The Jordan rules - Google Books
About 4 paragraphs down, you'll read an excerpt from the Jordan rules about all the kids w/ terminal ailments that Jordan met from "Make a Wish Foundation". One of my good friends caddied for him around this time, and he said he was a fantastic guy. Does he sit around campfires with fans singing kumbaya every weekend? No. Is he as good a guy as David Robinson or Drew Breese? No, and few are. He's a complex individual, and like many of us, good and times and bad at times. But to portray him as some sort of rampaging prick is wrong. And considering all that he's done for the city, efforts to portray him as such are quite pathetic.
Umm...did you actually
read Sam Smith's book about
one MJ-lead Bulls season, or for that matter pay attention to any of the stories that have come out about MJ since his final retirement concerning his antics during his playing days?
That entire book (covering only one season, mind you) is filled with stories about Jordan being an absolute prick to a lot of people in the organization. Be it his love-hate relationship with Phil Jackson and his system, his blood lust with Jerry Krause, his punching of Will Perdue and Stacey King, his incessant gambling, they're all there.
You can't just cherry-pick one factoid from a book that paints a completely different picture than the one you are trying to. That's completely disregarding, you know, the truth.
I specifically asked Bill Wennington if he liked playing with him, and he said he never had a problem with Michael, and that Michael was a good teammate.
Ok? So Bill Wennington likes MJ, great. There are a lot of other people that would say some very different things about him. How about you ask Cliff Levingston what playing with MJ was like? Or how about Will Perdue? Scottie Pippen would also have some very interesting things to say, as well.
And besides, there's no way for you to know that Wennington wasn't just giving you the standard "MJ was demanding, but a great player because of it, and I really loved playing with him" bullshit company line that most of these guys walk when talking about Jordan now. Moreover, taking Wennington's comments and using them to paint a picture of MJ that completely flies in the face of a lot of other things we've heard and seen is just stupid and proves absolutely nothing.
He demanded effort from his teammates and excellence.
Yes, and when he didn't get it or thought that he wasn't getting it (from them or the organization), he punched them in the mouth (Will Perdue, Stacey King), ostracized them from the rest of the team (Craig Hodges, Cliff Levingston), purposefully would not dish them the rock on the court (Levingston all the time and Pippen at times), blasted them in the media (the whole team) or tried to get them traded/fired (Jerry Krause, Doug Collins, Stacey King, Cliff Levingston, Craig Hodges). These are all things that Jordan actually
did.
Has this society evolved into such a pile of wuss that these are now the qualities of a raging asshole?
That's a straw man of epic proportions.
The guy brought nothing but joy to my life. Why tear him down for speaking his mind?
Umm...because he actually is and was a raging asshole? That seems like good enough reason to me.
One more thing that isn't mentioned enough about Michael...his best friend and father was murdered in cold blood.
....by people he owed a lot of money to because he was a degenerate gambler, a trait he passed along to his son...
Does this give him a right to be a first class dick?
No. End of story.
Maybe we should. Can you quit acting like this is somehow the golden age of basketball. It's not. Right now, if the game suddenly stopped being played, there are only 4 stars who have a legacy worth remembering. Shaq, well past his prime, Kobe, LeBron, and Wade. That's it.
Jordan was at this best in the late 80's, when he had nothing around him. This was an era of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Isiah Thomas, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, Clyde Drexler, Dominique Wilkins, Chris Mullin, Hakeem Olajuwon, John Stockton, David Robinson, and Dennis Rodman...all in their primes. What stars are in their primes today? What accomplishments should I be amazed about?
Hold on a second. You say that if the NBA were to cease operations this instant, there would only be a handful of stars with legacies worth remembering, which implies that the handful of players already
have legacies, and aren't just starting their career or entering their (or even amidst) their primes.
But then, you go on to list off a bunch of players from the late-80's and bill them as "in their prime", yet you fail to apply the same method of determining whatever the **** it is you are trying to determine to the late-80's group as you did the group in the present. I'm not going to spend the time to go through it all (though maybe I will be forced to if the idiocy continues on this topic), but I'm positive that if you stipulated that if the NBA ceased operations sometime in the late-80's, you would also be left with only a handful of stars that had
legacies (
not potential) worth remembering, because a good number of the 80's players you mentioned were just coming into the league or entering their primes around that time period, and thus were incapable of having "a legacy worth remembering" at that point in history.
Steve Nash wins back to back MVP's in this era but look at Stockton's stats and he had like 12 years in a row where he had BETTER stats than Nash
Exactly how are Stockton's stats "better" than Nash's? If you mean just assists, then yeah, ok I guess, but when you look at their career lines as a whole (which, you know, probably gives you a better perspective on player value), Nash easily emerges as the superior player. I won't get into the specifics of it (yet, but I might have to like I said above), but while Stockton had more assists and was better from inside the arc than Nash has been, Nash is still the better shooter when you take into account 3-pointers and has put up better scoring totals (by almost 2 points on
average per 36 minutes) than Stockton. And, as we all should know by now, scoring is more important in the NBA than any other individual facet of the game, and that difference in Nash's favor is easily enough to place him firmly above Stockton.
Of course, this isn't even accounting for differences in eras-played, something that I think we're going to have to do pretty soon....
but never got the MVP. I mean not even a SNIFF! Because that generation of the league was so loaded he wasn't even in the discussion! He may not have even been a top 12 player at that time! Now he'd be a king.
You can't just compare eras straight away like that. That's not how it works. This is very similar to the Drexler-Wade debate (in principle, specifics and stupidity, actually) that went on a few days ago. What's even more interesting is that the two players we are talking about now pretty much fit in the same different eras I discussed and broke down in the Drexler-Wade bit (yes, I know their careers overlapped by a few years, but for the most part Stockton played in what we can call the Drexler era and Nash in the Wade era).
Because of that, we can use what we know about the differences in those eras (the late-80's was an environment much more conducive to scoring than today's game, along with having
more fouls called per game than today) and apply them here: since Stockton and Nash have comparable stats in everything but overall scoring (Stockton has the edge in assists, but Nash is a better rebounder, fouls less and is the better 3-point and FT shooter, let's call it a wash for clarity's sake), the difference in scoring environments makes Nash's numbers look much better than Stockton's, because Nash scored
more than Stockton in an era where it is
harder to score points than it used to be in Stockton's day. Then, when you account for the fact that scoring is more important than anything else, Nash is cemented as the better player.
Oh yeah, and let's all just forget that you people are using MVP's Won as criteria for judging different eras, because that's just really, really stupid.
Look at all those names you listed from when Jordan was in his prime. How anyone can say Kobe is comparable to MJ after the team he led was beat by 39 points in a FINALS ELIMINATION GAME and going 6-24 and having to have his team bail him out of an atrocious game 7 is beyond me.
When did Michael Jordan EVER play like that in a Finals Game 7?
:bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl:
Are you really using "Performance in Game 7's of NBA Finals" as a tool to compare Kobe and Jordan? Really? It doesn't matter which of them is actually better than the other, that's really, really, really fucking stupid.
Hou, you don't know what you're talking about you need to zip it up when you're talking about MJ.
Yeah, Hou, you need to STFU and listen to guys that compare performance in one specific instance of the playoffs (which already is filled with sample size issues) as a way to discredit a player's whole career. Duh.
