Isiah Thomas is not done, folks. He’s still itching to speak out on his long-running beef with Michael Jordan. The Detroit Pistons legend just can’t help it.

Looking at it from his perspective, though, it may be tough to stay quiet when you’re getting flamed non-stop. ‘The Last Dance’ did a good job of reminding everyone about the roots of the decades-long beef, and we all know how awful it looked for the Pistons, especially Thomas.

Speaking with Jason Whitlock of the sports show Speak For Yourself this past Thursday, Thomas talked about the ‘real’ competition that he and the Pistons had during their prime, which excluded Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

Digging into the stats, the numbers did speak for themselves for that timeframe. Thomas went 19-11 in 30 regular season games against Jordan from the 1984-85 season (Jordan’s rookie year) all the way through 1989-90. The Pistons also eliminated the Bulls in the playoffs in ’88, ’89, and ’90, and made the NBA Finals each year, winning the last two.

Thomas seems to have left out the part where he had the far better and more experienced team each time, although that may also be his point as to why he mentioned that Jordan wasn’t really the “competition.”

Later in the interview, he also recalled overcoming their own hurdles on the way to the championship:

“When Boston was at their absolute best, we gave them competition. But they were better than us. And as they got older, as they got a little bit more banged up, we were able to catch them … Every time you hear us talk about who were are, we do not mention ourselves as championships without saying the Boston Celtics. Because those were our teachers … Those are our people that really taught us how to win. And they gave us the heartaches.

When we got to go to the Finals, then I ran into another one of my mentors, which was Magic Johnson, who had let me become a student under him, learning how to win championships in the NBA … You saw me at every NBA Finals game when the Celtics and the Lakers were playing … I was there as a student taking notes … learning how to put together an organization and, not just become a basketball player in the NBA, but become a champion.”

Thomas isn’t really saying anything untrue here. They did learn from the Celtics, and had to lose to them in gut-wrenching fashion – which included a defeat that was caused by Thomas’s blunder – before edging them out in ‘88. The Celtics were already banged up at that time and indeed at the tailend of their run.

The same goes with Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers. The Pistons lost to the Lakers in the ’88 Finals after seven gruelling games, but had their revenge in the following season thanks to Magic nursing a hamstring injury and key guard Byron Scott being out for the series.

Of course, as we all know, father time is undefeated, so Thomas and company basically went on to take the same path that the Celtics and Lakers did.

The Bulls swept the Pistons in the ’91 Eastern Conference Finals on their way to launching their own dynasty, when Detroit was already in their fifth-straight conference finals appearance and Thomas coming off a wrist surgery in the regular season.

Now, the question mark in all of that is Thomas’s exact point. Is he throwing shades as retaliation or is he just making excuses?