The head coach of the WNBA’s worst team called his shot: “We’re going to win the championship next season.”
The offseason following the 2002 season, Detroit Shock head coach Bill Laimbeer went to the office of Tom Wilson, a longtime chief executive and officer of Palace Sports and Entertainment, and confidently declared that the team fresh off a nine-win season was going to be hosting a parade the following year. The additions the Shock made that offseason, coupled with the development of the young players in house, were enough for the former Detroit “Bad Boy” turned coach to plant his flag on the highest of hills.
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“I saw something in Swin Cash as a leader, and (Deanna) Nolan was coming into her own,” said Laimbeer, who took over head coaching duties for former lead man Greg Williams after an 0-10 start in 2002. “We got Cheryl Ford in the (WNBA) Draft and Ruth Riley in the expansion draft.
“It was clear early in the season that we were going to be something special. Now, whether we won or not, that was up to the players. We changed the way basketball was played, a more physical style and fast-paced, up and down the floor.”
The 2003 Detroit Shock are in the building!
Welcome back to the 313💙❤️ pic.twitter.com/0unLAK8FMj
— Detroit Pistons (@DetroitPistons) March 10, 2023
Twenty years later, nearly 30-something miles from where they once called home, several members of that 2003 Shock team were together again inside Little Caesars Arena, where the Pistons honored the squad that did, indeed, become WNBA champions in 2003.
The Shock are Detroit’s forgotten dynasty. Three WNBA titles in a span of five seasons and four conference championships. At the same time that their male counterparts were juggernauts in the NBA, and in the same arena, the Shock were becoming one of the league’s most decorated franchises of all-time.
It’s been over a decade since the last shot was taken from the “Bad Girls” inside The Palace of Auburn Hills, and still only three franchises in the history of the WNBA have more championships to their name.
The Shock, which were founded in 1998 and left Detroit for Tulsa, Okla., in 2009, were and remain Detroit sports’ greatest success story. It all started in 2003.
“Cheryl and I were new acquisition (in 2003),” Riley said. “She was a rookie, and I came in the expansion draft from Miami. We both came in new. We didn’t know any different. We didn’t know what they went through before. We just knew we were going to be part of something that was going to be great.”
Despite Laimbeer’s lofty claim going into the season, the players didn’t have the same expectations, though they understood they wouldn’t be the worst team in the WNBA. They realized they’d be good.
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It wasn’t until the Shock lost their first game of the 2003 season and then rattled off eight straight wins that things changed inside the locker room. “That’s when we realized that we could this,” Ford said.
The Shock went on to finish the regular season with a league-best 25-9 record, led by Cash, the franchise’s face, and Nolan, who similarly to the franchise she played for is arguably one of the sport’s greatest forgotten stars. The Flint native had a smooth game that would have translated to the men’s side. She could score with the best of them and, at times, seemed bored doing so. She could defend. Very few guards before Nolan were better, and very few guards have been better since.
Nolan, who played her entire nine-year WNBA career in Detroit, was a five-time All-Star and is the franchise’s all-time leader in games played, minutes played, points, field goals made, assists and steals. Nolan, at 5-foot-9, is one of 20 players in league history to record a triple-double.
“For me, even when we were playing, I always brought up ‘Tweety,'” Cash said of Nolan. “She was gangsta. Her skills … everything that she had, not a lot of players are playing like her, and she was a hometown girl who played here. I think one of the reasons her name doesn’t come up from a lot of talking heads in media, and I talk about myself because I was in media, is that she made a business decision where she stopped playing in the WNBA. She didn’t have those years here. She went overseas and was able to have a long career, make the money and get her worth.
“I feel like her story needs to be told, and it will at some point because she was special.”
In 2003, the Shock went 6-2 in the WNBA playoffs en route to taking down the Los Angeles Sparks for the championship, two games to one. The parallels between their first title and the history of the Pistons were eerily similar. The Pistons’ first NBA championship in 1989 came by beating the Los Angeles Lakers. Laimbeer was on that team. The 2004 Pistons won the championship the next year after the Shock by taking down the Lakers.
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The thread that tied together both great Pistons eras — defense, physicality and team-oriented hoops — also wove around the Shock. Surely, Laimbeer being in charge had something to do with that, as well as the knowledge of what makes Detroit sports fans tick.
The Shock are, arguably, the most successful franchise Detroit has ever seen. The stats speak for themselves. The championships crammed into a decade do, too. Twenty years after it all started, the Shock might be out of sight and out of mind for the rest of the basketball world, but Detroit still wishes they never left.
“We’re talking about that, a couple of people,” Laimbeer said when asked about WNBA expansion and bringing the Shock back to Detroit. “It was a great time here. We were in the infancy stage of the league. Now the league is very popular. The women’s time is right now. Whether it comes back to Detroit in the future … this arena is probably way too big for their product, but I think there is a market for it.
“Whether it happens or not, I don’t know.”
(Photo of 2008 Detroit Shock: Domenic Centofanti / Getty Images)
James L. Edwards III is a staff writer for The Athletic covering the Detroit Pistons. Previously, he was a reporter for the Lansing State Journal, where he covered Michigan State and high school sports. Follow James L. on Twitter @JLEdwardsIII
