Originally posted by Palynka
Talk about intellectual dishonesty.
Pippen left for teams that were ALREADY great. He was always playing second-fiddle to someone and his petulance and arrogance (i.e. the Kukoc incident) led him to have problems with coaches (Phil Jackson) and team-mates (Olajuwon).
Nothing dishonest at all about what i said. If you'd care to dispute any facts i outlined, feel free, I'm listening.
Pippen left for teams that were "already great"... so what? Fact is, Pippen made the all defensive team without Jordan, Jordan never made it without Pippen. You'd think an all time great like Michael could have at least made it once on his own, without having another top-50 player as a teammate.
The first Bulls championship was won because Phil Jackson had the guts to basically admit that Michael Jordan couldnt handle Magic Johnson.
Besides, as I said, Pippen still made the all defensive team no matter where he was... and the Bulls did pretty well with just him when Jordan retired after the 93 season. As I mentioned, Pippen made all-stars out of Grant and Armstrong, who played a combined 28 years in the NBA and only made the all star team one time each.
Even Jordan's presence on the 92 Dream Team was overstated in terms of its impact....JORDAN WAS THE ONLY MEMBER OF THE TEAM (other than Christian Laettner, who doesn't count because he shouldn't have been there in the first place) who shot under 50% from the field.
Here are the FG percentages for the Dream Team players in the 92 Olympics:
Barkley .711
Malone .645
Ewing .623
Mullin .619
Pippen .596
Drexler .578
Robinson .574
Johnson .567
Bird .521
Stockton .500
Jordan and Laettner were the sole members of the "UNDER .500 " club
JORDAN .451 (includling .211(!) from 3 pt land )
Laettner .450
Jordan missed by 1 percentage point of being the WORST shooter on the entire teamA, beating LAETTNER by .001!!
That team would have been the most dominant in Olympic history had Jordan not been such a ball hog...he was the only player on the team to take more than 100 shots (113, Barkley was 2nd with 83 FGA, except Barkley made most of them). (Russell's 1956 team was the most dominant in Olympic history, in terms of avg. margin of victory).
Not that the Olympics are the sole measuring stick of a player, but Jordan was the worst NBA player on that team, in terms of his performance in the games themselves.
Jordan was the best player of the 90s, but that's as far as it goes with him.
Yeah, i know all about the "Kukoc incident". One play in 16 years... Can I use a potential game-winning shot that Jordan missed in order to prove that he wasn't good in the clutch? (Game One, 1991 finals, missed the 12 foot buzzer beater with the Bulls down by one, just to name one)
Pippen left for teams that were "already great"... so what? The BULLS were not even a winning team with Jordan until after Pippen (and Grant) got there. Did it take Bill Russell 4 years to finally lead his team to a winning record, as it took Jordan? Did it take Wilt 4 years? Jabbar? Bird?
In the time it took Jordan (4 years)just to lead his team to a .500 season, Bill Russell won 3 NBA titles.
And Pippen still made the all defensive team no matter where he was... and the Bulls did pretty well with just him when Jordan retired after the 93 season. As I mentioned, Pippen made all-stars out of Grant and Armstrong, who played a combined 28 years in the NBA and only made the all star team one time each...and they did it despite the fact that Jordan wasn't around to "make them better".
I agree with you that it's really just about impossible to pick one player as definitively "the best"... however, I think it has to be either Wilt or Russell...
In fact, it's interesting to me that the NBA is really the only league that tries to promote one player as being better than all the rest who ever played the game... Jordan is David Stern's boy, no question about it!
Wilt and Russell played against each other 142 times in 10 seasons, including playoffs...in those 142 games, Wilt scored exactly as many points as he had rebounds, averaged 28+ of each per game against Russell... Russell averaged about 14 and 23 against Wilt. Awesome battles!
But Jordan was most certainly NOT the geatest player ever... if you follow the money in terms of how much advertising revenue ESPN has received from NIKE over the last 20+ years, it's easy to see why ESPN picked Jordan as "the greatest athlete of the 20th century" (incidentally, without announcing any sort of criteria for thier evaluations). Follow the money! 🙂
Russell would be a much better choice as the best player ever instead of Jordan.
Bill Russell was 10-0 in game 7s (plus, he also won a game 5 of a best-of-five series)... you don't get much better than that.
Bill Russell in game 7s (he averaged 14 pts and 22 reb/game in his reg season career):
57 NBA Finals - 19 pts 32 rebounds
59 East Finals - 18 pts 32 rebounds
60 NBA Finals - 22 pts 35 rebounds (Russell's eye was hemorrhaging in this game, result of getting hit... but hey, let's not forget, Jordan played with the sniffles one time)
62 East finals - 19 pts, don't have rebound number (this was against Wilt..he also held Wilt to 22 pts, after Wilt averaged 50 ppg during the regular season)
62 NBA finals - 30 pts 40 rebounds (THE GREATEST PLAYOFF PERFORMANCE IN HISTORY...THIRTY POINTS, FORTY REBOUNDS in GAME SEVEN)...
63 East finals - 20 pts, don't have rebound number
65 East finals - 15 pts 29 rebounds 9 assists (against Wilt... this was the "Havlicek stole the ball" game)
66 NBA finals - 25 pts 32 rebounds (OK, this is getting silly now!)
68 East finals - 12 pts, held Wilt to 14. Also chipped in 26 rebounds
69 NBA finals - 21 rebounds vs. Wilt...won his 11th title in a 13 year NBA career... that was his final game
When the championship was on the line, Russell had no equal.
Yes, Wilt lost a lot of playoff series to Russell and the Celtics... but Wilt beat the Celtics one time, in 1967...and that's once more than anyone else was able to do during the decade of the 60s.
Russell was 11-1 in NBA finals, losing in 1958 (six games) after breaking his ankle (and still playing)... Jordan's considered an iron man because he played a playoff game with the flu one time (as if that's never happened before... again, Jordan, maximum hype-age.. gets the sniffles, "Oh my God how can he play like that???"😉.
Plus, guys like Wilt and Russell would give you 48 min/game.
Wilt averaged 48.5 min/game in 1962, sitting out only EIGHT MINUTES of the ENTIRE SEASON (but playing all overtime minutes in something like 7 overtime games).
Comparing Wilt to Jordan, unless you only consider free throws, Wilt would dominate Jordan in every category, even passing, as Jordan never led the league in assits (which Wilt did, becoming the only non-guard ever to do so).
Also, Wilt and Russell didn't compile their numbers in a league full of high school players.
In addition, when you consider what Russell had to put up with, racially, in Boston in the 1960s, Jordan never could have survived in that environment.
btw, it was JORDAN who objected to the triangle offense, not Pippen, because he knew it would take shots away from him. Jordan was always about his own numbers.