when MJ created basketball he looked down from above and drew a line...it was meant to jump from but lesser men decided to take a free shot from it. as an offering off apology i create this thread on behalf of us lesser beings.

share your fav MJ memory and link a vid (related or unrelated)


fav Mj memory - i was at my friends dad's office in the back watching tv and jordans first game back was on. one of the best days of my life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1LeVCwyHas

unrelated vid -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Ee6TVtdPU

favorite MJ memory: banging pots and pans in our driveway after he hit the shot against the Jazz

also Space jam

I liked how he told everybody off in his vicious Hall of Fame induction speech. Never any shortage of WIM with that guy!

He's not even the fourth best basketball player of all time...

Well I don't know all four players MSchu puts ahead of Jordan, but I do know one obvious one who is ahead of him.

Big Shot Bob, Robert Horry of course.

I mean, he has seven rings from winning seven NBA championships.

Jordan only won six NBA championships, that's one championship less than Robert Horry won.

Since you all are always saying it's all about how many championships you win that determines how great you are then by that metric Robert Horry is better than Michael Jordan obviously.

I used to live about 10 minutes away from MJ growing up. We were trick or treating one year, and went to his house. His wife answered the door, and he was in the back with a broom and dustpan cleaning something up. Amazing to see a legend doing housework. Some of you might ask what they were handing out for Halloween.

I'm not surprised at all. Many people, when given the opportunity to speak about his game, say something about his character and work ethic instead or in addition to.

Have friends who caddied for him. He does not tip.

thats actually a cool story bro. a neat little glimpse into his life.

No love for MJ here. Shocked he gave out $5 gc. They were probably free and just laying around.

My Jordan memory:
A road trip to Indianapolis to see Bulls play the Pacers. Winter of '86-'87.

This game I think.

In the trunk, final case of Molson Export Non-BB-Fan Friend and I hauled back from Toronto earlier that year. (NBBFF not on the road trip) Wasn't even planning on drinking it that night. Just the most convenient place to store contraband from all involved's parents.

Backseat Friend (who has no share in the Trunk Beer) decides to store a wine cooler in the glove box. Somewhere in Indiana on Hwy 74, we get pulled over for 65 mph in a 55. (Where the speed limit is now 70, btw) Cop spots wine cooler when driver has to fetch registration. Cop has probable cause and searches car. Decides we need to empty all the beer onto the pavement. I have never been so mad. Cop takes forever to eventually let us leave with a couple citations and a bunch of empties.

Naturally, we don't get to the game until mid 3rd quarter. In the nosebleeds so near-sighted me couldn't see a God damn thing. I couldn't tell Jordan from Paxson. Only thing I remember from the game is hearing one rim rattling dunk.
Heartbreaking phone call to NBBFF the next day to explain why all his beer is gone.

So no, I have no great love for MJ.

I appreciate his transcendent talent, his work ethnic, and his achievement. But he's really not a very good person in a lot of ways, the way he treats people etc. I'll take a guy like Tim Duncan and y'all can have Jordan.

I just read on espn that this is the 25th anniversary of the shrug game.

Sports right now is missing this kind of player - not someone who you think "he's great, he has every chance to win the championship/tournament/whatever", but someone you think "I expect him to win" and someone you can see other PLAYERS expect to win.

The only real examples I can remember are him and Tiger. Lebron can have all the stats and be dominant - but he's also failed to win with him at his best, and failed many times. He might win this year, he might not, and no one would be surprised either way. When the Bulls made the finals, you expected them to win, period.

I wonder if the truth about his baseball dalliance being a secret 2yr suspension for gambling will ever be proven true.

The "you knew he would get it done" thing is myth, it's retroactively fitting a narrative on it. Yes we may have FELT that way at the time, but we also felt the Warriors were inevitable last year and they managed to lose.

Jordan did lose in '95, but we dismiss it because it was a partial season for him. It's an unfair freeroll for his legacy, because if he had won we would have said "yea, of course we knew Jordan was going to get it done".

LeBron has failed because he hasn't always had the clear best team like MJ did. LeBron did have that feel I think, it was surprising to see him lose in many of the years.

Steph Curry, whom I despise, comes close imo. Just very scary (especially backed up by a team that won 73 games and then added the 3rd best player in the league), feels inevitable.

But the fact that it DOES sometimes feel that way with Curry and LBJ kinda proves that the whole thing is BS, because we know it isn't true.

Don't really get your point. It was felt that he would somehow win, and he did. Sometimes you have a narrative, and it lives up to reality.

This isn't even close to accurate. MJ had Pippen, but beyond that, the other players on the team were far from world beaters. Starters like Bill Cartwright, Luc Longley, BJ Armstrong, Craig Hodges are not exactly a killer lineup.

He faced the Magic Johnson Lakers once, the Payton/Kemp Sonics (Kemp might be a bit of a weird joke now, but at the time, he was Kevin Garnett level), and Stockton/Malone (two clear first ballot HOF players) twice.

The Bulls were the best team because they had Jordan; if you look at players 2-12 on each roster in the finals he played in, I'm not sure you find a lot of difference.

If you don't think MJ has excellent talent around him if what to tell you, especially after he came back. Pippen, great hof plsyer, rodman hof, Harper was a 20/5/5 guy be for joining the Bulls, Kukoc, Kerr was a good shooter, even luc longley wasnt bad, he was a big body, knew where to be on the floor and could hit a decent shot.

No one is arguing he didn't have an excellent team - one man teams don't make the finals, much less win. I'm only arguing that he did not always clearly have the best team.

Let's take their last couple teams, which is when the Jordan narrative was in full effect.

Guards: Stockton/Hornacek/Anderson vs Jordan/Kerr/Harper - kind of hard to compare Jordan vs Stockton as they are completely different players. Both are easily in the discussion for the best ever at their position. Hornacek and Kerr are basically the same player. By this point in his career, Harper and Anderson is not a significant difference.

Forwards: Pippen/Rodman/Kukoc vs Malone/Russell/Foster - Pippen/Malone gets the same answer as Jordan/Stockton - I think you can make a decent argument here that the Bulls get a clear edge. The difference is that Malone/Russell are playing significantly more minutes, so the inclusion of Foster isn't quite the dagger it should be. Rodman was nothing special in either of the finals vs the Jazz, averaging about 8 rpg and contributing nothing in terms of points, while Malone (who would have been his most likely player to defend) was going for 25/10 both years (w/45% and 50% shooting), so his defense was not so overwhelming.

Centers: Longley vs Ostertag - nothing significant here in terms of difference. Neither was a key win/loss factor.

Were the Bulls better? Maybe. I wouldn't say they were clearly better and certainly it's plausible to believe this Jazz lineup could beat this Bulls lineup on paper.

edit: did a bit more research and the Bulls were believed to be clear underdogs in 98:

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/03/sp...ng-possum.html

You do realize they did not go to the finals in 95'. They lost to the Orlando Magic in the Semis and yes it was because Jordan played half a season. Even the best can't come midway through the season and win a championship without the team chemistry and just being in shape enough. Jordan has been to the finals 6 times and won 6 times and won finals MVP each time. Tell me who will do that again? All these Lebron comparisons to Jordan fall short when the finals record comes into play. Also everyone knew Jordan would get the ball on a last shot, yet still couldn't stop him. The ultimate clutch gene right there. Something you cannot say about Lebron. Also since when did Jordan have the clear best team? He had 1 all star in Scottie Pippen. The rest of the team were all role players. Take Jordan off their team I bet they barely make the playoffs.

Who is your top 2 current players since you have KD at #3?

1. LeBron 2. IDK, I'd prob put KD tbh but was just copying what Haralabos said. He has Curry or Kawhi as #2 I'd guess.

Not worth responding to this anymore, there's a reason it has its own "containment" thread in Sporting Events forum.

Never ceases to amaze how poker players, who've experienced severe variance firsthand, throw any understanding of it out the window when it comes to sports. (This includes Jordan's positive variance at the right times that formed a narrative.)

Check out the roster Lebron took to the Finals in 2006.
http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/CLE/2007.html
Woof

I understand variance just fine. At the same time, you can't just handwave away every result in every endeavor as "good/bad short term variance" no matter how many times you've read "Fooled by Randomness". The winner of the NBA championship has a very high skill dependency and a low variance dependency in my opinion.

If you need a bigger sample size, in his 7 year peak (6 titles, one elimination), he would have played 26 playoff series, and went 25-1 in series (being forced to only two game 7s, which involves the highest variance possible), and 99-31 in playoff games.

To put this in "variance" terms for you, let's assume that based on that 99-31 record, he entered every playoff game with a 75% chance to win. If you look at this page:

http://basketballnumbers.com/2011/04...atical-primer/

You'll see that a team that in a scenario where one team has a 750 winning percentage and the other has a 250 winning percentage, the odds of the better team winning are 99.7%.

All just variance tho right?