Isiah Thomas’ Son Admits Suffering In Pain Despite Father’s $18M Job

If we asked the family who has anyone employed in the NBA, what’s the biggest drawback of that job, they’re probably going to say the moving. Players, coaches, trainers, even ball boys not only travel between home and road games, but their lives could be uprooted by one decision of the front office. Even a franchise player like Isiah Thomas couldn’t escape that fate. While he spent his entire NBA career with the Pistons, his post-playing career was most unstable. He was a new father when he was also expanding the NBA to the Great White North and later coaching while building a business empire. His kids remember Coach Zeke or business mogul Isiah Thomas more than a 2x NBA champion. And not all of that was pleasant.

His son, Joshua Zeke Thomas was born in 1988, during his first title campaign (another son, Marc, from a previous relationship was born in 1986). By the time his daughter, Lauren was born in 1991, Thomas was transitioning to a new role in the league.

Zeke stopped by the Born to the Game podcast to talk what it’s like growing up as an NBA legend’s kid. When he was born, Isiah did everything to keep the family close.”I was always at my dad’s hip, and my dad always brought me with him. I thank him for that. My dad’s definitely a family person. We’re a tight family. We like to hang together, watch TV together, and talk about everything together. Nothing is off-limits. We moved from Detroit to Indiana to New York.”

While they would’ve lived in Detroit during the Bad Boys Pistons era, after Thomas retired in 1994, he immediately took over the NBA expansion team, the Toronto Raptors. In 2000, he succeeded his once rival Larry Bird as the head coach of the Indiana Pacers. That didn’t go as great as anyone imagined, and when Bird returned as president of basketball operations, he fired Thomas in 2003.

The family would relocate to New York within months when the Knicks hired Thomas as the president of basketball operations. He also later coached the team. But this situation had more lows than highs too.

During that, his kids had a hard time struggling. Zeke calls it “false starts” when they never knew where they’d head to next. As a social person who made a lot of friends, it was hard for a teenage Zeke to constantly leave his life in one city and move to the next. But going from Indiana to New York was a different kind of adjustment.

“Now I made close friends in New York, but it was more so after the fact, a lot of my close friends in New York were older than me,” Zeke told the hosts. This move would also set the foundation for his future career. “When I moved to New York, I started working for Hot 97. I started DJing. We’re going to get into that. So, I was definitely adulting earlier than expected in New York, where in Indiana, I could be a kid.”

Life for Senior Zeke was just as different between Detroit, Indiana and New York. The new cities weren’t as kind to the Pistons legend either. Unseen during that time was his family’s own ways to cope with the struggles.

Isiah Thomas’ son found a home

Isiah Thomas’ NBA career was legendary. He earned $16.7 million as a player across 13 seasons, the longest and highest-paying contract in Pistons history at the time underscoring the Bad Boys culture he spearheaded.

His post-NBA career though was a trainwreck. He had a falling out with the Raptors management, was fired from the Pacers, and compounded the Knicks’ salary problems. His coaching career was dogged with criticism of him wasting the potentials of Reggie Miller and Zach Randolph. James Dolan let him coach the Knicks with a demand for progress but more controversies ensued.

After signing Thomas to an unspecified extension, the Knicks quietly ‘reassigned’ him in  2008. Thomas accepted an offer to coach FIU in 2009, while the Knicks reportedly owed him $12 million. He forgoed his first year salary but earned $1.29 million at FIU.

While his father was dealing with heat from the teams, Zeke found comfort in his own little community. “I felt that I took on my ‘Zeke’ persona in New York to kind of hide some of  ‘Joshua’s’ pain from moving twice.”

The persona would be DJ Zeke. He launched his music career in New York and built a legacy independent of his father as an LGBTQ+ activist, a voice for survivors, and a sustainability advocate. As much as he loves his father for his support, he’s grateful for friends who helped him reach this point.

While he never opted for a basketball career, Zeke has his own NBA social circle. “I got great friends and those great friends who I have from Michigan and Indiana, some of them work in the NBA now. Shout out to them. It’s all circled around, you guys.”

Like Shaquille O’Neal’s kids have spoken about missing their father when the NBA took him away, Zeke doesn’t hold this against his dad. He spent the majority of the podcast showing gratitude to his dad. It shows that no matter how crazy it got on the court, Isiah Thomas kept it together for his family.