Author: mlinh

WHEN YOU THINK of Michael Jordan, every image seems to evoke moments of greatness. From his intensity on the court to his evolution into a global brand and pop culture icon, the storied visuals of “His Airness” are by now ingrained in our collective memory. That’s why when veteran Chicago sports photographer David Banks finally had the time to look through his archives and organize his photo negatives amid the coronavirus stay-at-home lockdown, he was surprised to find rare images of his that had sat undeveloped for years.

Banks, a diehard sports fan who was born and bred in the Windy City, was just beginning his career shooting for various photo agencies when Jordan arrived in Chicago at the start of his rookie 1984-1985 season. After being chosen third overall by the Chicago Bulls in the 1984 NBA Draft (behind Hakeem Olajuwon, who went to the Houston Rockets, and Sam Bowie, who joined the Portland Trail Blazers), Jordan made his Bulls debut against the Washington Bullets on October 26th, 1984. From that moment forward, Banks focused his lens on Jordan.

When it comes to the toughest of defenders in NBA history, Kenyon Martin is a name that will likely come up in most circles. And the man knows a thing or two about guarding some of the toughest covers in league history. The man made a name for himself on the defensive end of the court, having guarded the likes of Shaquille O’Neal, Dirk Nowitzki, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan and even Chicago Bulls Hall of Famer Michael Jordan.

Regarding the latter, K-Mart had a ton to share in a recent interview with the folks behind the “Buckets” podcast, with Martin breaking down in detail why His Airness was so hard to guard during his wide-ranging chat.

K-Mart encountered MJ on the court during his comeback days with the Washington Wizards. But even in that sunset period of the perennial G.O.A.T. candidate, Jordan was a cover that required Herculean strength and laser focus to stay with, never mind contain.

To hear the details of guarding MJ for yourself, check out the clip above.

Story originally appeared on Lonzo Wire

For the last month or so, the most eye-catching sports highlights on TV have been those from 30 years ago, showing the low blows Michael Jordan suffered at the hands—and elbows, hips, forearms and knees—of the Detroit Pistons. Three consecutive postseasons Jordan and the Bulls faced the Pistons, and three consecutive postseasons the Bad Boys, as the Pistons were known, recognized they couldn’t stop Air Jordan from taking flight, but they could decide when he landed. And how.

After falling short (literally and figuratively) to those Pistons again and again and again, Jordan decided to ground himself, and that’s when everything changed—for Jordan, the Bulls and the NBA.

The Pistons referred to their strategy as “The Jordan Rules,” apparently believing that “Goonery” was too indelicate. “The Jordan Rules by the Pistons were all about not letting him get to the basket,” says former Bulls center Will Perdue, who played in the last two of those futile Pistons series. “Nobody could stay in front of him, so his man, usually Joe Dumars, would try to make him go a certain direction, usually toward the baseline. A second defender would run at him with their hands up as if they were making a play on the ball, except they’d literally run through Michael’s body. John Salley or Dennis Rodman would get a running start and just take him out.”

While repeatedly getting knocked down never knocked Jordan out with an injury, the energy to pick himself up, along with his insatiable hunger to prove the tactic couldn’t stop him, had a cumulative effect. It left him drained, both at the end of games and the end of the series.

“I don’t think [Pistons coach] Chuck Daly wanted to hurt him,” Perdue says. “He was just looking to wear him out.”

After losing in seven games to the Pistons in the 1990 Eastern Conference Finals, Jordan decided it was time to stop running headlong into a wall of Detroit big men—and, instead, make himself into a big man. Rather than drive from the perimeter and then take flight, leaving himself vulnerable to Detroit’s punishing tactics, he worked on catching the ball where he was a scoring threat without taking a dribble: on the low block near the basket. It was an unorthodox tactic to have a 6’6″, 198-pound shooting guard play that way, but it was possible because of the Bulls’ equal-opportunity Triangle offense, which was predicated on interchangeable players reading the defense and collectively recognizing its weak spot.”The Triangle was the ultimate disguise because we never ran a play,” says point guard B.J. Armstrong, who arrived as a rookie for that seven-game loss to the Pistons and stuck around long enough to pick up three championship rings. “Once he figured out how to manipulate the defense, there was no denying him. He’d pick apart the game as he saw fit.”

First, though, Jordan had two items on his to-do list: Get stronger and perfect his post game.

“The Jordan Rules worked as long as Michael played a traditional way,” Armstrong says. “But he made an adjustment. … He figured out he had to catch the ball in position to score. So he learned to operate from the post and on the weak side and play the game with three dribbles or less. Now when he caught it, because his footwork was so good, he could score in a multitude of ways. He was skilled enough to adapt to any situation.

“He wasn’t just a jump shooter. He wasn’t just a post player. He could play every phase of the game. At both ends. He was as fundamentally sound and complete on defense as he was on offense. His thinking was, ‘Y’all want to get tough? Not only can I score on you, I can stop you.’ He could always adjust. [His opponent] couldn’t.”

Fitness trainer Tim Grover became part of the equation after reading an article about how the Pistons’ physicality was wearing Jordan down, physically and mentally. He contacted the Bulls and offered his services. Jordan gave him a 30-day trial, which turned into a career-long relationship.

“He trained exclusively with him by the time I got there,” says swingman Jud Buechler, who was part of the Bulls’ second three-peat. “It wasn’t that they were doing anything that far ahead of the curve; some guys are just built. Mike didn’t look like a bodybuilder, but the times I ended up on him in practice, it was no fun. He had this natural strength. Especially his core. From the waist down, he was a rock. You could not move him.”

To hone his back-to-the-basket game, Jordan spent the entire 1990-91 season dragging 6’10”, 230-pound rookie power forward Scott Williams onto the floor for post-practice one-on-one sessions with one rule: only post moves allowed.

“I probably played more one-on-one with Michael than anybody other than his brothers,” Williams says. “He always grabbed me after practice. We played free-throw line down. I beat him once. Well, I beat him and he called an offensive foul on me and then scored three straight to finish the game. He was relentless.”

The plan worked. On their fourth try, Jordan and the Bulls swept the Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals and won the first of their six titles in the spring of ’91.

That didn’t stop other players from trying to physically intimidate Jordan, even if their tactics were far more subtle than the Pistons’.

“Guys would file their fingernails a certain way so they’d come to points, like claws, and just rake him,”  Perdue says. “He’d look like he had jumped over a barbed wire fence and didn’t make it. There were marks all over his back, legs, arms. It was almost a badge of honor for him. ‘Look at what this guy tried to do to me,’ he said once.”

Not that Jordan wanted anyone to feel sorry for him; quite the opposite. He never wanted opponents to think they were good enough to affect him or his play. Winning the psychological battle was as important to Jordan as the physical one.

“He wanted to make things look effortless, like he wasn’t even working that hard,” Armstrong says. “That was part of the act. Because then people didn’t realize just how much energy he was expending. Even with the Bulls, he made it look like he just showed up. He’d walk in 25 minutes before practice. What most people didn’t know is he’d already worked out at his home gym, ate breakfast and played 18 holes of golf. MJ was a grinder at heart.”

Another part of the “act” required his teammates to play along. Perpetrators who knocked Jordan down with a hard foul weren’t to be confronted, lest that Bull should find Jordan in his face.

“He’d get mad at somebody going at somebody on his behalf, because he felt it was giving that person [who fouled him] too much credit,” Perdue says. “It was part of the mental game for him. He never wanted anyone to think any of it got to him.”

That extended to how he dealt with the referees. He certainly did his share of griping about missed calls, but he was calculated in how he did it.

 

Michael Jordan made it clear to his teammates that he didn’t want their help getting up off the floor no matter how many times the Pistons, or any other opponent, knocked him to the ground.John Swart/Associated Press/Associated Press

“He rarely barked at the referees,” says Steve Kerr, a guard on the Bulls’ second three-peat squads. “He would hold his jersey up near his mouth and make his point. He didn’t want anyone seeing that he was frustrated or angry.”

Jordan didn’t even want his teammates knowing if he was hurt in an effort to prevent that information from leaking and providing an opening for an opponent.

“Back then, if you knew a guy had a bad hand, you were going to find a way to whack it,” Perdue says. “He once got a really bad infection in the webbing between his toes. He had to be hospitalized. He kept the IV insertion needle taped to his arm. He’d have the IV in until we practiced, unhook it and practice, and then go back to the hospital. Other than that, though, you never saw him getting treatment. I have very few images of him sitting on the training table, other than getting his ankles taped. I’m sure he did [get treated], but it wasn’t around us. It was almost like all the info on MJ was off-limits. He didn’t want anybody knowing stuff like that.”

Jordan recognized, though, that he needed his teammates to be equally tough. If he envisioned needing you to play an important role at some point, however small, he was going to find out what you were made of long before the moment of truth. Small forward Scott Burrell’s successful navigation of Jordan’s gauntlet of fire during the 1997-98 season is covered in ESPN’s 10-part documentary, The Last Dance, on that season’s march to a sixth and final championship for Jordan, but there are others who couldn’t. Dennis Hopson was Burrell, six years earlier—a scoring wing off the bench who was consistently matched up with Jordan in practice

“It ruined Dennis Hopson,” Williams says. “Every drill, five-on-five, three-on-three, Hopson had to take the abuse of Jordan. It was a mental beatdown. There was one day Hop went back at him and we ended up winning that scrimmage. We picked up Hopson and carried him to the locker room as if we’d just won a championship. But next day, it was more of the same.” Hopson, the third pick of the 1987 draft, was traded two games into the next season to the Sacramento Kings. It was his fifth and last.

Jordan didn’t have to tell management when a guy didn’t meet his standard, either. They did it themselves. “He made it so guys were rushing to their agents saying, ‘You have to move me,’” Buechler says.

The standard reached a new level when Jordan returned from a 21-month hiatus to try his hand at baseball and mourn the murder of his father, James. Everyone in the league, including inside the Bulls locker room, reacted akin to gazelles catching sight of a lion. But for those who could cut it, the chance to play with a living legend superseded any trepidation.

Buechler remembers walking into the Bulls locker room before Jordan’s first practice back and sensing something different.

“What’s going on?” Buechler, who had yet to play with Jordan, asked Ron Harper, who had his head down tying his shoe. Harper looked up and said, “The Man’s here.”

 

Jordan often would probe an opponent’s defense early in a game in an attempt to plot a countermove later in the same game.Nathaniel S. Butler/Getty Images

In that day’s scrimmage, Buechler was on Jordan’s squad, received a pass from him on a fast break and nailed a three-pointer. “He stuck out that big mitt to give me five and I thought, ‘My career is done, I am going to run out of the building and go home because this is as good as it gets,’” Buechler recalls. “His aura was larger than life.”

That carried over to opponents.

The New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers replaced the Pistons as teams in the East that tried to get physical with Jordan, but at that point, Jordan knew what he needed, both from himself and those around him, to claim another title. After being bounced in the second round of the ’95 playoffs by the Orlando Magic, he went to work once more sharpening the Bulls’ collective championship mettle. The ’95-96 training camp “was a war every day,” says Kerr and included an incident when an exchange of trash talk resulted in Jordan punching Kerr in the eye. Although Jordan says he later apologized, Kerr doesn’t think it happened by accident.

“It was a test, for sure,” Kerr says. “He wanted to know he could count on you. The Knicks, in particular, would not double him for three quarters and then in the fourth they would, to challenge the role players to make a shot and make a big shot.”

What Pat Riley and the Knicks understood is that if you showed Jordan your strategy early, he’d have a counter devised before the night was over. “He’d say, ‘B.J., let’s find out what they’re going to do and then I’ll make our adjustments after halftime,’” Armstrong recalls. “He’d attack double-teams twice in one possession just to see what the defense did. He’d goad them into thinking they had him covered. But he was saving it all for the last four minutes. Then he was going to force whoever we were playing to be perfect those last four minutes. No misreads.”

Of course, there were those who still tried to physically intimidate Jordan, mainly because there weren’t too many other ways to beat him. Former center Olden Polynice—traded to Seattle by the Bulls for the rights to Scottie Pippen in a 1987 draft night deal—earned an ejection after hammering Jordan on a drive to the basket.

“We couldn’t stop him the traditional way, so we had to do whatever we had to do,” Polynice says. That incident allowed Polynice to discover just how revered Jordan had become.

“I would call my mom after every game and I did that night, too,” he says. “First thing she says is, ‘Why did you hit Michael?’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m your son.’ She said, ‘Yeah. But that’s Michael.’ That’s how big he was.”

Or that’s how big he became. First, literally, by becoming a big man in a 6’6″ shooting guard’s body. And then by becoming the psychological monster in every player’s mind.

“When you look into a man’s eyes and see no fear, that’s a different look,” Armstrong says. “That’s what you saw in his. It was a look that said, ‘I’m the baddest one here. I know it and you know it.

“‘But I’m still going to prove it to you.’”

Championship celebrations were the norm for Michael Jordan throughout his NBA career.

By acclamation, Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time. Although, a summary of his basketball career and influence on the game inevitably fails to do it justice, as a phenomenal athlete with a unique combination of fundamental soundness, grace, speed, power, artistry, improvisational ability and an unquenchable competitive desire, Jordan single-handedly redefined the NBA superstar.

Even contemporaneous superstars recognized the unparalleled position of Jordan. Magic Johnson said, “There’s Michael Jordan and then there is the rest of us.” Larry Bird, following a playoff game where Jordan dropped 63 points on the Boston Celtics in just his second season, appraisal of the young player was: “God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

A brief listing of his top accomplishments would include the following: Rookie of the Year; Five-time NBA MVP; Six-time NBA champion; Six-time NBA Finals MVP; Ten-time All-NBA First Team; Nine time NBA All-Defensive First Team; Defensive Player of the Year; 14-time NBA All-Star; Three-time NBA All-Star MVP; 50th Anniversary All-Time Team; Ten scoring titles — an NBA record and seven consecutive matching Wilt Chamberlain; Retired with the NBA’s highest scoring average of 30.1ppg; Hall of Fame inductee.

Considered one of the greatest players ever, Michael Jordan made 11 All-NBA teams, won 5 MVPs, 6 Finals MVPs and 6 NBA titles and crafted a legendary legacy.

However, his impact is far greater than awards and championships. He burst into the league as a rookie sensation scoring in droves with an unmatchable first step and acrobatic drives and dunks and concluded his career as a cultural icon. Along the way, he became a true champion who spearheaded the globalization of the NBA with his dynamic on-court abilities and personal sense of style that was marketed to the masses.

He was an accessible star who managed to maintain an air of mystique. He was visible as “Air Jordan,” as part of a sneaker advertising campaign and endorsing other products as well as the star of the movie, “Space Jam”. However, he would vanish into retirement twice only to return until hanging up the sneakers for the last time after the 2002-03 season.

Although Brooklyn born, Jordan was bred in the more tranquil North Carolina. The son of Delores and James Jordan, he shared a special bond with his father, which included baseball being both of their first love. However, following his older brother, Larry, whom he idolized and was a spectacular athlete in his own right, Jordan began to play basketball.

He attended Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina, but as a 5-foot-11 skinny sophomore, he was cut from the varsity basketball team. The summer before his junior year, he grew to 6-foot-3 and began his path to superstardom.

A Tar Heel at heart, the high school All-American attended the University of North Carolina. As a freshman, he played somewhat in the shadows of upperclassmen James Worthy and Sam Perkins. However, he shone in the spotlight of the NCAA championship game against Georgetown and another great freshman, Patrick Ewing, whom Jordan would foil future NBA championships for as well. Jordan scored 16 points, grabbed nine rebounds and made the winning basket on a 16-foot jumper with 18 seconds in the game for the 63-62 victory.

As a sophomore, he was named College Player of the Year by The Sporting News. As a junior, he received that award again as well as the Naismith and Wooden Awards. After his junior year he was chosen with the third overall pick in the 1984 NBA Draft by the Chicago Bulls.

Back in 1984, the Blazers made a move in the Draft that would change two franchises’ paths.

The Houston Rockets selected 7-foot center Hakeem Olajuwon form the University of Houston with the No.1 pick, which most expected. The Portland Trail Blazers, however, with the No. 2 pick chose 7-foot-1 center Sam Bowie from Kentucky, which was not as anticipated. Bowie had suffered several injuries while in college but the Blazers bypassed Jordan because just the year before the team selected another exciting shooting guard in Clyde Drexler. Although Drexler went onto to be a star, Bowie was an injury prone player with a journeyman pro career.

Jordan, coming off a gold medal performance at the 1984 Olympics, prospered in the pro game with a fabulous first season, earning the NBA Rookie of the Year Award. He averaged 28.2 ppg, (third behind Bernard King and Bird) 6.5 rpg and 5.9 apg. He also was selected to the All-NBA Second Team. Perhaps more important, the Bulls improved to win 11 more games than in the season prior to his arrival and made it to the playoffs. Jordan averaged 29.3 ppg in the first round series, but the Bulls lost in four games to the Milwaukee Bucks.

In his first season, he did not have outstanding shooting range and was thought to roam too often on defense, resulting from playing trapping defenses in college according to his first NBA coach, Kevin Loughery. Yet, his medium game — eight- to 15-feet from the basket was impressive as evidenced by his .515 field-goal shooting percentage and his steals tended to compensate for his less than stellar straight-up defense.

Improvement in both areas would come and he would ultimately be regarded as threat from anywhere on the floor and one of the best ever one-on-one defenders.

Even in the exhibition season before his rookie campaign, players and coaches were sure that the Rockets and Blazers would regret their picks. King, the eventual leading scorer for that upcoming season, seemed sure as well when he spoke to Hoop magazine after a 1984 preseason game.

“All I can say,” King said, “is that the people in Chicago are in for a real treat.”

He was right. Jordan’s greatness and likeability was apparent in just his first season. Home attendance at the venerable Chicago Stadium and on the road rose dramatically. Fans of opposing teams were seemingly content to see their team lose if in return Jordan put on show.

Jordan’s personal style was equally authentic and unique as his basketball skills. Nike signed him to a major shoe deal because of his anticipated appeal, but he surpassed even the loftiest of expectations. One version of the sneakers he wore in his first preseason was an unseen before blend of his team’s red and black colors that the NBA initially considered in violation of the “uniformity of uniform rule.” Subject to fines if he continued to wear them, he occasionally did and the demand for that version and others in the Air Jordan line was unprecedented.

He also had a clause in his contract that allowed him, unlike most other NBA players, to play basketball anytime in the off-season — known as the “love-of-the-game clause.”

He dangled his tongue out of his mouth — picked up from observing his dad working on mechanical devices — as he levitated toward the basket and it became one of his first trademarks in personal style. He continued to wear the shorts of his beloved North Carolina basketball uniform under his Bulls uniform. This may have led him to wear longer game shorts although he has said that the extra length allowed him to bend at the waist and tug at the hem for a good resting position. Either way, the trend toward the baggy shorts was started and the entire league and sport would follow.

The rookie’s mesmerizing effect was even suggested to have extended to referees as it was said that he was getting veteran preferential treatment allowing him to take that additional step on route to the basket rather than being whistle for a travelling violation. Many assessed that he eluded defenders so easily that he had to be travelling. However, video break down established that his first step was just so quick and that he was not in violation of the rulebook.

Despite all the attention, Jordan retained a sense of humility. He did not ridicule the Blazers for not taking him. Early on in his first season, he told Sports Illustrated, “He [Bowie] fits in better than I would. They have an overabundance of big guards and small forwards.” His self-effacement was more apparent when in that same article he said, “I’d like to play in at least one All-Star game.”

Check out some rarely seen highlights from Michael Jordan’s career.

That goal was quickly accomplished as later that season he was voted a starter to the 1985 All-Star East squad. There, he probably faced one of his first professional obstacles. The media ran with the idea that Eastern All-Star teammate Detroit Pistons’ Isiah Thomas, had led a “freeze-out” of the golden rookie limiting his opportunities to score by not passing him the ball.

Jordan scored seven points in 22 minutes and was left to face questions concerning the alleged conspiracy. The affair grew a life of its own over the years, but Thomas refuted such accusations. The whole ordeal would come full circle when Thomas, as the coach of the 2003 East All-Star squad, persuaded Toronto Raptors’ Vince Carter to relinquish his starting role to Jordan in his last midseason classic.

Three games into his second season, he broke a bone in his left foot. He was voted to the All-Star team but could not play as he was sidelined for 64 games. However, he came back late in the year to score a NBA playoff-record 63 points in a first-round game against the Celtics. The Bulls lost that game 132-131 in double-overtime and the series in a sweep, but Jordan averaged 43.7 ppg in the series. If there were any doubters to that point about Jordan’s ability, surely there were no more.

Starting with the 1986-87 season he began a career-long onslaught on the NBA record book. That year saw him average 37.1 points in the first of seven consecutive seasons in which he led the league in scoring and topped 30 points per contest. Jordan scored 40 or more points in nine consecutive games and 23 straight in one game to set an NBA record. At the All-Star Weekend, he won the first of two consecutive Slam Dunk competitions. However, again, the Celtics swept the Bulls in the first round of the playoffs

That offseason, the Bulls began assembling a championship caliber team by drafting power forward Horace Grant and acquiring the versatile small forward Scottie Pippen from tiny Central Arkansas in a draft day trade with the Seattle SuperSonics for former University of Virgina center Olden Polyinice. In 1987-88, Jordan won every major award including MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and All-Star MVP. With the help of his teammates, Jordan led the Bulls to a first-round playoff win over the Cleveland Cavaliers before falling to the Pistons in five games in the conference semifinals.

The Pistons, known as the “Bad Boys” for their aggressive style of play, would defeat Jordan and the Bulls in the Eastern Conference finals in the next two seasons as well. Utilizing a defensive scheme developed by head coach Chuck Daly and his staff known as the “Jordan Rules”, the Pistons dared Jordan to single-handily win games with constant double and triple teaming. The Bulls, however, were nudging to a championship as each successive season the team would get closer.

In the 1988-89 season, perhaps Jordan’s best statistical campaign, he led the league with 32.5 ppg, was 10th in assists with a career high 8.0 apg and had a career high 8.0 rpg. He also ranked third in steals with 2.89 per game. Jordan propelled the Bulls past the Cavs in the first round of the playoffs in the decisive Game 5, scoring the memorable buzzer-beater floating jumper over Craig Ehlo for a 101-100 victory.

Prior to the beginning of the 1989-90 season, Sports Illustrated published an article on Jordan’s emerging golf game and his thoughts about joining the PGA Tour after his NBA career was over. Chicago management, however, was making other moves.

That offseason, the Bulls let go head coach Doug Collins and hired Phil Jackson. Under Jackson’s leadership, the Bulls instituted the triangle offense — a fluid passing and cutting system that created opportunities for all five players on the floor to score. But when the play broke down and the shot clock waned, Jordan had free reign to create his own shot.

The Bulls went 55-27 that season, the franchise’s best record since 1971-72. Jordan set his career game-high in points with 69 against the Cavs in a 117-113 overtime win. He also emerged as a 3-point threat, posting 37.6% — 100 percentage points above his previous best. However, the Pistons defeated the Bulls in a tough seven-game series in the 1990 Eastern Conference finals.

That third consecutive playoff defeat to the Pistons prompted many to think out loud that a scoring champion like Jordan could not lead his team to a title.

Were they ever wrong. The next year, Jordan led the Bulls as the team waltzed through the postseason, losing only twice en route to the franchise’s first NBA title. The redemptive blow was the sweep of the Pistons in the conference finals. And after losing the first game at home to the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals, the Bulls stormed back to win four straight to end the last remnants of the “Showtime” Lakers as Magic Johnson would retire before the beginning of the next season. Jordan averaged 31.4 ppg, 6.4 rpg and 8.4 apg, earning the first of six NBA Finals MVP awards.

Jordan, who by now shaved his head completely bald, triggering another trend and making him recognizable by just the dark rounded silhouette of his head, was now known as a champion. He was also known to be ultra-demanding of his teammates, ruffling more than a few feathers with his critiques. But winning was the soothing elixir. The Bulls would go on to successfully defend their title for two consecutive seasons, defeating both Drexler and the Blazers and the Charles Barkley-led Phoenix Suns in six games.

By the end of that three-year run, Jordan had eclipsed stardom and approached folk hero status. Early into his career, he drew Peter Pan-like admiration for his gravity defying leaps and belief that he would remain youthful forever. However, during the three-peat, players and teams seemed to concede that the title was Jordan.

Clyde Drexler and Michael Jordan squared off in the 1992 Finals.

In the 1992 Finals, Jordan opened up Game 1 with a record setting 35-point first-half performance to lead the Bulls to a 122-89 rout. Jordan seemed unstoppable as he drained several 3-pointers over Blazer defenders and after one made three he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, I don’t even know what’s going on here. The Blazers bounced back and seemed poised to force a Game 7 as they took a 79-64 lead into the fourth quarter of Game 6. However, the Bulls roared back for a 97-93 series-clinching win.

That summer, Jordan was the key figure in forming the Dream Team that competed in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. The 12-member roster, full of the era’s best players, were respected as basketball royalty by its opponents, whom they outclassed on the way to the gold medal and idolized like pop icons by the world’s fans.

In 1993, Jordan led the Bulls past the Patrick Ewing-led Knicks for the fourth time in five postseasons — this time in the Eastern Conference finals in six games without the home court advantage. Jordan scored 54 points in a 105-95 Game 4 win. And in the series’ turning point that was Game 5, Jordan recorded a triple-double (29 points, 10 rebounds and 14 assists). But the crucial play was the Bulls’ successive blocks of putback attempts by the Knicks’ Charles Smith in the final seconds that allowed the Bulls to escape the Garden with a 97-94 win. The Bulls sealed the series with a 96-88 victory in Game 6.

In the Finals, Jordan set a Finals record as he posted a 41.0 ppg average in the six-game series victory over the Suns. In the decisive Game 6, the Bulls again stormed back to overcome a fourth-quarter deficit. This time, Jordan scored nine straight points down the stretch. leading to John Paxson’s game-winning 3-pointer with 3.9 seconds on the clock for a 98-97 victory.

But trouble was brewing. Jordan was under scrutiny for what was thought to be poor decisions with respect to his gambling endeavors. But that paled in comparison to the loss of his father who was murdered during an armed robbery. His father was Jordan’s main confidant whom could be seen with his son on a regular basis as he climbed the ladder of success.

Emotionally drained and seeking new challenges, just one day before the start of training camp, Jordan stunned the basketball world by announcing his retirement.

Relive the storylines and moments from MJ’s return in 1995.

After much speculation about his plans, Jordan returned to the spotlight in a baseball uniform. Attempting to fulfill a dream inspired by his father, the younger Jordan set his sights on Major League Baseball. He spent the 1994 baseball season playing for the Birmingham Barons, an affiliate of the Chicago White Sox in the Class AA Southern League.

He was a competent if unspectacular performer. But Jordan’s hope of reaching the big leagues seemed dim, and with Major League Baseball embroiled in a labor dispute as the 1995 season neared, he focused his competitive fire back on the NBA. Late in the 1994-95 NBA season, he came out of retirement with the succinct statement: “I’m Back.”

He was back, albeit with the unorthodox No. 45 as he wanted to leave No. 23 behind, and attempted to carry the Bulls to another title. Jordan averaged 26.9 points in 17 regular-season games, which the Bulls played to a record of 13-4.

The most memorable game of the initial comeback occurred six games in when he scored 55 points against the Knicks in the Garden. That game, dubbed “Double Nickel,” was extraordinary in that a new Jordan emerged. Robbed of his youthful bounce at age 32, he turned primarily to fadeaway jump shots and spinning layups. And in the waning moments of a tie game, he drew attention as he dribbled around the perimeter and passed to a wide-open Bill Wennington under the basket for the winning points in a 113-111 victory.

His coach, Jackson, in the aftermath said, “It’s rare that players can live quite up to New York. I’ve seen a lot of them fall flat on their faces because of the pressure to perform there. But he had the whole evening in the palm of his hand. Sometimes the game just seems to gravitate into his grasp.”

In the playoffs, he poured in 31.5 ppg. But despite Jordan’s presence in the lineup, the Bulls didn’t have quite enough to get past the Orlando Magic in the conference semifinals. Chicago lost to the Shaquille O’Neal-led Magic in six games.

Jordan’s championship quest was fulfilled the following season with almost a whole new band of players than in his first title runs. He began the season with his old No. 23 uniform but only his sidekick Pippen remaining from the first three championship teams. The Bulls added Dennis Rodman, an enigmatic player but a rebounding and defensive phenom.

Relive the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls’ historic 72-10 season.

The team enjoyed one of the most remarkable years ever posted by any club. Jordan led the NBA with 30.4 ppg as the Bulls charged to a record 72 victories during the regular season, then stormed through the playoffs with a 15-3 record ending in a six-game Finals win over the Sonics.

Poignantly, Jordan recaptured the title on Father’s Day and cradled the ball after the decisive game in a heap on the floor of the United Center, which replaced Chicago Stadium during his retirement, unabashedly crying. The emotional impact of the moment was overwhelming.

Along the way, Jordan captured the MVP awards for the regular season, All-Star Game and Finals, joining Willis Reed (1970) as the only men to win all three honors in the same season.

Although he had relinquished the MVP award to Karl Malone in 1996-97, Jordan was awarded MVP in 1997-98 and again led the Bulls to the NBA championship with a satisfying six-game victory over Malone’s Utah Jazz. Despite a horrible case of stomach flu in a critical Game 5, he would not let his team lose. He scored 38 points and the Bulls won the game and then the title at home in Game 6. He was also named the NBA Finals MVP for the fifth time.

The final shot Michael Jordan took in a Bulls uniform was perhaps his most memorable moment.

At the turn of the 21st century, ESPN conducted an expansive survey of media members, athletes and others associated with the sports world to rank the 20th century’s greatest athletes. Jordan topped the list above Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali — substantiating his link to those earlier cultural icons.

In 2009, Jordan was immortalized in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as the headliner of a class that also included NBA legends John Stockton, David Robinson and Jerry Sloan. One year later, Jordan added another accomplishment to his storied career.

Since 2006, Jordan held a minority ownership stake in the then-Charlotte Bobcats. In 2010, he was approved by the NBA’s Board of Governors as the majority owner of the Bobcats, buying the team from then-owner Bob Johnson. Under Jordan, the Bobcats were eventually renamed the Hornets (starting in the 2014-15 season) to reunite the city with the nickname of its first NBA franchise.

Jordan has been deeply involved in the Charlotte community from a philanthropic perspective, donating millions of his dollars to various causes and charities in the community. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Jordan opened a second Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic to help communities in the North End of Charlotte get the medical help they needed.

DENVER, CO – JANUARY 30: Philadelphia 76ers forward Julius Erving #6 dribbles the ball during an NBA basketball game against the Denver Nuggets at McNichols Arena on January 30, 1977 in Denver, Colorado. (Photo by Mark Junge/Getty Images)

February 7, 1987. Seattle. Julius Erving is going through his last season and, at the All Star, a tribute is made. Two of the best bases in history are standing on a stage, microphone in between, and Magic Johnson asks Isiah Thomas a question, with his usual smile.

– What is the most incredible play or moment you have from Doctor J?

Isiah smiles, pauses and prepares to answer. “We were on a youth campus in Lansing (Michigan) when Julius took a ball and went to the other side of the court. He asked everyone, standing up, to applaud and to the beat of the palms he started to run. I swear I’m not lying (he smiles): he jumped from the free line, that’s what it looked like to me (laughs), he held himself in the air and there, stopped, it seemed that he told us ‘come on, clap, I’m going in the air’ and continued until he turned it over…”

In the face of exaggeration, Thomas can’t help the laughter that rumbles in the place and infect Magic while the audience applauds. The story summarizes how captivating Erving’s talent was but, at the same time, what it generated, with his style and charisma. Of those people who, over time, have managed to make their stories grow big until they seem (unlikely) children’s stories. We’re talking about a global superstar, a great player who won in two different leagues (two titles in the ABA and another in the NBA), but above all about a popular myth, a pure entertainer, a legend who moved from the streets to the professional leagues, capable of crowding the most famous playground in the world (Rucker Park) and, at the same time, fill stadiums and bring to another level of popularity to elite competitions, first the ABA and then the NBA. A player who changed the game like few others, the one responsible for taking a play (the dunk) to another dimension, a true basketball showman and owner of one of the best nicknames in history. Someone who left such a mark that ended up being responsible for many other boys, then superstars who followed his legacy, decided on basketball. “If Doctor J hadn’t existed, probably neither did Michael Jordan. And therefore, I would not have been a basketball player,” LeBron James summed up. That is the importance of this 2m01 forward whose legend is incredible, although his true story is even better.

Julius Winfield Erving II was born on February 22, 1950, in New York. In a lower-middle class family with three children. Julius Sr. and Callie Mae divorced when Julius was three years old and the difficult scenario was completed at seven, when dad died in a traffic accident. Hard times when Julius clung to his younger brother (Marvin), his friends and sports, occasionally to basketball. The Ervings lived on Long Island, across from Campbell Park, an open place that had basketball courts that Julius could see from his bedroom window. “It was the courtyard of our homes. We went every day, even if it rained or snowed,” she recalled four years ago, when she returned for her documentary and walked back to the beloved places she used to frequent.

Until one winter day in 1962, he and his best friend, Archie Rogers, couldn’t stand the cold, grabbed the bikes and went out in search of some indoor gym to play. “I remember, all of a sudden, I see two black boys coming in and asking permission to play. They were 12 years old. That’s how they started with us…” said Don Ryan, Doctor J’s first coach in the short film. “The point is that they were all white, except us. But, of course, we were kids, we all loved basketball and we didn’t feel racism at any time. We joined the team and started playing,” recalled Julius, who divided his time between sports, school and helping his mother around the house, especially with Marvin. “He was very smart, he loved to study and devoured books, but he was always sick. He had asthma, permanent rashes and had to be taken care of. I had to take on a role more of a father than an older brother,” he explained.

Si hay una jugada que lo define, ésa es la volcada (Getty Images)Bettmann | Bettmann Archive

At 13, when the family moved to Roosevelt, another neighborhood on Long Island, looking for a safer life, Julius entered Roosevelt High School, where he began to stand out and the nickname was born, which, over time, became better known than his full name. Leon Saunders, a colleague, was responsible. “I remember that in one training session we argued about a play and since he always complained, he said that I grabbed him, made foules, this and the other, I said ‘you always know them all, what are you, the teacher? ‘ , and he answered me. ‘And what about you, who are you the doctor, then? ‘” , Julius recounted. With a smile, Saunders completed the anecdote of that inside joke that sealed both their nicknames on fire: “From that day on every time we saw each other, I called him Professor and he called Doctor”.

For his senior year, Julius was a 1m90 base-guard who stood out at the high school level, but since it was a small school in the area, only one scout went to watch the matches. “I went to see it and rated it a 4, which is not bad for someone who didn’t have any previous grade. But it is clear that no one thought at the time that it would be so good,” said Howard Garfinkel, coach of the Five Star Basketball Camp. But Julius had a distinctive feature: in the playground, in street basketball so typical in NY, he was much better than in organized basketball. Every time he went to the paddocks, he seemed to be unleashed and took out all the tricks he had. In addition, in another rhythm of play and on the open court, he began to show those athletic conditions that would make him different. Little by little he began to transfer that talent with plays that showed how different it would be. “One day I remember that the defense attacked, saw space and jumped the free line. I closed my eyes, because I thought I wasn’t going to make it, but he just slipped into the air and turned it over, above everyone else. Julius acted like it was something normal, not great, and that’s when I talked to a friend I had at the University of Massachusetts to get him a scholarship,” admitted Ray Wilson, his coach at Roosevelt High School.

He arrived at UMass in 1968 and, quickly, in the first year, when Julius was already having a major impact on the NCAA (he averaged 18.2 points and 14.3 rebounds in his debut season), he received a call that dismayed him. “Marvin is not well, you must come home,” the mother told him. The younger brother had been diagnosed with Lupus — a disease that attacks the immune system — a while ago and had worsened in the last few hours. Leon Saunders, his partner, drove as fast as he could and Erving arrived to hear his brother’s last words. “I’m tired…” he said and left… “It was bleak, knowing that I would no longer have him by my side, that we would no longer do the beautiful things we used to do together,” he said. Only one positive thing can be highlighted from that tragedy: the motivation it generated. “From that day on, every time I played basketball again, I tried to carry his spirit with me,” he said.

That spirit took him to gyms and paddocks. Because, in his feeling, in his essence, there was competing but also having fun. To win but also to leave something, to entertain, to amuse, to turn the game into an art. And that’s what he did every time he visited Rucker Park, the most famous playground in NY, located on the corner of 155th and 8th streets, in the Harlem neighborhood. There, the show was as important as the result. Or even more. And, little by little, with Julius he began to forge the legend. “There was a lot of talk about him. ‘You’ll see when Julius comes, ‘they said to me and I asked ‘Who is it?’ If I play in the NBA and I don’t know him,” said Tom Hoover. But this 2m06 pivot wing, who between 1963 and 1968 played in the NBA and ABA, experienced firsthand who was that animal that captivated all of NY. “I was standing under the hoop when he penetrated and flipped the ball on me. So hard that the ball hit my head and a tooth fell out. I remember the roar of people as I bent down to look for the tooth…”, he laughed.

On every play, Erving left his stamp, doing things that no one had ever seen and no one has been able to forget since. We talked about ending alley oops launched from the middle of the court, about penetrations through the final line ending in dunks, about counterattacks ended with sunks that left the board moving… They immediately began to give it nicknames. First they told him the Little Falcon, then the Claw (The Claw), even Houdini and the Black Moses, but one day Erving got tired and went to the announcer to tell him what he wanted. “If you’re going to name me in any way, call me the Doctor,” Irving said. An ideal nickname that was completed when the presenter came up with the ideal phrase to sell any Julius Erving show: “The Doctor will operate tonight”.

Doctor J con la 6 de Philadelphia 76ers (Photo by Mark Junge/Getty Images)Mark Junge | Getty Images

Each presentation of his was, really, a real work of art and popularity grew to generate an expectation never seen again. “Since the place didn’t have enough capacity for such a boom, people would climb onto the roof of the school next door, to the trees or to the bridge in front. Everything to see him. Erving gathered the largest audience in the history of this playground during the Rucker Pro League. There were people who didn’t see well but wanted to be in the same place as him,” said none other than Nate Archibald, a full-fledged New Yorker, used to Rucker and, since 1970, an NBA superstar — champion in 1981. This is how the legend of Doctor J was built, also on the streets…

Those intense summers, in NY, prepared him for organized basketball, since 1968 at the NCAA. He spent three seasons at UMass, where he became a figure, being today one of six players in history who averaged at least 20 points (26 if any) and 20 rebounds in his college career. But, of course, the basketball world still didn’t know what it expected… At that time, the NCAA was still banned from the dunk, the secret weapon that the Doctor would soon dust off… But it would not be in the NBA, which at that time had banned picking players in the draft who had not completed the four college years. As the ABA decided to authorize it, precisely to steal the best young talent from its competitor, Julius made the decision to sign a four-year, $500,000 contract with Virginia Squires. In that team and, above all, in that tournament, the all-terrain forward would find the ideal setting to play his spectacular game.

The ABA was created in 1967 to compete with the NBA and quickly found its identity. The game was very different, faster and “street”. Entertainment was prioritized in every way, with the incorporation of women cheerleaders and even a tricolor ball (red, blue and white) that remained in the collective memory of the fan. That is why we welcome — and sought after — those players who are fearless, capable of creating and making eye-catching plays. The goal was to amuse people and, for a few years — seven the ABA lasted — the goal was achieved, even allowing college or high school players to reach the league. All for the show. And the standard-bearer of that game was Erving, who deployed his entire repertoire. His every move lifted people from the seats and although he already had a nickname, some called him Thomas Edison, after the scientist, because “every night he invents something new on the court”.

Since the first season, when he averaged 27.3 points, 15.7 rebounds and 4 assists, he blew everyone away. They were not times of viralizable videos, like today. But, little by little, the comment “here is a boy who is the most incredible thing I saw in my life” began to gain national fame, reaching the offices of the NBA, whose managers made an attempt (with no luck) to get him out of the ABA. “My brother was in the Navy, in Virginia, and he kept saying that to me,” recalled Darryl Dawkins, a pivot who would later be Erving’s teammate in the NBA.

Doctor J llevó la volcada a otra dimensión, convirtiéndola en un arte, en un recurso hermoso que era aplaudido por todos y levantaba al hincha de su asiento. (Getty Images)Bettmann | Bettmann Archive

If there is one play that defines it, that is the dunk. Of course, Erving wasn’t the first to do it, far from it. We are not talking about the inventor, but we are talking about who, with his plasticity, creativity and power, took this action to another level. And we are talking about the play that symbolizes the American game and, we could say, basketball itself. The most spectacular and iconic one, the one that everyone loves, the one that attracts the public that is not purely of that sport. This ending was born as something of few. Or the pivots, a brute action and often not well seen, reserved for taller men.

But Doctor J took it to another dimension, turning it into an art, a beautiful resource that was applauded by all and lifted the fan from his seat. Erving made it aesthetic. And popular. And, along the way, allowing new terms, such as posterizar (leaving someone on the poster, in the photo), which was invented to define the dunks he did in the face of rivals, even ending up above them. His warm-up prior to the games in Virginia, with income to the basket ending in dunks, became a must see — “you can’t miss it” -, as is now the case with Stephen Curry, his ball handling exercises and kilometre throws. More than once a coach asked him how he had come up with a dunk and Julius replied that he had dreamed it the night before and that was the first time he did it. This is also how the word slam was born, when the press of the time had to use a term to adapt to this forward that marked an era. Something he would ratify in 1976, winning an epic dunk tournament, before the demise of the ABA and his departure to the NBA.

In Virginia he spent only two years because in 1972 he was involved in a legal dispute between several teams, after he was declared eligible by the NBA and Milwaukee Bucks chose him in the draft to form a trio that could have been epic, with Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Oscar Robertson, who had just won the championship. Atlanta Hawks, the other involved, had signed him a pre-draft contract and in fact Erving went to his preseason camp and played three friendlies. The NBA fined the Hawks and gave them the right to incorporate the Bucks, but a ruling by a US federal judge forced him to return to the ABA. Since Virginia couldn’t afford what Erving demanded, he was transferred to the NY Nets in exchange for $750,000 and two players. For him, it was the return home. “I am delighted to pursue my career in my city,” he said at the presentation at Colliseum Nassau, on Long Island, blocks from where he had lived and that, suddenly, it would become the theater where everyone wanted to go to see the great Doctor Erving.

Since his debut, in October 1973, the small forward was the main attraction of the team and became the image of the competition. For its style and aesthetics. In the 70s, Doctor J was the paradigm of cool. Because of his afro hair, his game and even his hands, so big that it looked like he was carrying an orange — instead of a ball — and that added spectacularity to every action… He could do whatever he wanted, he moved it from one side to the other, he ran it when he was going to tip… “Julius became a cult figure, everyone wanted to see him,” recalls Rod Thorn, assistant to the Nets until 1975.

Erving also won. All sorts of awards and titles, since his first campaign in the Nets: top scorer (27.4), MVP —he won it three years in a row- and champion —he would repeat in 1976-. “You watched him play and you were shaking your head, they couldn’t believe what you saw,” says George Gervin, another ABA star, who participated in that memorable dunk tournament that Erving won in 1976, before the disappearance of the competition and the passage of both to the NBA. Larry Kenon, Artis Gilmore and David Thompson, all remaining tippers in history, were in that contest in which Doctor J deployed his entire arsenal, starting with a dunk with two balls and ending with the legendary action that Michael Jordan would later perfect — and popularize globally — in 1988: the dunk jumping from the line of free throws.

With Erving already becoming a popular idol who was on his way to having his own model of sneakers and commercials, there was a union between the ABA and the NBA, generating a new legal dispute around the player. Four teams moved from one competition to another, including the New York Nets, but the Knicks felt it was an invasion of their commercial territory and sued the Nets for 4.8 million. The new franchise also failed to fulfill the promise of salary increase for its star, who declared himself in absentia and warned that he would not play anymore. The Nets, in order not to lose him for anything, offered it to the Knicks. What did a franchise expert in making mistakes do? He committed the worst in his history: he refused the offer and thus let in a generational talent pass, who was a local idol and was still in the prime of his career. The one who took advantage of it was Philadelphia 76ers, who bought the contract and compensated the Nets, an expenditure of six million that absolutely paid off in the following years… Doctor J would play for the next 11 seasons in Philadelphia, becoming an idol of the city and an essential piece of a team that always fought up and ended up achieving glory — and the title, of course — in 1983, after losing three finals.

Doctor J con 72 años en el partido de las estrellas de la NBA USA TODAY Sports

Precisely, in his first definition, in 1977, against Portland, he made a move that he had made so many times before and that summed up the jewel that the NBA had achieved: in a counterattack he went straight to the hoop, regardless that Bill Walton, the 2m11 red giant who specialized in tapas, was measuring it. He jumped and flipped it over him, generating one of the dunks to remember in history. It was in the first game of a final that Philadelphia started winning 2-0 and lost 4-2. That was not the only mythical move he was reminded of. In the 1980 finals, against the Lakers, he made an action that is still described today as “impossible”: the so-called Baseline Move, in which he runs the baseline in the air, with the ball in his right hand and, to avoid the cover of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he gets to put his hand and ball behind the board to last moment, make a move and leave the tray with board. Erving’s photos with much of his body behind the hoop confirm the difficulty of the play. A final that the 76ers would lose again, but that would leave several highlights of Doctor J, like two dunks in the face of Kareem, 2m18.

The rematch would come three years later, again in a duel against the Lakers. Julius was 33 years old but his legs were still prodigious. In that definition, the legendary broadcaster Chick Hearn named Rock the Baby that historic talk about Michael Cooper. The forward stole a ball and ran the court. When he was about to reach the hoop, he pulled the ball from his waist, took it between his hand and forearm, and took off. Cooper jumped to try to cover up but in the air he realized it would be impossible and hid his hands when the buried one exploded in the net to the delirium of a crowded Spectrum stadium. In that season, the Sixers won 67 of 82 games in the regular phase and barely lost one game in the playoffs (12-1), with a still brilliant Erving, being a more comprehensive player (21.4 points, 6.8 rebounds, 3.7 rebounds and 1.6 steals), and receiving more help than ever, from Maurice Cheeks (point guard), Moses Malone (pivot) and Andrew Toney (guard)).

Along the way, in addition to his father and younger brother, he lost his older sister—to cancer at 37, when he was 34-, later his mother and son, Cory, 19, in a car accident, one of four offspring he had with his first wife, Turquoise, to whom he was married for 31 years (1972-2003). In 1999 he admitted to having a daughter, the famous tennis player Alexandra Stevenson, with the sports journalist, Samantha, whom he privately recognized since birth but only publicly 19 years later. In 2003, he had another child out of wedlock with a woman named Dorys Madden, a new conflict that led to the divorce with Turquoise. With Madden, he later had two other descendants and they both married in 2008. He himself admitted to having an addiction for the opposite sex. “I lost my mind to women and I’ve come to bet on how many I could have sex on consecutive nights,” he said in an exercise of brutal sincerity. Already retired, he also fulfilled a promise to his mother, receiving him at the university. He then managed businesses at NASCAR, Orlando Magic and even Coca Cola.

Erving played four more seasons, always in the 76ers, until his retirement, in 1987, at the age of 37, in a final season in which each stadium filled up to see the last performance of the great Doctor J. Thus he closed an epic trajectory that included 11 All Star elections (16 counting the ABA) and averages of 24.2 points (8th highest scorer if we add both competitions), 8.5 recovers and 4.5 goal passes. “I wanted to be like him,” Jordan admitted. “We all wanted to be like him,” Dominique Wilkins, another of the great tippers who came after Doctor J. “I often wondered how he did what he did,” added George Gervin. “We saw him as an alien, as an alien,” admitted Pat Riley. Perhaps because it is another era, without social networks, of course, with little TV and competitions without media reach, such as street basketball, or with very little, like the ABA, Julius Erving does not receive enough credit. Or the one he deserves. But those who saw it, those who paid a ticket, those who went to the playgrounds, teammates and rivals, know what we’re talking about. He was the one who flew before Jordan, the one who made the fans stand up, the one who stood up, the one who left rivals speechless, the one who made notes that nobody thought possible, the guy with wave and charisma. That was all Julius Erving. The unforgettable Doctor J.

There aren’t any Bulls players in Indianapolis this weekend for the NBA’s just-past-mid-season Super Bowl knockoff party and fashion show. It’s no longer the sleepy Midwest crossroads city often referred to as Naptown, which actually came about less as an insult for a lack of activities than just a nickname drawn from a syllable.

Indy has been rockin’ for the NBA this weekend, but it’s not about to have the effect on Bulls history that it did the last time the NBA parked there for a party 39 years ago.

Because Indianapolis, the game then in the cavernous football Hoosier Dome, was the site of Michael Jordan’s first All-Star game, and if not one of the most discussed NBA All-Star games of all time, it was probably the most important All-Star game for Bulls franchise history.

That Jordan inaugural 1985 All-Star game became the famous “Freeze-Out” game when NBA stars, supposedly led by Chicago native Isiah Thomas, allegedly kept the ball away from the super popular rookie Jordan in an attempt to embarrass him and demonstrate that he’d have to wait his turn behind the stars of the day, like Magic Johnson, Julius Erving, George Gervin, Larry Bird, Moses Malone, and, of course, Thomas.

It’s the stuff of NBA legend, and it almost certainly didn’t happen the way they said then. Still, you don’t want to ignore a good conspiracy as we see so often these days.

But what the events and whispers produced was the beginning of the Jordan/Thomas and Bulls/Pistons rivalries that were among the most intense and brutal perhaps in NBA history, and more importantly for the Bulls it began in Jordan the career long chase for slights and motivations that came to define his competitive nature and likely was one of the main reasons Jordan became the on-court killer that he did. And with that his unique refuse-to-lose ethic that pushed him to become one of the biggest winners in league history and regarded as likely the greatest player ever in the NBA.

After all, that wasn’t the Jordan in college, who did make a game winning championship shot, but who willingly deferred to better known teammates and never averaged more than 20 points in a college season, 17.7 combined for his three at the University of North Carolina.

But just a few days after that All-Star game in which Jordan scored seven points, the same as starting East center Moses Malone who played more than Jordan and during the game little notice was paid, the Bulls opened the post All-Star sprint with a home game against Isiah’s Pistons.

A fiery, focused and forceful Jordan scored 49 points with 15 rebounds, five assists and four steals in a 139-126 Bulls overtime win. Only beside the point—or points—no Bulls player even attempted a three-point shot in the game. Teammates recalled an angry, almost frothing Jordan they hadn’t seen before. Though many would see it since and come to regret it in legions of stories about payback after payback.

And it all began that Sunday afternoon in Indianapolis.

Though first some history about the overall significance of that weekend in Bulls lore.

     *      *      *      *

Michael Jordan actually should have been representing his home team Indiana Pacers.

In the all-time draft gaffes category one of the top prizes goes to the Portland Trailblazers, who had the No. 2 pick in the 1984 NBA draft and selected center Sam Bowie. It wasn’t a huge ‘What!’ at the time since the Trailblazers had a year before drafted All-American shooting guard Clyde Drexler, and, after all, there was that 17.7 per game Jordan.

The 1984 draft had been all about Hakeem, nee Akeem, Olajuwon, the star center who had played with Drexler at the University of Houston. In that era, a star center meant championships from Russell to Wilt to Kareem with side trips to Walton, Moses, Willis Reed and Wes Unseld. The race to the bottom and the No. 1 draft pick was so intense it led to the creation of the NBA lottery for the following season.

The eventual 1984 winner was biggest loser Houston Rockets, the tanking champs racing to finish last after the previous draft getting center Ralph Sampson, an eventual Hall of Famer. It was elite tanking.

The Bulls also were busy basically losing on purpose, 14 of their last 15. The 76ers, run by former North Carolina star Billy Cunningham, may have been the only team that might have passed on Olajuwon for Jordan with Dean Smith whispering in their ears about Jordan. They would eventually offer the Bulls their No. 5 pick they used for Charles Barkley and two All-Stars for Jordan. Bulls GM Rod Thorn badly wanted Olajuwon, but he made Jordan the consolation. The 76ers had the San Diego Clippers pick, and almost moved up. But the Clippers out of the tanking won their last game of the season to fall a game ahead of Houston.

The big what if in recent years, however, has been what the Rockets should have done and maybe they’d have passed Boston’s record 11 titles in 13 seasons.

Houston was taking Olajuwon, who now would replace Sampson. And Portland at No. 2 badly wanted a center as they had Drexler and Jim Paxson, the latter who had been an All-Star at shooting guard. Bowie was injured in college, and the Trailblazers gladly would have accepted Sampson for the No. 2 pick. But the playing ethic then was two big men. The Knicks signed Marvin Webster to pair with Bill Cartwright. The Celtics were winning with Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. No one thought Olajuwon with Michael Jordan was better than any of those jumbo combos. In subsequent years, I spoke with Portland’s Jack Ramsay and Houston’s Bill Fitch. Both said trading Sampson to select Jordan No. 2 for the Rockets never was discussed.

But Jordan should have been wearing Pacers blue and gold.

The NBA wasn’t thrilled in 1976 with the settlement of the Robertson free agency suit and merger to let in four ABA teams. The Pacers had been an ABA dynasty, but the NBA was making it difficult on all the former enemies. TV revenue was almost nothing, so teams like the Pacers relied on gate receipts, and thus wins to attract fans. They had a chance to draft Larry Bird in 1978 before he went back to school for another year, but passed because they knew they wouldn’t have enough money to sign him.

In 1980-81, the Pacers had their first winning season since coming into the NBA and made the playoffs, losing in the first round. But center James Edwards, the future Piston and even, yes Bull, left as a free agent. Desperate for a replacement, at a time draft picks weren’t that valued, the Pacers traded theirs for 1984 to the Trailblazers for center Tom Owens. Indiana would miss the playoffs the next five years and inn 1983-84 was 26-56, and thus the Portland Trailblazers got the No. 2 pick in the 1984 NBA draft.

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Michael Jordan stole Isiah Thomas’ city.

Thomas was the story of Chicago and was on the way, even playing for the Detroit Pistons, to being one of the most popular athletes in Chicago’s history.

Until You Know Who came along.

“I didn’t understand being booed in Chicago Stadium and I took it personally,” Thomas admitted years later.

Thomas was one of those kids who snuck into the old Chicago Stadium late in Bulls games in the Sloan/Van Lier days and begged for shoes. Though for him to wear rather than sell. Breakfasts at his West Side home often came courtesy of the church or the Black Panthers. He watched the tanks come down his street in the late 1960s riots.

But young Isiah was a basketball prodigy. When his older brother Larry played in a Catholic youth league, three-year-old Isiah provided the half time entertainment with dribbling shows. His brother, Lord Henry, was a basketball star headed for fame but sidelined as so many were in that era by drugs and gangs.

In the famous story played in a TV movie about his life produced by Bulls legend Chet Walker, chieftains of the notorious Vice Lords street gang appeared at homes on the West Side of Chicago to take recruits. One summer night in 1966, 25 chiefs stopped in front of the home of Mary Thomas. There were nine children, seven boys, with Isiah the youngest. They lived then on the first floor of a two-story red brick building on Congress Street facing the Eisenhower Expressway. The bangers had guns.

“We want your boys,” the gang leader told her. ”They can’t walk around here and not be in a gang.” She looked him in the eye and said, ”There’s only one gang around here, and that’s the Thomas gang, and I lead that.” She shut the door and came back with a shotgun.

“Get off my porch,” she said, ”or I’ll blow you across the Expressway.’’

Isiah never joined a gang.

It became basketball. First at Our Lady off Sorrows elementary and to stay safe, if not convenient, Isiah got into mostly white St. Joseph’s in west suburban Westchester. So it would be up at 5:30 a.m. for a 90 minute trip to school. St Joseph’s became a state power. Isiah went on to Indiana University, and after leading them to an NCAA title as a sophomore and deflecting the wrath of Bobby Knight, Thomas went on to be the No. 2 pick in the 1981 NBA draft to the Pistons.

The Bulls had the No. 6 selection and Isiah was angling to get there. He desperately wanted to play for the Bulls.

But he was the top rated prospect in the draft. So when he went to Dallas, which had the No. 1 pick, he told owner Don Carter in his cowboy hats and boots how stupid he looked and he wasn’t wearin’ no ridiculous cowboy outfit. The Mavericks selected Thomas’ buddy, Mark Aguirre at No. 1. Thomas then told Pistons GM Jack McCloskey what a pit Detroit was. McCloskey told him to complain all he wanted, he was going to be a Piston.

Even still, Isiah was a hero to Chicago.

The Bulls were lousy, and Isiah was an instant star starting every All-Star game from his rookie season, the first NBA player ever to do it his first five times. The Pistons were starting to win, 49 wins by 1983-84, and Isiah still was the hometown hero when he was back at his favorite courts in Gladys Park (Gunderson) Park.

Until that Bulls rookie came along with the tongue hanging out of both his mouth and his famous sneakers, and finally Bulls fans could begin to wipe away the haze of defeat. Isiah still came back to Gladys Park, but this time the hangers on were yelling that he wasn’t good enough for Jordan. How could that be?

     *      *      *      *

The Buildup and the background.

It was love at first dunk for Chicago with Michael Jordan.

The Bulls had a great run in the early 1970s, but more on grit than talent, and the talent always prevailed as first Kareem and then Wilt took them out of the playoffs year after year. There was a brief resurgence with the merger acquisition of ABA superstar Artis Gilmore, but they ran into Bill Walton’s one magical season and the Bulls soon faded back to basketball oblivion. There seemed to be almost as many drug rehab stints as wins some of those seasons.

And then came Michael.

Set featured image

He shocked the world in the 1984 Olympics as the coach of Spain’s team marveled how everyone went up and came down, and this Michael stayed up.

But it still was the league of Magic and Larry and to a developing extent Isiah, and certainly at the All-Star game.

The NBA All-Star games in the 1960s and 1970s were relatively competitive games since the winner versus loser prize money was significant in an era of low pay. They’d occasionally try to get a car for a member of the home team, like they did for Cincinnati’s Adrian Smith in 1966. But the games were reasonably close to regular season.

Then they became the greatest show on hardwood thanks to buddies Magic and Isiah.

They’d become close friends with the same representation, Isiah playing in Michigan and Magic from there. The winner/loser share began to mean much less as salaries began to increase in the 1980s, and Magic and Isiah combined to make the All-Star game the spectacle weekend it’s become the game to see. Both were showmen players, and they showed out for that game with the best of street ball and their phenomenal skills. Most of the players stepped aside to watch as they filled the game with behind the back full court passes, lobs off the backboard for dunks, the best of the Harlem Globetrotters smoothed over with the best of NBA talent.

Basketball now had the midseason classic.

So actually it was no surprise that Jordan would have a modest debut. Isiah actually did, also, when he was a rookie. But even as Johnson was winning the titles and Isiah was winning hearts, Michael was winning the endorsements.

There was that infamous Nike contract. Jordan as a rookie was really just this wide-eyed kid thrilled about being in the NBA and at his first All-Star game to play with and meet players he’d idolized in college. Yes, really, though he’d never admit it now. He was a Mr. and Ma’am guy, and he wanted to be careful about understanding his place in the game. Dean Smith and his parents always had made that clear.

So when Jordan ran into Isiah in the hotel elevator, Jordan didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to act out of place. Isiah took it as rookie arrogance, a snub. And Jordan was wearing some of his specialty designed Nike stuff while the other players wore the league mandated jerseys. Showing off his endorsements, which were not big in that era, it seemed to some.

“Part of the tension might have been that I was coming into a city he grew up in and was loved in,” Jordan said years later in a Playboy magazine interview when it was the place for celebrity interviews. “I think a bigger part was the way I came into the league. Magic had that great smile and had won multiple championships while I was in high school and college. Isiah also had a great smile and was a great player before I came into the league. But here I come, a rookie, and David Falk is making all these deals, and there’s an explosion of marketing opportunities that Magic and Isiah and George Gervin hadn’t had. Those guys were all great players. But they hadn’t yet been marketed to the level of their skills or celebrity. I came in, unproven in pro basketball, and was getting the stuff they should have previously gotten.

”I was very quiet when I went down there,” Jordan said. ”I didn’t want to go there like, ‘I`m a big shot rookie and you must respect me.’ I didn’t want to be perceived as having an arrogant attitude. That was my first All-Star game. I stayed in my room most of the time because I didn’t know what to do. None of my teammates were there. I didn’t want to be out in a situation that I wasn’t comfortable with. The one time I did go out, I got on an elevator with Isiah Thomas to go downstairs for a league meeting. I was really intimidated because I didn’t know him and I didn’t want to get on his nerves. I didn’t want to seem like a rookie. You know, to just be so stupid. So I was quiet. I stayed in the corner. When I went down in the room for the meeting, I still didn’t say anything. After the weekend was over, it got back to me that I was arrogant and cocky and I wouldn’t even speak to Isiah on the elevator, that I gave him the cold shoulder.”

Thomas in later years explained his view.

“He became a great player,” Thomas said. “But at that time he wasn’t the Michael Jordan that he became. At that time, the NBA was Dr. J, Larry Bird, Magic, Moses.”

When the East lineup was introduced that day, Thomas, who attended Indiana University, and Bird, a native of Indiana, were greeted with far bigger cheers than Jordan. The crowd that day of 43,146 was the biggest ever to see an All-Star Game.
“I thought he may have been a little nervous because of what had happened that whole weekend,” Thomas said. “When he came to Indianapolis there was the big controversy with Nike, his warmup suit, his gold chains (NBA fines for not wearing conforming sneakers which Nike turned into more ads). That whole weekend he was in some controversy. I thought at the start of the game, Gervin came out and was into his thing, Bird was ready, Dr. J was ready and in the All-Star Game, it was the show. We were trying to feature Larry, which we should have. Moses and Doc had just won the championship. Larry and Moses had been MVPs of the league.”

The Freeze-Out.

It really began after the game the West won 140-129 with Sampson the MVP with 24 points and ten rebounds. Gervin had 23 points and Thomas led the East with 22. Bird had 21. Jordan was two of nine for seven points, though starting center Malone had just ten shots. The story of the game was the Magic/Isiah showmanship.

Until in the airport waiting to return to Detroit.

Charles Tucker and Bill Merriweather were advisors to Isiah and Magic. They were waiting for the plane with Detroit columnist Charlie Vincent. He says, ‘What’s going on?’ So they say, well our guys taught Michael a lesson. And they described this plot that Magic, Isiah and their Michigan buddy Gervin schemed to make Michael look bad for all his showing off.

Which Chicago attorney George Andrews, who then represented both Thomas and Johnson, insisted was nonsense.

“You’re telling me Larry Bird was in a conspiracy with Isiah Thomas?” said Andrews. “If Isiah said one thing, Bird would do the opposite (it would be two years later, remember, that Thomas at the conference finals declared Bird only the MVP because he was white. And then made to apologize by the league). Bird years later when he took over the Pacers immediately fired Thomas as coach.

“And you’re getting Dr. J, who was the moral compass of the league back then who started the basketball chapel, and Larry Bird ganging up on Michael Jordan?” wondered Andrews. “If Isiah said to do this, Bird would say screw you. And remember, Bird and Magic had not made up yet from the college and their NBA rivalry.”

There’s also another classic footnote in Bulls history from this episode.

The following training camp, Bulls general manager Jerry Krause signed Gervin. Yes, with Jordan still believing Gervin was part of the plot. To do so, Krause released Rod Higgins, who then was Jordan’s only friend on the team that was deep with drug addled veterans. That more likely was the start of Jordan’s feud with Krause than the issue with his foot injury and returning, with came later.

Vincent wrote the story in the Detroit Free Press, and when the Pistons came to Chicago for that first game after the All-Star break it was on.

The Jordan legend thus began.

It really didn’t matter if there was a plot since, after all, two of the supposed plotters were on the other team. But even when Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame he attributed “the Freeze-Out” to a large part of his famed game face.

“I’m going to thank a couple people that you guys probably wouldn’t even think that I would thank, Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson, George Gervin,” Jordan told the audience. “They say it was a so-called ‘Freeze-Out’ in my rookie season. You guys gave me the motivation to say ‘you know what, evidently I haven’t proved enough to these guys. I gotta prove to them that I deserve what I’ve gotten on this level.’”

And he just kept on proving it after it really all started that Sunday in Indianapolis.

Chicago can only be grateful.

Two months into the season, Michael Jordan looked bad. This is not to say he had looked bad for the whole of his first 26 games with the Wizards; that was a matter of some debate. The numbers were forgiving from some angles (23 points, six rebounds and five assists a night) and harsher from others (a shooting percentage that nudged just up above 40). The Wizards, who had set playoff qualification as a reasonable benchmark of comeback-season success, sat at a shaky 14–13. But on the night of Dec. 27, 2001, things reached a nadir no measure of nuance could rescue. In a blowout loss to the Indiana Pacers, the 38-year-old Jordan was sweatlogged and slow, hobbled by the pain of recent operations to drain fluid from his knee and not yet buoyed by their effects. He clanked eight of his 10 shots, and, in the third quarter, coach Doug Collins let the best player in the history of the game strap on the ice packs. Jordan finished with six points, then the fewest of his career.

During his years with the Bulls, when precious little criticism materialized and still less reached his ears, Jordan nevertheless honed a remarkable talent for unearthing it. Now there was no need; columns and SportsCenter segments scanned as obituaries. “Those bad games were his new Calbert Cheaneys,” Steve Wyche, then the Wizards beat writer for The Washington Post, says, referring to the Washington Bullets swingman whose physical style Jordan occasionally saw as an affront in the 1990s and who drew some of his most focused and explosive outings. “You could see it in warmups [of the next games]: ‘He’s lathered up, he’s not playing around today.’”

Two nights after the Pacers debacle, Washington hosted the Hornets. Less than a minute into the game, Jordan opened the Wizards’ scoring with a fadeaway jumper from the right elbow. Thirty seconds later, another. Old rhythms sounded. Faking another fade, he pivoted and ducked under his defender’s armpit to bank a four-footer off the glass. Tracking a teammate’s missed shot, Jordan slipped into the lane to tap the ball back over the front rim. He didn’t quite recapture his former ways of moving—the Air Jordan XVIIs just didn’t get as far off the floor as the XIVs had—but he was attuned to the degrees of momentum and stillness that great scorers prey on. When his opponent gave him an inch too much space, he put the jumper over top; when someone lurched out, he dropped his shoulder and powered past. He scored Washington’s first 13 points and 34 of its first-half total of 56. The Wizards won big in the end, but nobody cared; Jordan had scored 51. Steve Martin, Charlotte’s play-by-play TV announcer, laid out the game’s real purpose in the second quarter: “Relive the memories, folks.”

“Scoring six points, my career low, I’m pretty sure you guys were saying how old I was,” Jordan said afterward to the once-fawning press corps that had become, in his mind, a kind of nagging monitor. “After tonight, I’m pretty sure people are going to say I can still play this game.”

Al Tielemans/Sports Illustrated

That Saturday night showed Jordan near his peak in more ways than one. As he regained his on-court prowess, he tapped into his talent for shaping the story it told. Jordan had always been one of sports’ great mythmakers: in the fusion of underdog and deity that framed his Gatorade and Nike ads; in the too-perfect hero’s journey beats of his arrival, ascent, departure from and return to Chicago; in the horizon-scanning that would let him lord over a shoe empire and unveil The Last Dance. With the Wizards, he once again cast himself, this time as the sage elder who could still go it alone when needed. “I may not have 50 points the next game,” he said, “so someone has to come in and take some of that load.”

Twenty years later, though, Jordan’s Wizards chapter remains noteworthy—singular, really, in the polish of the rest of his career—for his inability to control it. Over two losing seasons, he put up a handful of remarkable performances and as many wretched ones. He scored well but inefficiently. He set goals, failed at them, revised them. He was a genius, a has-been, a grump, a teacher and an ambassador. He added to his story as he detracted from it. If Jordan has always taken pains to tell the public who he is, here he made the clarifying mistake of showing us. To acolytes, it’s a chapter best forgotten. To anyone interested in the mechanics of greatness, and in what you can glean from those mechanics breaking down, it’s essential.

Jordan’s announcement in late September 2001 that he’d be returning to NBA floors came as no surprise. There’d been the noticeable slimming down, the vortex of rumor and nondenial, the pickup games arranged with once and current NBAers. More telling than anything, there’d been the grumbling, the acknowledged itch. “Nothin’ compares to bein’ it,” Jordan had told Post reporter Michael Leahy—the eventual author of When Nothing Else Matters, a survey of his last playing years—in December 2000. At the time, he had not been it—a player—but rather a part-owner and executive for the Wizards, a position as artificial and removed as politics to a career soldier. He’d kept a distance from the club, rarely traveling on road trips, indulging long days of golf and nights of gambling. When Leahy reminded Jordan that the Wizards had a game that night, he snapped, “I don’t.”His process for returning had seen him lock back into his old focus. Jordan had reenlisted his personal trainer, Tim Grover, who built a regimen for strengthening the muscles around his knee. The pickup sessions served to test the soundness of the old catalog. (In one of these, a young Metta Sandiford-Artest, then Ron Artest, swung an elbow into Jordan’s abdomen, cracking a couple ribs.) He couldn’t glide through the air like he had, but he found that he could still stagger defenders with his pivot foot, which won him pockets of space for the jumper or the drive. His trash talk took the stay-in-school shape of a wizened veteran’s. “He got to jawing. It was unbelievable,” says Brian Scalabrine, a draft prospect out of USC who had worked Jordan’s summer camps during the hiatus years and partook of the heated closed-door runs afterward. “He turned into a different guy. But you could tell, in his mind, every day he was searching for a strategy, for what was gonna work that particular day.”For those who stood to benefit from Jordan’s return, the calculus was simpler. During the 2000–01 season, the young Wizards had floundered to a 19–63 record, the third-worst in the NBA, and drew the 12th-fewest fans in the league. (“He made a coaching hire, Leonard Hamilton, and that did not work out at all,” Wyche remembers of Jordan’s first splashy executive decision. “He was on nobody’s radar.”) TV ratings had suffered since Jordan retired from the Bulls in 1998, with a labor dispute condensing the ’99 season and NBA brass fretting over the marketability of a new generation of stars. The Sept. 11 attacks cast a pall over the sports world, turning routine events into security-laden shows of resolve. “The gold standard was really Jordan, in terms of what a player should be, how he should conduct himself, his competitiveness,” remembers Stu Jackson, then an executive in the league office. “I mean, he was the guy.”

Jordan was to be a palliative, if not a savior. The Wizards had sold out their season tickets on the strength of rumor alone; the NBA tore up its national TV schedule and shoved Washington into prime-time slots. Abe Pollin, the Wizards’ principal owner, basked in the celebrity (and, to be sure, the cost: Jordan took a veteran’s minimum contract and donated the sum of it to 9/11 charities). “To have the greatest basketball player that ever played playing on my team,” he said. “With all the tragedies that have befallen our country the last couple weeks and the mood being what it is, a little good news like this is really a good thing.”

Jordan, for his part, characterized his last comeback as a project of encouragement, not dominance. What could he offer that no other executive in the league could? His presence. “There is no better way of teaching young players than to be on the court with them as a fellow player, not just in practice, but in NBA games,” he said in a reintroductory statement. Still, Collins—Jordan’s second coaching hire, handpicked for his on-court return—stoked the nostalgist’s hopes: “Michael Jordan will be one of the top 10 players in the league.”

ne night in late November 2001, Jordan boarded the Wizards’ team plane from the rear, where the team’s announcers and beat reporters sat. The Wizards had just lost to the Cavaliers by 19; Jordan had led Washington with 18 points on 9-of-24 shooting. He cast his eyes down the aisle, to where his teammates settled into their seats. “F—- those mother——-,” Buckhantz remembers Jordan saying. “I’m gonna sit back here with the grownups.”

A month into the season, the Wizards had lost 10 of 13 games, and MJ the mentor was faring about as well as MJ the exec had. A roster made mostly of youthful promise and mid-career flotsam was prone to lapses in focus—after the Cavs loss, Collins had complained that they hadn’t made it out to warmups in a timely manner—and lacked the talent to compensate. Richard Hamilton, the club’s third-year shooting guard, looked the part of a ready-made Jordan disciple, with a hair-trigger midrange shooting stroke and inexhaustible stamina for moving without the ball. But he also had his own bona fides—a national title and All-American status with UConn, a No. 7 draft slot—and chafed at the notion that he needed to be tucked under anybody’s wing. When Jordan sat out to tend to his knee, Hamilton hardly hid his pleasure. “The guys take pride and want to show we can play without Michael,” he said after one such game, per Leahy. “Hopefully he can watch and maybe get an understanding of our games.”

Upon his return, Jordan struggled with his young teammates and an aging body.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

The team’s other young centerpiece, rookie big man Kwame Brown, presented even more challenges. In his last major act in the front office in June 2001, Jordan had drafted Brown with the first overall pick out of high school, seeing in him a collage of potential. He had unteachable size and speed, with a frame that could support top-tier NBA muscle. A post move or two and he’d dominate, the thinking went. But Brown entered the league out of shape and raw; he fumbled passes, cuffed rebounds and forgot plays. One trait irked Jordan more than the rest, as it represented what he saw as a shortcoming in his own diligence. In the locker room before a road game during Brown’s and Jordan’s second year together, Jordan would vent to Charles Oakley, an offseason signing and longtime MJ confidant. “God, I would never draft a big man who couldn’t palm the ball,” Jordan said, repeating the sentiment within earshot of Brown. Wyche asked why he’d done so, then; the team had had access to all the combine measurables. “It’s a lesson learned,” Jordan replied.

As it became apparent that the team’s stated goals were likely out of reach, Jordan’s public posture shifted. He spoke in increasingly defensive terms, not of sowing the seeds for lasting success but of girding his reputation. He kept to the rear of the team planes, smoking cigars, venturing forward primarily to up the ante in his teammates’ card games. He feuded with Pollin, at one point footing the bill for the team to stay downtown on the road, instead of at a hotel closer to the airport owned by the owner’s brother Harold. Having spent his entire career in the luxury of pure stakes—the pursuit of being the best player on the best team in the world—Jordan had to make do with smaller motivations and cherish more fleeting victories. When a reporter commented on a hot streak by noting that Jordan had averaged 35 points over his last four games, he shot back, offended by faint praise. “That surprise you?” he asked.

But stretches like those were a surprise. Some nights, Jordan would flub a dunk attempt or have his jump shot blocked by the likes of Voshon Lenard—a three-point specialist and fine role player but nobody’s idea of a stopper. Wyche remembers a murmur among the press seats on that occasion. “It was, ‘Whoa, O.K., this is a different MJ.’” The remainder of the games fell somewhere in the middle, Jordan logging his 20-something points fitfully: pump-faking more than he once had, leaning back at a steeper degree, searching out fissures in defenses he’d once simply risen over.

The knee, which would cost Jordan much of the final third of the 2001–02 season, became a metaphor: for what its owner had to deal with and for how impressive it really was that he could. “It was honestly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” remembers Etan Thomas, then a young forward for the Wizards. “His knee was swollen like the elephant man, and the doctor took out this long needle and extracted this black tar, goo-looking stuff out of MJ’s knee. He was writhing in pain.”

Afterward, Thomas asked Jordan why he bothered. “He looked at me and just kind of stared at me, but he didn’t have an answer.”

The Wizards’ heady plans unraveled: a 37–45 record in Jordan’s first year back, with their old, new star missing 22 games, and an identical mark the next season, despite him playing all 82. Between seasons, the team unloaded Hamilton and brought in Jerry Stackhouse, to little effect. Still, the gambit remained a box-office success. Washington sold out its home arena every night and drew packed houses on the road. “He was still a shot in the arm,” Jackson says. “It was just more about the man than the team, at least to my mind.”

Jordan led the Wizards in scoring during his two seasons in Washington, but he was unable to lift them into the playoffs.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

To fans, Jordan’s return had the powerful twin pulls of nostalgia and celebrity. For league figures, his comeback captivated for different reasons. The way a failing mind can hold onto essential memories, great athletes in decline isolate their core characteristics. It was true, this ground-bound and loss-saddled Jordan was haughty, frustrated, dismissive of his teammates. He faltered in ways that once would have been unthinkable. (In the 2002 All-Star Game, Jordan broke free into the open floor, lined up his steps … and clanked a dunk off the back rim.)

But he remained as competitive and thoughtful about his sport as ever, even when it was clear those qualities would get him nowhere near where he’d once been. Every so often came a game like a thesis statement: I can still play. Days before Christmas 2001, with three seconds left in a tight contest in Madison Square Garden, Jordan muscled Latrell Sprewell to the right elbow, leaned back and dropped in a game-decider. (“Firing … AND HITS!” went Marv Albert’s muscle-memory call.) Two nights after putting 51 on the Hornets, Jordan scored 45 against the New Jersey Nets. In a January game against the Bulls, his first against his former team, Jordan tallied 29 hard-won points, but the representative moment came after he had his shot blocked by Artest with 23 seconds left. Jordan griped for a foul but then turned and raced downcourt, tracking a Chicago fastbreak from behind. Ron Mercer tried a layup, and Jordan soared (the word could here be used legitimately, not nostalgically), snared the ball with two hands and pinned it to the backboard, preserving Washington’s six-point lead. Phil Chenier, Buckhantz’s partner at the broadcast table, remembers the play as an instant of pushback—against lacking teammates, diminished hops, a shot that could suddenly be tipped by defenders who once wouldn’t have gotten within a foot of it. “You could just see the energy, the emotion going into it,” Chenier says. “It was a great block.”

“There was a maturity level to his game, a perspective,” says Bryce Drew, who grew up near Chicago in Valparaiso, Ind., and guarded Jordan during his 51-point game against the Hornets. The reflexes were a touch duller, Drew remembers, and the burst more than a touch lessened; at one point, he swiped Jordan’s dribble. But in the midrange he was a composer, one variation setting up the next. “It was face-up shot, pump-fake, step-through, 12-foot finish,” Drew says. “It wasn’t the high-flying dunks. It was all skill.”

In total, over his last two seasons, Jordan scored 21.2 points a night on 43% shooting, with six rebounds, four and a half assists, and a steal and a half per game. Fans and pundits saw some sadness in the numbers, that perfect conclusion scuffed by a crummy coda. Jordan’s competitors—the players, coaches and executives whose matchup with the Wizards suddenly became loaded with significance—tended to look at it differently.

“The guy in the Wizards uniform solidified, in my estimation, why he’s the greatest basketball player of all time,” former Mavericks, Heat and Hornets swingman Jamal Mashburn says. Jordan used whatever was at his disposal—once, a vicious first step and powerful jump; now, the intimidation of his status and canniness of his footwork. “He was averaging 20 points a game on smarts alone.”

Mashburn remembers his lone appearance in an All-Star Game, in 2003. It was Jordan’s final fete, a weekend soaked in nostalgia. The game started with Vince Carter giving up his starting spot for Jordan; at halftime, Jordan tearfully addressed the crowd, saying, “Now I can go home and feel at peace with the game of basketball.”

For Mashburn, the more telling moment came during a lull in the pregame warmup. “I asked some questions about the fadeaway, and he not only shared some things but had an active scouting report going on in his head about my game,” Masburn says. “He told me to keep the ball closer to my body on the turn so it wouldn’t get stripped. He was like, ‘Jamal, you turn over your right shoulder 90% of the time. You need to have a counter, just show it once a game and it’ll open things up,’” Mashburn laughs. “I played against the Memphis Grizzlies right after that. That’s when I scored 50.”

The comparisons have been made too many times to count, by teammates, coaches, trainers and staffers: Traveling with Jordan was like riding on Air Force One or touring with The Beatles. Buckhantz’s entry into the lore of Jordanmania centers on water fowl.

Some fans would rather forget the image of Jordan in dark blue.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

The story goes that the Wizards had a road game in Memphis and stayed at the Peabody Hotel, where every day a gaggle of mallards waddled from their perch on the roof onto an elevator and down to the fountain in the lobby. A Peabody official approached the team and asked whether Jordan might lead the procession, as rock stars and politicians had done during their own stays. Per Buckhantz’s memory, George Koehler, Jordan’s personal assistant, put a question back to the would-be organizers. “Do you like your ducks?” Koehler asked. “Because if those elevator doors open up and Michael Jordan walks out, you’re going to have a lot of dead ducks.” That afternoon, Jimmy Carter led a perfectly tame version of the ritual

If that level of adoration led people to rush en masse for a glimpse of Jordan, it has also led them to endeavor to forget their last look at him. Jordan in dark blue belongs to a tucked-away file in America’s collective sports memory, next to Ali leaning on the ropes being pummeled by Berbick.

Johnny Smith, a professor of sports history at Georgia Tech writing a book on Jordan’s mass appeal, grew up in Chicago and remembers avoiding Wizards games when they were broadcast. “As a historian, understanding him better, it makes perfect sense. He had to feed his ego, and he thought that the best thing he could do to resurrect the Wizards was lace up his Nikes again,” Smith says. “But at the time there was something so jarring about it. It was like it invaded my own personal memories, my joy associated with him wearing a Chicago uniform.” The cleanliness of Jordan’s previous exit—the hand cocked in follow-through against a backdrop of Utah Jazz fans who all know what’s coming—emphasized a feeling that he now tarnished something precious. “There gets to be a collective fear that heroes will be diminished, that they can’t live up to the ideal they once created,” Smith says.

Now the heroics against Utah were painted over, one last time, by a rough night in Philadelphia. In Jordan’s final game, in April 2003, he scored 15 points in a 20-point loss; Allen Iverson scored 35. His relationship with Pollin had soured, the hotel incident just one yank in an ongoing tug-of-war over franchise influence, and his return to Wizards management—long a foregone conclusion—would not come to pass. Announcing his comeback, Jordan had stated that “we have the foundation on which to build a playoff-contention team.” What he’d done instead was turn a bad team into a slightly better, and much more famous, one.

For many players, Jordan’s Wizards years showed why he’s the greatest player of all time.

Bob Rosato/Sports Illustrated

It is a truism of coaching that you learn more from losing than from winning. The same can be said of whatever strange project fans undertake, this process of trying to understand something—about an individual, about achievement, about what pushes a person to success or consigns them to setbacks—via the way an athlete moves on a court. Throughout his career, Jordan had included a “Love of the Game” clause in his contracts, a bit of language allowing him to play in any game anywhere he chose away from NBA arenas. Like so many elements of Jordanian myth, this was hard to parse amid the confetti of championship parades. Did Jordan’s combativeness fuel his teams’ accomplishments, or did his talent let them succeed in spite of it? Did he work harder than everyone else, or did his athleticism let that work show? Did he love the game, or did he love winning it? “Jordan prided himself on that clause, it tapped into this idea that he was the most competitive man on earth,” Smith says. “But was he more competitive than Magic Johnson? Larry Bird? Isaiah Thomas? I don’t know how you measure that.”

This isn’t a measurement, but it is a story. Halfway through Jordan’s last season, the Wizards were 25–28, and the East-leading Nets came to town. Jordan had turned 40 four days earlier; the Nets had a trio of 20-somethings—Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson, Kenyon Martin—who would end the year in the NBA Finals. The stakes, such as they were, had nothing to do with playoff seedings or psychological edges in a championship race. In the context of the broader basketball family, it was a bitter father and ascendant son having it out on the driveway.

Before the game, word had circulated that Jordan had an ailing back. Rod Thorn, then an executive with the Nets, remembers a misstep. “Before the game, Kenyon ribbed him a little, asked how his back was doing,” Thorn says. “Allegedly.”

In 1988, Michael Jordan officially ARRIVED.

4 years into his career, NBA fans had one criticism of MJ:

“He can score, but he’s a terrible defender.”

But the truth was – his defensive skills were masked by his immense scoring skills, especially after putting up 37.1 PPG clip the previous year. His 5.6 rebounds and 2.6 steals a game In his first three years proved just that.

Entering the 1988 season at age 24, Jordan was ready to show the world that he could stand out in a league that had Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Isiah Thomas as the faces of the league.

And then – he did this:

Played all 82 games, at 40.4 min/game
35.0 PPG
5.5 RPG
5.9 APG
3.2 SPG
1.6 BPG
1st player in history to win MVP and DPOY in the same year

MJ made Chicago Stadium his playground, and in his home arena, even topped Dominique Wilkins for his second straight Slam Dunk Championship. He also bagged All-Star MVP honors for good measure.

This was his “I have arrived” moment.

He was the league’s best player, best dunker, best defender and best scorer. Rarely do you see that combination. 3 seasons later, the rings started coming, and you know the rest.

But that 88 season turned skeptics to believers. And left his doubters speechless

Discover the playoff records of Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Find out who has the edge in key statistics. Read more to settle the GOAT debate.

Many regard Michael Jordan as the all-time greatest basketball player, and his remarkable playoff record throughout his career supports this.

Jordan’s perfect record of winning 6 out of the 6 NBA Finals he entered is well-known, but achieving this involved many challenges. LeBron James, in comparison, has clinched the championship only four times despite making it to the final stage a total of ten times.

This article will explore Michael Jordan’s Playoff history and question if it surpasses LeBron James’s record.

Michael Jordan’s Playoff Record

Michael Jordan’s Playoff Record is truly remarkable. He holds the NBA records for career regular season scoring average, with an impressive 30.1 points per game. In addition, his career playoff scoring average is an astonishing 33.4 points per game. Jordan’s achievements include six NBA Finals MVP awards, ten NBA scoring titles, five NBA MVP awards, and nine NBA All-Defensive First Team awards. His legacy in the basketball world is truly unparalleled.

While playing against Miami in the 1992 playoffs, Jordan shattered two records in a single half by making 20 free throws and undertaking 23 shots, with both records still standing tall.He also equaled an all-time defensive record by nabbing eight steals in one half, and he shares the record of leading the NBA in steals three times.

Jordan’s extraordinary scoring skill shone brightly in the playoffs, where he maintains an unbeaten record for scoring the highest points in a playoff game, 63 points against the Celtics in 1986.

Additionally, he set a sustained playoff record in the 1991 Finals versus LA by successfully striking 13 consecutive field goals without missing, another unmatched playoff record.

Beyond scoring, Jordan also set a persisting playoff record in 1988 by making 24 field shots against Cleveland. In the 1991 match against Detroit, he pulled off another enduring playoff record by making 13 free throws in a quarter.

Jordan’s imprint on the game propagated beyond his records, for he played a huge role in globally popularizing basketball and the NBA.

This basketball icon also notably influenced fashion, particularly with the Air Jordan sneakers and changing player uniform trends. This contribution solidified his stature as a cultural icon.

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LeBron James Playoff Record

Basketball icon LeBron James showcases an admirable playoff record, having reached the NBA Finals on ten occasions and securing four championships with three unique teams: Miami Heat, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Los Angeles Lakers.

He frequently headed his squad in scoring, rebounds, and assists, playing an influential part in these triumphs.

James’ high-level playoff performance is a consistent theme throughout his career. His record includes scoring over 40 points seven times during Eastern Conference postseason matches and over 27 points on average during his NBA Finals participations.

His exceptional contribution to the game has won him four NBA Finals MVP accolades. James’ command of basketball surpasses just the NBA.

He also boasts of two Olympic gold medals won playing for the United States men’s basketball squad. His undeniable influence on the sport continues to motivate and inspire both fans and fellow players due to his passionate work ethic and commitment to basketball.

In comparison, Michael Jordan’s playoff record is established at 119-60, translating into a winning percentage of 66.4%. On the other hand, James’ record stands at 182-102, equating to a win percentage of 64.0%.

However, it is crucial to mention that Jordan’s teams, on average, outperformed James’ teams, with the Bulls recording more victories and a superior net rating.

Furthermore, Jordan’s opponents had a higher net rating during the specific season they encountered the Bulls, suggesting Jordan’s conquests were generally more formidable during those seasons. Regardless, both players exhibit outstanding playoff records, leaving the debate on who’s superior ceaseless.

Michael Jordaп, the icoпic basketball legeпd, made headliпes oпce agaiп as пews broke of his moпυmeпtal coпtract sigпiпg with Nike, worth a staggeriпg $500 millioп. Jordaп, reпowпed for his υпparalleled athleticism aпd competitive spirit, expressed elatioп at the lυcrative deal, solidifyiпg his loпg-staпdiпg partпership with the athletic apparel giaпt.

Iп a sυrprisiпg twist, Jordaп revealed his iпteпtioпs to allocate a sυbstaпtial portioп of the coпtract proceeds for philaпthropic eпdeavors. Despite jests sυggestiпg otherwise, Jordaп clarified his commitmeпt to doпatiпg $100 millioп to varioυs charitable caυses, υпderliпiпg his oпgoiпg dedicatioп to makiпg a positive impact beyoпd the basketball coυrt.

 

However, amidst the jυbilatioп sυrroυпdiпg the coпtract aппoυпcemeпt, Jordaп’s statemeпt aboυt reserviпg $400 millioп for persoпal υse raised eyebrows aпd sparked debate. Critics qυestioпed the ethical implicatioпs of sυch a sigпificaпt persoпal allocatioп, especially coпsideriпg Jordaп’s coпsiderable wealth aпd iпflυeпce.

Noпetheless, sυpporters argυed that Jordaп’s sυccess aпd fiпaпcial aυtoпomy warraпted his decisioп to secυre his fυtυre while simυltaпeoυsly coпtribυtiпg to charitable iпitiatives. They emphasized his loпgstaпdiпg history of philaпthropy aпd emphasized the traпsformative effect his coпtribυtioпs coυld have oп commυпities iп пeed.

Jordaп’s latest coпtract пot oпly υпderscores his eпdυriпg relevaпce iп the sports aпd bυsiпess world bυt also reigпites discυssioпs aboυt wealth distribυtioп, respoпsibility, aпd the iпtersectioп of sports aпd philaпthropy. As the debate rages oп, oпe thiпg remaiпs certaiп: Michael Jordaп’s impact traпsceпds basketball, shapiпg coпversatioпs aпd iпspiriпg actioпs oп a global scale.