Basketball Movie Review
Untold: Malice at the Palace
The most infamous NBA fight of the modern era gets retold from the players' side, reframing a night usually compressed into one thrown cup and endless suspension footage.
Essential league-history viewing because it restores players, security, crowd behaviour and consequences to an event too often remembered as a single viral clip.
Movie details
2021 · 1h 08m · Documentary · Drama
Director Floyd Russ
- Jermaine O'Neal
- Stephen Jackson
- Metta Sandiford-Artest
- Reggie Miller
- Floyd Russ directed the 2021 documentary about the November 19, 2004 Pacers-Pistons brawl at The Palace of Auburn Hills.
- Jermaine O'Neal, Stephen Jackson, Metta Sandiford-Artest and Reggie Miller are among the central basketball voices revisiting the incident.
01
The Take
The power of the documentary is not discovering what happened; every basketball fan knows the outline. It is hearing Jermaine O'Neal, Stephen Jackson and Metta Sandiford-Artest describe the sequence from inside it, while the film rebuilds how quickly an already physical Pacers-Pistons game became an arena-wide loss of control.
02
Does the Basketball Hold Up?
The context matters. Indiana was a genuine contender, Detroit was the defending champion and the rivalry already had real edge. The suspensions and public reaction did not just punish individual players; they altered a season and changed how the NBA talked about security, image and fan-player boundaries.
03
Best Basketball Moment
The eerie seconds before the cup is thrown, when the on-court confrontation appears to be cooling down and an ordinary hard NBA game is one spectator decision away from history.
04
Ball Cred
The film centres first-person accounts from Pacers players who were directly involved in the November 19, 2004 brawl at The Palace of Auburn Hills.