ESPN’s Michael Wilbon Apologized To Isiah Thomas For Saying Nine Players Kept Him Off The Dream Team

Isiah Thomas popped back up in episode five of The Last Dance. The previous week spent a ton of time discussing Thomas and the Bad Boys-era Detroit Pistons, with a special emphasis on that team’s desire to physically and mentally challenge Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls when they’d meet in the postseason. He wasn’t as prominent in this week’s first episode, but Thomas still made a cameo.

One of the main plot lines on Sunday involved the Dream Team, which infamously did not include Thomas even though he was one of the best players in the league. The belief has long been that Jordan specifically demanded that Thomas not make the squad, something Jordan denied. Michael Wilbon, then of the Washington Post, pointed out that a number of players had issues with Thomas, which did not help his case.

Wilbon went onto ESPN’s The Jump on Monday and said that “nine of those guys” on the Dream Team objected to Thomas making it, which is a pretty huge claim, seeing as how 12 players went to Barcelona on the squad. Soon after, Wilbon took to Twitter to apologize to Thomas for getting this “dead wrong.”

Thomas thanked Wilbon for offering up this correction.

While it’s been nearly three decades since the Dream Team took international basketball by storm, it was evident in the episode that Thomas still takes his snub from the squad personally. As a number of people have pointed out, the team’s chemistry was a major reason why it was able to run opponents off the floor, and Thomas very well might have caused issues due to the amount of players with whom he had beef. The real number is unknown, but at the very least, we now know that nine guys did not express an aversion to Thomas making it.