Babe Ruth’s dominance is not respected by casual fans, nor by sports talking heads who want to whip up some controversy. You might call it “hot takes.” Jerry West and Rick Barry and Wilt are afterthoughts to the modern sports observer, who refuses to consider that athletes were tough and fast and smart prior to 1990.
This erosion of great athletes’ legacies happens to everyone. Time not only brings retirement. Time throws dirt upon anything that happened yesterday, at least to all of you prisoners of the moment. It’s inevitable. The new generation wants to remove the landmark set by their fathers. The younger always believes the newer way is better. Then, hypocritically, they will roll their eyes at older folks who applaud anything time-tested from the past… things that actually did work for the time. There are ditches of extremism on either side of any argument. We discussed this in “3-point cult.”
Related: Is the three-pointer outdated?
The same downgrading will happen to Michael Jordan, even though he is still currently, and largely, seen as the best basketball player ever. In fact, it has already begun. Let’s examine some of the criticism aimed at Jordan, now that he is receding into the video clip bin of history.
“Michael Jordan succeeded because had a good team.” We all know that Jordan didn’t win his rings until he had a supporting cast worthy of his fire. For some reason, this is a strike against only him.
One popular dart, often thrown, is that when Jordan left the NBA that first time, the Chicago Bulls went from 57 to 55 wins. This is posited as proof that he wasn’t that valuable to a good-without-him team, “because when LeBron leaves teams, they fall apart.” There is some truth to this observation. The problem is that even LeBron never really won until he got better teammates, too. He just helped losing teams improve a lot.
1994 Bulls without Jordan: Were they as good as people say, without Jordan? That 57 to 55-win drop after his first retirement: Was it really what it looked like? Jordan wasn’t really all that valuable to them?
Magic Johnson reportedly came out of college when he did because he knew he’d end up with the Lakers already-loaded team. This reveals Magic as the prototypical architect of LeBron’s “Decision,” although it wasn’t quite as in-yo-face as Bron has been. It was more backdoor type of stuff. But, Magic angled to get on a team with the better players and no one cares.
Larry Bird had companions like McHale, Parish and Dennis Johnson, plus a dedicated front office in Boston. Not many people put the “he has good teammates” criticism on them.
One man can affect a lot in the game of basketball. But to win titles, he needs help in this thing we call a “team sport”.
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