You Can’t Spell ‘Greatest’ without ‘Easter’

Michael Jordan’s legendary 59-point Easter Sunday performance in Detroit

Thirty years ago, on Easter Sunday, 1988, on national television, Michael Jordan single-handedly dismantled the Detroit Pistons at the Pontiac Silverdome. He scored 59 points on just 27 shots, and the Bulls won the game 112–110. It was in the wake of that game that Detroit’s famous “Jordan Rules” were born.

Detroit head coach Chuck Daly had seen enough. MJ was averaging 39.2 points per game against the Pistons that season, and Daly, following that Easter Sunday loss, vowed to put an end to Jordan’s comprehensive domination of his emergent Eastern Conference powerhouse.

“We made up our minds right then and there that Michael Jordan was not going to beat us by himself again,” said Daly, years later. “We had to commit to a total team concept to get it done.”

Daly and his assistants devised a set of principles designed specifically to contain Jordan. These principles, which became known as the Jordan Rules, mandated perimeter double-teams — a mixture of aggressive traps and help-and-recover maneuvers, intentionally variable in timing — and triple-teams whenever MJ posted up — anything to force the ball into the hands of his inferior teammates.

The most notable aspect of the Jordan Rules was the brand of physicality Daly instilled in his interior players. John Salley, Rick Mahorn, Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman were brutes to begin with, but Daly now commanded them to enforce, at all costs, a strict ‘no-layups’ policy in the painted area. It was this directive and the team-wide embrace thereof which birthed the “Bad Boys” moniker.

Jordan went on to lead the NBA in both scoring (35.0 ppg) and steals (3.2 spg) that season, 1987–88, and won both the MVP and Defensive Player of the Year awards, becoming the first player ever to do so (only Hakeem Olajuwon has done it since). The Bulls won 50 games for the first time in fifteen years and entered the Playoffs seeded third in the Eastern Conference.

The Bulls and the Pistons met again in the 1988 Eastern Conference Semifinals. Jordan had averaged 45.2 points per game on 56 percent shooting in the first round against Cleveland, but Detroit, employing the Jordan Rules, held the game’s greatest scorer to just 27.1 points per game and 49 percent from the field. Detroit won the series 3–2, and then beat Boston in the conference finals before falling to the Lakers in the championship round in what was the mighty last gasp of L.A.’s famed Showtime Era.

The Pistons went on to win back-to-back NBA titles in 1989 and 1990, beating Chicago in the Eastern Conference Finals both years. In 1991, MJ finally broke through, as the Bulls swept the Pistons 4–0 in the conference finals en route to their first of three straight championships. Michael had finally learned to trust his teammates — and that was because the Jordan Rules left him no other choice.