History is written by the victors, but also by the editors. Careers are shrunk to a sentence and people whittled into caricatures. We sum up entire wars in a paragraph, so it’s easy to nail down one of history’s best point guards with three words: Isiah Thomas, snake.
The problem is not so much with the descriptor itself; the problem is that this has become the only way we talk about Thomas. His list of transgressions—real, imagined, and exaggerated—include: The All-Star Game freeze-out of Michael Jordan; walking off the court after the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals without shaking the victorious Chicago Bulls’ hands; wrecking the Continental Basketball Association; telling everybody within earshot that Magic Johnson did not contract HIV the way he said he did; convincing the Pistons to trade Adrian Dantley so he could play with his childhood buddy Mark Aguirre; and making a mess of the Knicks.