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Rasheed Wallace was known for being an in-your-face player during his time in the NBA, and it’s only natural that he pulled an incredibly on-brand move with the championship ring he won as a member of the Detroit Pistons.
There are plenty of NBA fans who bemoan the lack of physicality in the league these days—especially people who remember a bygone era when players were much less hesitant to throw around their weight (and, occasionally, their elbows and fists) to assert their dominance on the court.
That summed up the state of basketball when Rasheed Wallace was selected by the team that’s now known as the Washington Wizards with the fourth overall pick in the 1995 NBA Draft. He had a solid rookie year but was traded to the Trail Blazers when his inaugural campaign wrapped up, which is really when he started to make a name for himself.
Wallace was one of the reasons Portland earned the “Jail Blazers” nickname at the start of the new millennium, as he and his teammates were at the center of a number of incidents on and off of the court.
During his tenure, the big man set the single-season record for technical fouls with 41, was suspended seven games for threatening (now disgraced) ref Tim Donaghy after a game, and was charged with possession of marijuana after he and Damon Stoudamire were pulled over in 2002.
The big man was eventually traded to the Detroit Pistons in 2004, and he won his first (and only) championship that year before altering the piece of bling he received as a result.
Rasheed Wallace resized his championship ring to fit his middle finger
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Portland actually traded Wallace to the Hawks, and he played a single game in Atlanta before discovering the team had decided to ship him off to Detroit while he was chilling with Stephen Jackson at the bar at a Cheesecake Factory.
The Pistons were in the midst of a midseason skid when Wallace arrived in the middle of February to firm up a solid roster that also included Chauncey Billups, Richard Hamilton, and fellow fearsome big man Ben Wallace.
It took the team a few games to turn things around, but they finished the regular season clicking on all cylinders and headed into the playoffs as the second seed in the Eastern Conference after finishing 54-28 with the help of the 20-4 run that closed out the schedule.
The Pistons made easy work of the Bucks in the first round before beating the Nets in seven games to earn the right to face off against the top-seeded Pacers, who they dispatched in six in order to punch their ticket to the NBA Finals against the Lakers.
There weren’t many people who thought Detroit stood a chance against Los Angeles, who were a season removed from their threepeat and viewed as the heavy favorites thanks to the dynamic duo that was Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal.
However, the Pistons were able to flip the script in a big way and only dropped a single game to the Lakers en route to winning the title in five games.
Wallace gifted every single one of his teammates a replica of the WWE World Heavyweight Championship belt to commemorate the victory, and after the Pistons presented him with a championship ring, he headed to a jeweler to get it resized so he could wear it on his middle finger instead of the customary digit.
Never change, Sheed. Never change.