While NBA legend John Salley has cemented his status in 2025 as a media fixture—launching his new show, THE BEST DARN SPORTS SHOW! on OAN, and continuing his work as a prominent vegan entrepreneur—his past still serves up some of the game’s best anecdotes.
Recently, Salley, the first player in league history to win a championship in three different decades, revisited a classic story about his late Detroit Pistons coach, Chuck Daly, and the motivational tool Daly wielded to keep the infamous “Bad Boys” focused: the threat of a trade to the Milwaukee Bucks.
The Original Threat: Milwaukee as the Ultimate Punishment
The two-time Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee, Chuck Daly, guided Salley, Isiah Thomas, and Bill Laimbeer to back-to-back championships in 1989 and 1990. Despite Daly’s preference for short, high-intensity practices—a coaching style Salley contrasted with Phil Jackson’s rigorous approach in Chicago—discipline was paramount.
As Salley recounted, Daly had a special weapon reserved for his talented but sometimes meandering young big man.
“Daly used to say to me: ‘Sal if you keep playing bad I’m going to trade you to Milwaukee,’ because he knew I would rather be anywhere else but Milwaukee,” Salley explained. “He would see me in the hotel and be like: ‘where are you going?’ And I’d be like: ‘there’s nowhere to go, I got to walk around the hotel.’ And he’d be like: ‘imagine if you played here’ and I’d say: ‘I couldn’t play here, now I know why they traded Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] after he won the championship.’”
For Salley, who craved the vibrancy of major cities and the West Coast lifestyle, the thought of being exiled to Milwaukee was genuinely terrifying, making Daly’s tactic supremely effective.
The 2025 Irony
More than three decades removed from the “Bad Boys” era, the context of the anecdote has flipped entirely, making the 2025 NBA landscape a source of high-level irony.
While Chuck Daly’s coaching legacy remains robust—highlighted by Don Nelson receiving the prestigious 2025 Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award this past June—the competitive balance between the two franchises has been volatile.
In the 2020s, the Bucks, powered by two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo, won an NBA championship and became a premier destination. Yet, as the 2025-2026 season heats up in December:
- The Bucks are struggling. Despite their superstar talent, the Milwaukee Bucks are hovering around the .500 mark.
- The Pistons are elite. Conversely, the Detroit Pistons, led by a blossoming Cade Cunningham and a strong supporting cast, have surged to become one of the most surprising and dominant teams in the league, currently leading the Eastern Conference with a 16-4 record.
If Chuck Daly were coaching today, the threat of sending a slumping player to Milwaukee would be met with a confused shrug, or perhaps even excitement. The punishment Salley feared—being separated from a winning environment and big-city life—no longer computes with Detroit having the better team and the Bucks navigating a challenging 2025 season.
The true modern-day trade threat would have to be to a perpetually rebuilding team. But given the unexpected resurgence of the 2025 Detroit Pistons, Salley’s classic story serves as a perfect reminder that in the NBA, “The only constant is change.” The “Bad Boy” Pistons were once the bullies, now the current Pistons team is dominating the East, a turn of events that would surely make Coach Daly grin.
