't come up to me, and I didn't think they should.”