Just a brief entry on the current National Basketball Association (NBA) finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Detroit Pistons.

Not only do the two cities parallel my personal road from undergraduate college at UCLA to graduate school at Michigan. It's also the case that during my last two years of graduate school, 1987-88 and 1988-89, the Lakers and Pistons met both years for the NBA championship. The Lakers won the first of these match-ups, and the Pistons the second. In fact, the NBA website has created retrospectives on both the 1987-88 and 1988-89 finals.

Then, as now, the Lakers were led by high-profile "celebrity" players (Magic and Kareem, then, and Shaq and Kobe, now). Likewise, then as now, the Pistons were known for their "blue collar," physical play under the basket (Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman, then, Ben Wallace, now). The Pistons of yesteryear also featured Isiah Thomas.

In the years before making the finals, the Pistons had to battle through the Larry Bird-led Boston Celtics. In similar fashion, once the Pistons established themselves as the top team in the NBA's Eastern Conference, they had to fend off the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls, which they did, but only for a while.

I went to a game in March of 1987 at the Pontiac Silverdome (probably best known as the former home of football's Detroit Lions, but also the former home of the Pistons) in which Jordan scored 61 points against Detroit. Frankly, from seats up high in a football stadium, the players on the basketball court looked like 10 tiny insects.

Overall, during my years at Michigan, the baseball Tigers probably had the biggest following of the Detroit sports teams among the people I hung out with. They were consistent contenders and even won a World Series during this time, a topic I plan to address in the fall as the 20-year anniversary of the Tigers' 1984 world championship rolls around. The Pistons and Red Wings (hockey) would get some attention when they were doing well in the play-offs, whereas the Lions were consistently bad and got little attention.