By R.L. Bynum
The father of the man who will try to lead the new era of Carolina men’s basketball into greatness was the architect of a plan to stop the greatest player in program history.
Michael Malone’s father, Brendan Malone, spent almost 30 seasons coaching in the NBA. As a Detroit Pistons assistant coach under Chuck Daly from 1988 to 1995, he helped devise one of basketball’s most famous defensive schemes.
The Jordan Rules was the name of the blueprint that helped Detroit limit Michael Jordan’s production and overcome the Chicago Bulls on their way to back-to-back NBA titles in 1989 and 1990.
The idea was born out of frustration. In April 1988, after Jordan scored 59 points on the Pistons, Daly decided enough was enough.
As Daly later told Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum, “we made up our minds right then and there that Michael Jordan was not going to beat us by himself again.”
Brendan Malone, brought onto Daly’s staff that year and known for his defensive mind, worked with Daly to build a system specifically engineered around one player, an approach almost unheard of in the league at the time.
Malone laid out the mechanics of the plan years later, in an interview featured on Episode 3 of the ESPN documentary “The Last Dance.”
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“On the wings, we are going to push him to the elbow, and we’re not going to let him drive to the baseline,” Malone told filmmakers at 30:33 of the episode, which is in the above video. “No. 2, when he’s on top, we’re going to influence him to his left. When he got the ball in the low post, we were going to trap him from the top.”
It sounded almost academic, funneling Jordan into predictable spots on the floor. But there was a fourth component that gave the Jordan Rules their real teeth, and Malone didn’t shy away from describing it.
Asked what happened when Jordan broke through to the baseline anyway, Malone said, “That’s when [Bill] Laimbeer and [Rick] Mahorn would go up and knock him to the ground.”
The players who executed the plan were even more blunt about its intent. Dennis Rodman, the Pistons’ relentless forward and later a Jordan teammate on the Bulls, described the fourth rule in stark terms:
“Chuck Daly said this is the Jordan Rule: Every time he go to the f-ing basket, put him on the ground. When he goes to the basket, he ain’t gonna dunk. We’re gonna hit you, and you’re gonna be on the ground. We were trying to physically hurt Michael.”
Teammate John Salley put the logic behind that physicality even more simply, telling filmmakers, “You have to stop him before he takes flight because you know he’s not human.”
Jordan never forgot it.
Reflecting on those years in “The Last Dance,” he made clear the Pistons’ approach left a lasting mark.
“Oh, I hated them. And the hate carries to this day. They made it personal. They physically beat the shit out of us,” Jordan told Newsweek. The strategy worked well enough, for long enough, that Jordan reportedly added roughly 15 pounds of muscle in the offseason specifically to withstand it, a detail ESPN highlighted in the documentary.
Detroit eliminated Chicago in the Eastern Conference finals in 1988 and 1990, but Chicago won the rematch in 1991 on the way to the first of Jordan’s six championships. The Jordan Rules were one of the most physically punishing defensive game plans in NBA history.
Brendan Malone died in October 2023 at the age of 81. He and his son remain the only father-son duo to have each won an NBA championship as coaches, Michael Malone having led the Denver Nuggets to the 2023 title.
When Denver raised its championship banner that October, just days after his father’s death, Michael Malone spoke about how present his dad still felt.
“I’m always thinking about him,” Malone said. “He’s with me every step of the way.”
That family history followed him to Chapel Hill this spring when UNC hired Malone in April as its 20th head coach, ending its long tradition of promoting from within the “Carolina family.”
Malone used part of his introductory press conference to acknowledge how deep his ties to the program already ran through his father. His father was a huge fan of Dean Smith’s Carolina teams growing up, a detail he leaned on to explain why, despite spending nearly a quarter-century in the NBA himself, taking a college job at UNC felt different.
It’s a fitting bookend. The father built his basketball legacy trying to physically dismantle the greatest player in UNC program history. The son now leads the program, carrying his father’s name and, by his account, his father’s love for it, to Chapel Hill.
Photo via ESPN screenshot
