By Johnny Askounis/ info@eurohoops.net
Playing alongside Michael Jordan, all six championships won by the Chicago Bulls in franchise history featured Scottie Pippen as an extremely valuable member of the team. It’s been a minute and a Last Dance documentary miniseries since playing days, but Pippen resurfaced once more with unkind remarks regarding MJ.
Pippen, 57, labeled Jordan as a ‘horrible’ player before teaming up in 1987. The Bulls had picked him up via trade with the Seattle Supersonics after he was selected with the fifth overall pick of the 1987 NBA draft.
“I saw Jordan play before I came to play with the Bulls. You guys saw him play. He was a horrible player. He was horrible to play with. He was all one-on-one, he’s shooting bad shots, and all of a sudden we become a team and we start winning and everybody forgot who he was,” he told Stacey King as the latest guest of Gimme The Hot Sauce podcast.
Jordan, 60, won the Rookie of the Year award in 1985 and was named in the All-Star Game for each of the three seasons before the arrival of Pippen. Championships famously followed in the form of two three-peats between 1991 and 1998.
“I’ll put it like this, all my years I played in Chicago, played with Michael, I never saw one free agent come to the Bulls and say they want to play there with Michael,” added Pippen, “I do recall a couple of them coming in there in the offseason when he retired or the two years he was away from the game. So I say that to say this, the success of the Bulls came from the team. It didn’t come from Michael Jordan. It didn’t come from him being critical of other players. If anything, that discouraged players because no player wants to be talked down to, belittled, or even. Made fun of.”
“LeBron will be the greatest statistical guy”
Comparing Jordan to LeBron James was the starting point. Pippen praised the NBA’s all-time leading scorer falling short of calling him the greatest player of all time.
“LeBron will be the greatest statistical guy to ever play the game of basketball. And there’s no comparison to him. None. So does that make him the greatest player to ever play the game?,” he wondered, “I’ll leave that up for debate because I don’t believe there’s a great player because our game’s a team game, and one player can’t do it.”
On a possibly unrelated note, Pippen’s ex-wife, Larsa, has been dating Jordan’s son, Marcus, since 2022.
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