I'm amazed that it's 2006, 19 years after this incident, and it's the first you have heard of it. Where do you think the Pistons learned how to be dirty? The Boston Celtics. Before they kept losing, they were a fun-and-gun team like the Denver Nuggets. They learned that in order to win, they had to be more conventional; play like the Celtics.
The reason people called the Pistons bad guys is because they saw them as a bunch of no-talent hacks and so they searched for an excuse as to why they could win over the vaunted Celtics history and the Lakers flash and splash - they resorted to cheating. The Pistons ran with it because they realized they had to make themselves marketable. The media gave the Pistons a black hat, and they wore it with pride. That's the story of the Bad Boys.
As for Laimbeer, he would cry about fouls. He would push someone in the back, watch them crash to the floor out of bounds, hear the whistle, turn to the refs and give them an exaserpated "What?!?"
What's more amazing is that Robert Parish wasn't fined for that incident, he wasn't suspended. The original excuse by the ref is that "I didn't see it", but The NBA had the tape from Turner Sports and did nothing. It was a much different era, and the NBA essentially said with their silence that Bill Laimbeer deserved it. And so begins the Pistons feud with Rod Thorn (he had Stu Jackson's job back in the day).
As with all things, the truth lies somewhere between our individual perceptions.
I correct myself, I can believe you didn't know about "the punch." It's not in the career highlights of Robert Parish the way every Laimbeer fight is in his.