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 laud anything time-tested from the past… things that did work for the time and paved the way for the up-and-comers. There are ditches of extremism on either side of any argument.
“Michael Jordan wasn’t really so clutch.” There has been plenty of research to show that Jordan, along with other perceived “money time” players like Kobe, only hit shots taken with the game on the line about a third of the time or less.
It’s not about making the highest percentage of shots. It is the willingness to take those shots at crucial moments. It is the strength to shoulder the blame when the failures come. Not everyone can handle that.
Remember Scottie Pippen in the 1994 playoffs, the year Jordan took off to play baseball? Pippen became frustrated several times during that season, including once refusing to enter a pivotal game because Coach Phil Jackson didn’t call a play for him. In short: He couldn’t handle the burden. No shame, for few of us could. “All of the pressure is on me,” he complained in those days, as it dawned on him what Jordan shouldered.
“Michael Jordan’s statistics in whatever area don’t match up to (fill-in-a-name).” There are already movements to place Steph Curry and LeBron James above MJ. Usually people take some stat or area in which another player equals or exceeds Jordan, and use that to build an overall argument.
We have oceans of analytical information, or better yet mindless trivia, in our time. It stands to reason you could find a way in which someone beats Jordan at something. Sometimes, we simply want a shiny new toy to stare at and marvel over. And, in true New Age religion fashion, we try to create our own realities, using reams of figures as building blocks. Numbers don’t lie, but people always do.
Notice that some of the arguments begin to overlap. You can’t compare today’s best three-point shooters against Jordan’s numbers, for example, because people weren’t putting up long distance shots at that rate back then. Outside of the Reggie Miller and Dale Ellis types, they clearly weren’t putting in time to improve that area, as they are today. We have now calculated the risk-reward of treys to an exalted level. It is a different game, not necessarily “better” just because guys are more practiced shooters. A technically-perfect singer is not always better or more entertaining than a backwoods country belter who has put her heart and soul into her voice.
How simple can we make this? Jordan, similar to a player like Dwyane Wade, didn’t shoot threes all the time, because he didn’t have to. Why should he? No one could stop him!
Related: Why the 2016 Warriors would lose to the 1996 Bulls