On November 7, 2025, Peter Sunjic authored an article for Basketball Network titled John Salley says Dennis Rodman refused to guard him after his Pistons trade. The article describes an anecdote by former NBA player John Salley. Mr. Salley’s anecdote provided some very specific details which, for one reason or another, inspired me to conduct some research. For reasons I describe below, I believe Mr. Salley may have conflated two games from the 1992-93 season – an understandable mistake given that more than three decades have gone by. But let us cut the introduction short and dig into the story.
To begin: Who is John Salley?
John Salley played in the NBA for 11 seasons from 1986-87 through 1999-00, with a three year hiatus from the NBA (playing overseas, retirement) from 1996-97 through 1998-99. He was selected by the Detroit Pistons out of Georgia Tech with the 11th overall pick in the 1986 NBA Draft. My time following the NBA coincided with Mr. Salley’s final season in 1999-00 when he served as a backup center with the NBA Champion Los Angeles Lakers. I recall an interesting fact from when the Lakers defeated the Indiana Pacers in the 2000 NBA Finals which was noted by the commentators at the time: Mr. Salley became the first NBA Player to win championships with three different franchises, having collected rings in 1988-89 and 89-90 with the Pistons, 1995-96 with the Chicago Bulls, and 1999-00 with the Lakers. Three players have subsequently won championships with three different franchises—Mr. Salley’s teammate on the 1999-00 Lakers, Robert Horry, along with Danny Green, and LeBron James (Mr. James won the NBA Finals MVP in all four of his championships with three franchises)—but let no one take away that Mr. Salley was the first. (Mr. Salley also celebrated being the first player to win championships in three different decades, since joined by Tim Duncan, but I may have to speciously quibble with that one based on my preferred method for counting decades.) The Basketball Reference article described Mr. Salley as a “serviceable backup center option,” which I suppose is on the low-end of fair, but I will submit that he started more than half of the games he played with the Miami Heat from 1992-93 through 1994-95 and may well also have been starter caliber for much of his first six seasons with the Pistons (his playoff stats in the Pistons’ two championship runs are quite good), when he was relegated to a reserve status by the depth of the Pistons’ experienced front-line. (Today Mr. Salley is active in media, business, and promoting a vegan lifestyle.)
The Basketball Network report comes from an interview Mr. Salley recently gave to something called the “TFU Podcast.” I am not up to date on my podcasts, but I will relay the link for those who are interested. Before continuing, please note that my article is based on Basketball Network’s snippets of what Mr. Salley said on the podcast and not from listening to the podcast. I assume for the purpose of writing this article that the Basketball Network account is both accurate and sufficiently complete regarding the story I am covering.
One of Mr. Salley’s most notable teammates on the Pistons in his early days was Dennis Rodman, who became an NBA Hall of Famer in 2011. They were in fact part of the same 1986 NBA Draft class, with the Pistons selecting Mr. Rodman with the 27th pick after taking Mr. Salley 11th. Mr. Rodman is largely remembered these days for his eccentric personality and hair colors with the Chicago Bulls later in his career (note Mr. Rodman and Mr. Salley won a third championship together on the 1995-96 Bulls), along with his historically great rebounding and international diplomacy efforts. But some of Mr. Rodman’s greatest individual accomplishments came early in his career when he and Mr. Salley were both on the Pistons. Mr. Rodman won consecutive Defensive Player of the Year Awards in 1989-90 and 90-91, and he was selected to the All NBA Third Team in 1991-92. Mr. Salley explained in the interview that Mr. Rodman was partial to him as a teammate and did not take it well when the Pistons shipped Mr. Salley to the Miami Heat:
Dennis Rodman was so upset when I got traded. He was crying, he was pissed, to the point where… You know, I didn’t call anybody. I just did an interview in my house. And I couldn’t believe I was leaving this mansion, I was no longer gonna be in this city…
John Salley (via The Basketball Network)
Thanks to Basketball Reference, we know that the Pistons traded Mr. Salley to the Miami Heat on September 8, 1992, for Isaiah Morris and a 1993 first round draft pick, which would turn into Lindsey Hunter, who would go on to play 17 seasons in the NBA (Mr. Hunter was a reserve on the 2003-04 Pistons championship team, which I covered on site in some detail, and also played a key role for the 2001-02 champion Los Angeles Lakers). This trade was just shy of two months before the start of the 1992-93 regular season. According to a contemporaneous report, the Pistons had been expected to trade Mr. Salley since June because Mr. Salley was unhappy with his contract and had indicated that he would leave as a free agent after the 1992-93 season (whether the report is accurate I cannot say). The Heat indicated after the June 1991 NBA Draft that they were looking for a John Salley-type player, so it should come as no surprise that they were excited about acquiring the real John Salley in September 1992.
Before continuing, it is worth noting that there was already ample tension between Mr. Rodman and the Pistons. The Pistons lost Coach Chuck Daly after they were eliminated in the first round of the 1992 playoffs. At the time, Mr. Salley, still with the Pistons, credited Mr. Daly with having given him and Mr. Rodman the opportunity to play as rookies. In the offseason, Mr. Rodman refused to report to the Pistons training camp and threatened to retire due to his dissatisfaction with the circumstances of Daly’s departure, ultimately relenting on November 2, 1992, right before the season began.
According to Mr. Salley, Mr. Rodman had an interesting reaction when Mr. Salley played his first game in Detroit as a new member of the Miami Heat. Below, I re-print the quoted passage from Basketball Network with a few key points in bold:
And then when I came back to play (in Detroit). First time I’m coming back to play, and they do the standing ovation and the people are clapping and all that stuff. And I’m on Miami and I’m starting, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is great.’ And Dennis Rodman walked up to me… and he said, ‘I’m not gonna guard you.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘When you get the ball, just go to the basket, I’m not playing defense on you.’ I had 27. I would have 40, but they switched somebody on me in time when they realized…
John Salley (via The Basketball Network) (emphasis added by me)
When I read this, I was inspired to try to find the game. According to Mr. Salley, he was in the starting lineup for the Miami Heat in his first game back in Detroit. Dennis Rodman, who was still with Detroit, promised Mr. Salley that he would not guard him. Mr. Salley said he had 27 points in that game and would have scored more had the Pistons left Mr. Rodman on him.
I checked Mr. Salley’s game log for the 1992-93 season on Basketball Reference. We see that the Heat’s fourth game that season was on the road against the Pistons on November 12, 1992. According to the game log, Mr. Salley was in the starting line-up, which is notable since he started just 34 of the 51 games he played that season. Mr. Salley played 36 minutes. Meanwhile, Mr. Rodman also played in that game, albeit just 16 minutes off the bench. The Pistons won 95-88. Everything checks out so far but for one point: Mr. Salley had 11 points on 5-8 shooting from the floor and 1-2 from the free throw line. To be sure, 11 points is well short of 27.
I was now intrigued. Everything but one part of Mr. Salley’s story lined up with the game log. Is there a way to explain how he recalled scoring 27 points instead of 11? I dare say there is, but before continuing, I note that Mr. Rodman was traded to the San Antonio Spurs after the 1992-93 season, so I restricted myself to looking only at 92-93.
According to Mr. Salley’s game log, he played in one other road game against the Pistons in 1992-93. That game came on February 9, 1993. According to the game log, Mr. Salley not only started, but also scored 23 points in 44 minutes on 8-12 shooting from the floor and 7-7 shooting from the free throw line in a 106-105 win for the Heat. Mr. Salley’s game log shows that 23 points was his season high, he only hit 20 in one other game that season – a November 21, 1992 contest against the Charlotte Hornets (Mr. Salley’s career high in points was 28 in 1987). Is it possible that Mr. Salley was thinking of this game when he described Mr. Rodman’s effectively letting him score at will. I thought this might be the case but for one minor issue: Mr. Rodman did not play in the February 9 contest. In fact, Mr. Rodman missed 14 consecutive games between January 14 and February 16 of 1993 (we now know that Mr. Rodman was going through a trying time in his life during that period).
I have a theory about what happened with Mr. Salley’s recollection. Let us begin with my research.
There is some interesting circumstantial evidence supporting Mr. Salley’s story that Mr. Rodman refused to guard him in his first game back in Detroit. Mr. Rodman played 38.9 minutes per game in 1992-93 and 31.0 minutes in the Pistons’ first three games of the season. Yet against Miami in the fourth game he played just 16 minutes, recording 2 points and 4 rebounds. Why did Mr. Rodman only play 16 minutes?
On November 20, 1992, United Press International reported that the Pistons suspended Mr. Rodman indefinitely without pay. The article includes an interesting quote:
Rodman, who came to training camp late after declaring during the offseason that he was retiring, hasn’t played since suffering a knee injury in the Pistons’ fourth game of the season. Team officials have cleared Rodman to play but the seven-year veteran has not accompanied the club on its western road trip.
Here we learn that Mr. Rodman “suffer[ed] a knee injury in the Pistons’ fourth game of the season,” which was their home game against Mr. Salley’s Heat. The Pistons’ next game was at home against the Indiana Pacers on November 14, but they then went on a 4-game road trip from November 17 through 22 against Western Conference squads. On November 24, the Tampa Bay Times reported that the Pistons reinstated Mr. Rodman, but this article adds some intrigue to our story. First:
Rodman sat out all of training camp but played in Detroit’s first four games. He then said he had a knee injury. After Pistons doctors cleared him to play, he did not go with the team on its recent Western trip.
The wording here suggests that the Pistons and Mr. Rodman may have had a disagreement regarding the nature of his knee injury (note that this is not to say Mr. Rodman was averse to playing through injury generally, see a contemporaneous story about his playing with back spasms during the 1989 NBA Finals). There were just four days between Mr. Rodman’s playing 16 minutes against the Heat and his refusing to join the Pistons on their West Coast swing after being cleared to play, leaving open the possibility that the Pistons may have questioned Mr. Rodman’s knee injury from the get-go. We can confirm from a contemporaneous AP report (via The New York Times) that Pistons doctors cleared Mr. Rodman on November 15, 1992, three days after the Heat game and one day after the Pistons’ next game against the Indiana Pacers.
Now for some extra intrigue from the Tampa Bay Times article:
The Pistons reportedly were close to a deal that would have sent Rodman to the Miami Heat for Grant Long and Brian Shaw. That trade soured when Rodman refused to defer $800,000 of his salary.
According to rumors at the time, Mr. Rodman was close to becoming a member of the Heat himself. I suspect this rumor pertained to the off-season. It seems possible, albeit it would be difficult to confirm without comment from people who were in the Pistons or Heat front offices at the time, that the Heat initially tried to acquire Mr. Rodman from the Pistons, but the teams worked out a smaller deal centered on Mr. Salley after the more complicated deal involving Mr. Rodman fell through. We started with Mr. Rodman being upset that Mr. Salley was traded from the Pistons, but little did I know that Mr. Salley’s trade to the Heat may have followed from the failure of the Pistons and Heat to complete a deal centered on Mr. Rodman.
(Note: Mr. Rodman was the subject of trade rumors through the February 1993 trade deadline, but he remained with the Pistons until he was traded to the Spurs in October 1993.)
Having gone through the readily available evidence, I now submit my theory.
Firstly, I accept as true Mr. Salley’s account that Mr. Rodman promised to not guard him before Mr. Salley’s first game back in Detroit, which occurred on November 12, 1992, and that Mr. Rodman followed through on his promise. I will assume, based on the evidence, that Mr. Salley’s recollection of scoring “27 points” in that game is from his second game in Detroit in February, which Mr. Rodman missed.
That Mr. Rodman’s low minute total on February 12, 1992, was chalked up to injury seems to be plausibly consistent with this version of events. Assuming arguendo Mr. Rodman played very poor defense against Mr. Salley on several possessions contributing to Mr. Salley’s 5-8 shooting and 11 points, one could have chalked up Mr. Rodman’s play to the injury which resulted in his being pulled from the game (or asking out of the game). I will note that Mr. Salley’s quote – as relayed by Basketball Network – suggests that the Pistons saw what Mr. Rodman was doing and addressed it by switching defenders on Mr. Salley. I suppose it is possible that the injury was a cover story, but Occam’s razor cautions against complicating things without clear evidence in the record.
With that, I wrap up my brief investigation of Mr. Salley’s story about his first game against the Pistons in Detroit. It is entirely possible that there are more decisive answers to find in interviews with Mr. Salley, books about Mr. Rodman, or additional contemporaneous newspaper reports. I am satisfied with my findings, but if any readers, former Pistons or Heat officials or reporters, or former NBA Champions have something more to add, I would be happy to share the new information.
