Jerry Seinfeld once punctured the entire premise of team fandom with the observation that at the end of the day, it’s an empty exercise in rooting for laundry. Particularly in this modern league, Seinfeld has a point. Rosters are constantly in flux, staffed by modern-day athlete/mercenaries who hail from any and everywhere on Earth, most on one-to-two-year deals or recently acquired in a trade. Coaches are replaced. Front office regimes and their philosophies change. Owners sell teams. Teams move homes. The fabric of entire American cities can flip in a few years.
But how do we account for instances in which overriding essences remain as fixed descriptors for a team for generations? The rare team cultures that transcend the players playing for them, the gurus shaping them, that appear to be woven into the very fabric of the laundry these teams play in. Who knows? Maybe it’s supernatural, and brings to mind a timeless quote from The Poltergeist, a film about haunted houses and the ineffable ties of history and culture to land: “You moved the headstones, but you left the bodies”.
As far as I know, the Bad Boys Pistons are not buried beneath Little Caesars Arena, but there are few other rational explanations for this current iteration of the team, and particularly their brutal, bloodthirsty backup center, Isaiah Stewart. Diego Rivera’s utopian industrial vision of Detroit is long gone. Isiah Thomas and Chuck Daly have been out for decades. Bill Davidson died in 2009. Joe Dumars left his position as GM in 2014. The Pistons left the Palace of Auburn Hills in 2017. And yet, Beef Stew is an eerily reminiscent phantom menace returned to earth, an X-Files case in which somehow, the combined spirits of Ben Wallace and Rasheed Wallace and Rick Mahorn and Dennis Rodman and Bill Laimbeer have returned to a single, bruising corporeal form in the exact same jersey, with the exact same ethos, retaining the same barely contained, unquellable anger that is his superpower. He is the heart and soul of the eternal Bad Boys in Detroit, at long last back to terrorize the postseason.
Isaiah Stewart is 23 years old, drafted a year before the team’s anointed No. 1 pick savior, Cade Cunningham. The two are soulmates and perfect inverses, with Stewart as coarse as Cade is silky. Isaiah is quite appropriately from Rochester, another city of cold, hard, pissed off people left behind by late capitalism, situated around a great body of water. He’s a solid 6’8, 250 lbs., once a college center/2000s NBA tweener type, though as the game continues to warp and atomize, has emerged as a certain Type Of Guy who are all this size, temperament and have carved out a niche in the league doing the shitty, taxing work no one else can/wants to. They don’t have the skill or finesse of a stretch five, but serve as an amorphous frontcourt bowling ball using strength, agility, ball knowledge and bulk in lieu of reach.
But even amongst that class of big, Beef Stew stands out, playing like a left-wing enforcer in the lawless, toothless bad old days of the NHL. Here’s a video of Isaiah doing some very normal boxing out on a rebound in late January in Indiana that became his sixth flagrant foul point of the year, which resulted in his ejection, a subsequent one-game suspension, and a $50,000 fine for “making inappropriate and objectionable gestures following his ejection” that made me actually laugh out loud.
His material contribution to the 2025 Detroit Pistons is 6 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 1.5 assists a game in just under 20 minutes, in relief of Jalen Duren, who has perhaps not coincidentally found definition this season, as part of a battery with Stew. But his real value to this Pistons team is that he is mean, stubborn, fearless, and relentless. He will block Giannis and yam on Joel Embiid. He is without vanity, willing to be posterized if it means he at least has a chance to block your shot or make you earn your two points with a hard foul, unconcerned with the hierarchy of NBA stardom and where he fits into it. This isn’t to take anything away from his skill. He has a respectable around-the-basket game, a face-up floater, and is a perfectly serviceable and willing interior passer. On the rare-but-not-non-existent occasions he finds himself open for a corner three, he can hit them, consistently landing in the low 30s percentage-wise from outside. But his role, his application of this talent for now, is primarily as Detroit’s sledgehammer. He’s a backdoor cutter, an oop option in the dunker’s spot, the constant defensive irritant, and of course, the shit starter, and shit finisher.
And this is the kind of blunt, uncaring, and callous instrument you need to reverse years of futility. If you want to flip a team’s fortunes from a 14-68 laughingstock that tied the record for the most consecutive losses in NBA history to a young, scrappy, frightening first round draw that just missed the top half of the bracket, you have to be illogical, and deaf, and blind, and in the parlance of the ‘04 Red Sox, too dumb to know you’re supposed to lose. The popular knock against willful, years-long tanking experiments is they produce bad habits and apathetic players, and it makes sense. It’s human nature to shut down and disconnect and lose interest doing soulless work you don’t believe in. History has seen this happen to plenty of Hornets and 76ers. But let the record show that Isaiah Stewart never lost himself to the despair that is a natural byproduct of constant, relentless, sustained failure. He retained his mental toughness and his soul as he suffered through the darkest night, and now the sun has at last risen over Little Caesars Arena.
Here are some redemptive stats. The Pistons have become the first NBA team to ever triple their win total from the previous year, and their defense has rocketed from worst in the league to top 10, largely thanks to Beef Stew. If you’re not watching, you could dismiss this season as a step back for Isaiah. He has sacrificed his minutes and his numbers in the name of winning and dedicated himself with maniacal focus to rim protection, though he’s just two inches taller than his point guard and nearly a foot shorter than the player who was going to win the Defensive Player Award (an award Stewart should be eligible to win, but isn’t because of the minutes/games prereq).
Stew is a lightning fast and whip smart rotational defender, the spirit animal of this team defense, which has an attitude defined by chippy pettiness (they finished fourth in the NBA in personal fouls). Their pathos is clear. All contact must be returned with multiplied force, leave no back unjumped over, leave no ball handler unguarded at three quarters court, leave no knee unlunged into, every point given up is a slight, every slight is personal, every call is bullshit. The team exists in a flow state of indignant, pissed off grievance.
Of course, Beef Stew didn’t do this on his own. He is joined by the aforementioned former No. 1 athletic freak finally realizing his tremendous potential, a castoff coach who isn’t actively trying to be relieved of a job he never wanted, and an assembly of intelligently gathered, professional, free-firing free agent journeymen wings, as well as young scrappy pitbulls like Ausur Thompson and Stewart’s aggro consigliere, the God-level yapper, Ron Holland II.
It is not inconceivable to envision a scenario in which the Pistons achieve what was inconceivable just six months ago, and find themselves in the second round of this year’s playoffs. It is, however, difficult to imagine much more. And it is equally hard to see this as the first step of an Oklahoma City-style powerhouse in the making, as currently constituted. They made smart moves in the margins last offseason, and as a result may have outkicked their coverage, achieved a little too much too soon with the likes of Tim Hardaway Jr. and Tobias Harris. But Jaden Ivey could be back depending on how long this playoff run goes, and the missing age-appropriate elite scoring wing they need to really go somewhere could be as close as a consolidation trade, or a disgruntled young superstar who sees something that has been missing from one of the NBA’s great historical cities and franchises for a generation: Hope. Either way, this year the Pistons proved to the league, and themselves, that a better world for this young core is possible.
We’re in Detroit on the evening of Nov. 21, 2021. You probably remember the ensuing scene. The Pistons are up 12 on the Lakers with 9:18 to play in the third quarter of a game they’ll ultimately lose by 5. Isaiah Stewart is lined up next to LeBron James on the side of the key, watching Jerami Grant shoot a free throw. Stewart fills the lane with his typical zeal, on LeBron’s back, and as the free throw falls, LeBron’s left elbow shoots up and nails Isaiah’s right orbital, with a shot that looks innocent enough but will very soon announce its damage. Stewart falls, gets up and dutifully trudges towards LeBron, putting hands on the waist of the veteran, multi-time champion with a calm that projects, “Well shit, not much say in the matter, we’re fighting” before reality sets in and the floor floods with bodies getting in the way of Isaiah Stewart and the haymaker he needs to rock LeBron’s jaw with.
As it becomes clear he’s not going to get the satisfaction he desperately needs, Beef Stew loses his fucking mind. He begins screaming at the opposing team, their coaches and assistants, his own teammates, the refs, and the heavens, all as blood begins pouring down his face. He literally sees red and begins shedding tackles like a fullback, flinging off multiple arms wrapped around his waist attempting to anchor him to the floor and charging the sea of bodies again and again in an attempt to beat the shit out of the greatest player in the history of the sport. Then-rookie Cade Cunningham roots himself in front of Stew and it’s seemingly the only voice of reason he’ll listen to, until he doesn’t, finding a corner at the edge of coverage and charging nearly the length of the floor, with Cade following him back to the scrum, then back again towards the sideline, as LeBron looks on from the far sideline of the court like Henry Hill somewhere in Kentucky eating egg noodles doused in ketchup.
Finally, Stewart gives up on charging his target head-on, and runs back into the tunnel, as the officials warn to watch the other tunnel, fearing he might come back out the visitor’s side to execute a pincer attack. LeBron received a one-game suspension for that elbow, his first of his career. Beef Stew would get two, as well as the undying admiration of every player and fan who watched the viral highlight.
The Pistons were 4-11 at the time and would finish the season 23-59. It is hard to know what motivated Isaiah Stewart in that moment, and in subsequent endless, miserable losing seasons he approached night in and night out with the same full-frosted intensity. Perhaps he was possessed by the ghosts of the criminal lunatics who once inhabited his laundry, who once beat the shit out of and took titles from Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan and LeBron James by force. Or just maybe, for a moment, he could see the future.
