Ben Wallace Doesn't Think Pistons Would Have Won With Melo

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Without any live sports at the moment, we're doing a lot of living in the past. 

One hot topic around Detroit is whether the Goin' to Work Pistons would have won another championship or two with Carmelo Anthony instead of Darko Milicic.

Melo believes so. Dwyane Wade does, too. The duo started the conversation during a recent conversation on Instagram Live, while reflecting on the 2003 NBA Draft when the Pistons took Darko one pick before Melo. 
Darko didn't take too kindly to it all, telling Melo and D-Wade, "We are not kids, we are adults. I hope you are old enough to understand that life is full of ups and downs."

Of course, it's a conversation that's been going on for a while. Ben Wallace, one of the key pieces of the 2004 championship team, had some comments of his own earlier this year. And like many Pistons fans, Wallace would disagree with Melo and D-Wade. 

"If we would’ve drafted Carmelo, I honestly don’t think we would have ever won a championship," he told the 120 Watts podcast in February.

Why not?

"Melo would have wanted to play right away, so it would have had the potential to disrupt the team chemistry." Wallace said. "By drafting Darko, he was the guy that came in and said, 'I can't play on this team. I'm not ready. Who I am going to play in front of?' By him doing that and accepting his role, it allowed us to build and grow, get stronger and stronger and eventually win a championship. 

"If he came in saying, 'I want to play, I need to be playing,' now he would have called his agent, his agent would have been calling (GM) Joe (Dumars), Darko would have been talking to the media, the media would have been asking us crazy questions, then we would have had to say something crazy, they would have taken it back to Darko." 

Furthermore, said Wallace, drafting Melo would have prevented Tayshaun [Prince] from becoming "the type of a player that he became. We won the championship on the back of the best block I’ve ever seen in my life, and I blocked a lot of shots. That's the type of grit and grind that team had.”

Lastly, Melo wouldn't have been the instant star in Detroit that he was in Denver "because Larry Brown wasn't one to play rookies right away," said Wallace. "That would have caused some tension between him and Larry Brown."

Now having heard from Wallace, do you agree the Pistons were better off drafting Darko?