The Ringer Streaming Guide to NBA Nostalgia

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fter five weeks and a 10-hour runtime, The Last Dance is over without any promise that the NBA will return soon. The documentary didn’t fill the absence of Ja Morant’s posters or the playoffs, but it did make the case for using this time to catch up with the past. Here’s a streaming guide of NBA documentaries to rediscover the league in the meantime:

Supplemental to The Last Dance

Bad Boys (2014)

Streaming on ESPN+

If there was one true villain in The Last Dance—no black eye mask or maniacal laugh, but everything else—it was Isiah Thomas and the late ’80s, early ’90s Detroit Pistons. That team—known unaffectionately as the Bad Boys—was the bully of an already-combative era in basketball. (The clear runner-up for villain of The Last Dance is Jerry Krause. Though he did break up the Bulls, he didn’t try to physically break people, which gives the Pistons the edge.)

Bad Boys provides a closer look at the supercharged “us vs. them” mentality that brought that team together. “We may lose the game,” Rick Mahorn says in the documentary, “but we ain’t gonna lose the fight.” (Mahorn was once referred to as “the baddest Bad Boy of them all” by announcer George Blaha.) It’s bizarre to see former players speak so candidly about their collaborative intention to hurt other people. Bill Laimbeer’s blunt interview alone led to the general public despising him all over again in 2014, when Bad Boys was released.

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