03 October 2012

Michael Jordan didn't live up to Michael Jordan's reputation

By DA | at

Every single player in this year’s NBA Finals is getting a raw deal, and it’s Michael Jordan’s fault.


From 1991 through 1998, Jordan’s teams lost one playoff series, and that was in 1995 to Shaquille O’Neal, Anfernee Hardaway, and the Orlando Magic, after Jordan returned from his baseball sojourn and had played in only 17 regular season games. In other words, it took a stacked team six games to beat a rusty Jordan and the Bulls. It is essential to Jordan’s legend that the only playoff series he lost* was to Shaq and Penny without the benefit of playing into form.



*To Jordan’s hagiographers, the first six seasons of his career weren’t failures to win so much as they were exercises designed to figure out what would allow Jordan to own the basketball world. Linguistically, this shows up when people say “Jordan never lost a playoff series…” etc., ignoring those brilliant early years when he simply didn’t have a supporting cast. For what it’s worth, Phil Jackson perpetuates this, too, saying that Jordan had to learn to be “committed to team goals”.



It’s also essential to Jordan’s legend that he willed his teams to victory when his team was matched up against equal or superior opponents. But how much of that is just memory playing tricks and how much of it is reality? In the six full Jordan seasons from 1990-91 through 1997-98, I see the Bulls finishing with a top three record each of those seasons. I also see that they had the best player in the world and a top-five to top-ten player backing him up each of those seasons (Scottie Pippen). When could those teams reasonably be called underdogs?


The lesson most NBA observers took away from this run wasn’t that a team with two of the three best players in any given series is pretty darn tough to beat. Possibly because Pippen was so underrated at the time**, they took away the lesson that the team with the best player should win the series, and that whenever that didn’t happen, said best player must have failed in some essential way.



**From 1990-91 through 1997-98, to use just one snapshot, Pippen put up PERs of 19.2 to 23.2, which, as a mostly offensive measure, makes him every bit Reggie Miller’s equal — or superior. But with his now-universally admired defense, he probably had at least the impact on games that Shawn Kemp had (a notch ahead by PER over those seasons), and might reasonably be discussed in the same breath as the other all-around talents of the era: somewhere below Jordan, Olajuwon, and The Admiral, but right there in total production with Ewing, Stockton, Payton, Malone, Barkley, and anyone else you might mention. Top-five to top-ten, year in and year out.



It may not be stated explicitly, but that’s the post-Jordan reputational burden foisted upon every NBA Finals team’s statistical leader, when it’s conveniently forgotten that for all of Jordan’s pre-1991 excellence he couldn’t win a championship without Pippen, nor could he win while the Detroit Bad Boys and Larry Bird’s Celtics were still at their full strength.


For that matter, none of those individual Pistons could carry a team to a title by themselves. Bird never won a title without McHale and Parish. Magic never won without Kareem. Kareem never won without Magic or Oscar. Kobe never won without Shaq or Gasol. Shaq never won without Kobe or Wade.


Fact: Since the 1979-80 season, which marked Bird’s and Magic’s entry into the NBA and, thus, the beginning of the league’s modern era, there have been only four championship teams led by a single superstar without an elite supporting player. Jordan never led any of those teams. Bird didn’t. Magic didn’t.


All three Detroit Pistons championships were unusual to the era in that those teams’ talent was oddly distributed pretty evenly through the roster; there was no single player who acted as pillar, focus. But at least the 1988-89 and 1989-90 Pistons had two Hall of Famers on the team, though the 1988-89 team relied less on Dennis Rodman than they did the next year, so we’ll count Isiah as the only Hall of Famer playing like one on the 1988-89 team. There’s one.


The 2004 Pistons team put four All-Star-caliber players together (Billups, Sheed, Ben Wallace, Hamilton) with an All-World defender who was near All-Star caliber (Tayshaun), and upended a Lakers team in the Finals that had the two best players in the series. It was clear in that series that the Pistons’ total talent and teamwork overwhelmed the non-Shaq/Kobe players on the Lakers. That’s two.


The 1994 Houston Rockets had Hakeem Olajuwon and a bunch of nice above-average starter types. If anything, the Dream’s performance that playoff season should be The Measure for singlehandedly willing one’s team to victory. 29 Pts/G, 11 Reb/G, 4.3 Ast/G, and 4.0 Blk/G, for the entire playoffs. Crikey.


Finally, the 2003 Spurs featured Tim Duncan, David Robinson’s dignity, Tony Parker back when the Spurs were perfectly willing to trade him for Ason Kidd, Manu before he became Manu, and Stephen Jackson doing Stephen Jackson things, which cuts both ways and always ends up as a slight net positive.


Those four teams won without a legitimate All-Star-level sidekick, which makes the NBA 4-for-31 in achieving the implicit Jordan standard of leading one’s team to glory by himself. If the Dallas Mavericks win, the league will be 5-for-32, and Dirk Nowitzki will join Tim Duncan as the only active players to pass the implicit Jordan test. If the Miami Heat win, the league will be 4-for-32. Either way, the real truth is not that the greatest players transcend their competition, but that the best teams tend to have better players, and that when a team with the better individuals loses a series, it’s because someone caught fire, or because farther down the roster the winning team made up the difference at the top. That is to say, LeBron James is screwed in the MSM’s opinion because if he wins a title, he will not pass the Jordan test thanks to Dwyane Wade’s presence, and if the Heat lose the series, it will necessarily be because of his failures.


Michael Jordan was the best player of his era, unarguably a top-six all time player, but the standard applied to James, the best player in this year’s Finals, derived from the perception of what Jordan’s career was, best exemplified by Gregg Doyel asking James about “shrinking” in the fourth quarter, never actually applied to Jordan, because while Jordan played exceptionally well in his playoffs career, in those six successful seasons he always had Pippen there to back him up, putting up 19/8/4 playoff game after playoff game. Imagine if Jichael Mordan did the same stuff today with Pippen as his teammate. I’m sure he’d never hear the end of how he couldn’t do it himself, like Jordan did.


(Originally published June 8th, 2011 on DavidAArnott.com)

No comments:

Post a Comment