G&G looks at mysterious similarities in outcomes between the Harrison Hawks football team and the NBA's Detroit Pistons over the course of five years.
Championships are never decided in advance. There is no way to know what will happen. The possibilities are always endless.
Or are they?
Over a period beginning in the fall of 1986 and ending in the spring of 1991, one could argue that the final outcome of the Detroit Pistons' NBA basketball season was tied to how the famed Harrison Hawk football team did the previous fall.
In the fall of 1986, the Hawks went to the Class B state football semifinal round, but lost to Marysville, 22-6. In what seemed like the most trivial of coincidences, the Pistons also lost in their semifinals the following year. The Boston Celtics beat them in the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, 4 games to 3.
But in 1987-88, the odd coincidences kept on coming.
Harrison earned a rematch against Marysville in the Class B state football semifinals, and avenged their loss the previous year with a 35-20 victory. And in May 1988, the Pistons followed suit, winning their Eastern Conference final rematch with the Celtics, 4 games to 2.
Both teams lost in the final round, however--Grand Rapids Catholic Central stopped the Hawks at the Silverdome, 19-7, for the 1987 Class B state football championship; and the Los Angeles Lakers edged the Pistons, 4 games to 3, in the 1988 NBA Finals.
One should note that the offensive leaders for both teams suffered key injuries at season's end. Harrison QB Mill Coleman suffered a hand injury in that 1987 Dome game. And Pistons point guard Isiah Thomas badly injured his ankle in the crucial sixth game of the '88 NBA Finals.
In 1988-89, the Hawks quickly established dominance in Class B, getting better and better as the fall progressed. More often than not, they outscored their opponents by more than 30 points. The Pistons were hot, too, with winning streaks of 12 and 13 games on the way to the best record in franchise history (63-19). Both teams breezed through the playoffs. Harrison allowed only 16 points over their four playoff games in winning the state championship; the Motor City Bad Boys only lost one game in the NBA playoffs on the way to their first NBA championship.
As in the previous year, both teams got some kind of revenge in a rematch. Westland John Glenn's Rockets had defeated HHS in 1987 to win the Western Lakes Activities Association football title, but 1988 saw the Hawks obliterate the Rockets, 45-7, for that very same title. The 1989 NBA Finals were a rematch as well; perhaps it should have been no surprise to see the Pistons sweep the Lakers in four games.
On to 1989-90. The 1989 Harrison Hawks would go on to win another state title, but this time, the fight was tougher. For starters, they lost a number of valuable players from the 1988 team, like wide receivers Chad Burgess and Bryan Wauldron. Although they went undefeated, the victories weren't so lopsided and the last two games were decided by one point apiece. The state semifinal game against East Grand Rapids took place on a frozen field, and the final score sounded like a baseball game: 3-2. The state final at the Dome was a come-from-behind victory that would come to be known as The Classic Game. HHS overcame a 21-7 deficit against DeWitt to win, 28-27.
And how did this relate to the 1989-90 Pistons? Before their season began, they lost a key starter, power forward Rick Mahorn, to the Minnesota Timberwolves in the 1989 expansion draft. They also did not tear through their opponents as they did the year before, and this was especially true in the last two rounds of the playoffs. They needed seven games to knock off the Chicago Bulls in the Eastern Conference finals, and went into Game 3 of the NBA Finals having lost the home-court advantage to the Portland Trail Blazers. And like the '89 Hawks, they also had to recover from a deficit in their final game--they were down 90-83 in Game 5, but scored the final nine points to finish off Portland. So like the 1989 Hawks, the Pistons' 1990 NBA title was much harder-earned than it had been the year before.
The parallels even appeared in the headlines. After the Hawks beat DeWitt, the Catalyst ran a special issue with the headline, "Repeat is SWEET!" Over 6 months later, the Detroit Free Press front page screamed "SWEET REPEAT" after the Pistons clinched the 1990 NBA title.
So both the Hawks and the Pistons went into 1990-91 with "threepeat" on their mind. Both failed in their bids. Not only that, but they were both eliminated in the semifinal playoff round. Oxford overpowered Harrison, 48-38, in the state football semifinal and the Chicago Bulls swept the Pistons in the NBA Eastern Conference finals.
Alas, like this article, all weird things must come to an end. Harrison won another state title in 1991, and given the previous five years, that pointed to another NBA title for the 1991-92 Pistons. But the aging, oft-injured Pistons lost to the New York Knicks in the first round of the NBA playoffs. That same year, as HHS head coach John Herrington and defensive coordinator Bob Sutter promised that wild horses would not drag them away from "the Prison," Pistons coach Chuck Daly and general manager Jack McCloskey left the Pistons. Daly went on to coach the New Jersey Nets, and Orlando Magic, and McCloskey was the Minnesota Timberwolves' general manager for three years.
Two unrelated sports teams--one in high school football, the other pro basketball--had amazingly similar outcomes over a five-year span. Was it the alignment of the stars? Subliminal mind control by aliens? Perhaps it cannot simply be dismissed as chance.
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