• Jordan: Beyond 'The Last Dance': bets, pressures and the shadows of his career
  • NBA: hatred between Jordan and Isiah Thomas

Michael Jordan said before the broadcast of ' The Last Dance ', the ESPN and Netflix documentary that narrates the last year of the fantastic Chicago Bulls of the nineties, that perhaps after seeing the 'show' people were going to to think that he was a " bad person ". At the moment, in the four chapters that have been published, some of the controversies that the best player of all time had with several of his colleagues, with the direction of the franchise and even how he maintains his enmity today, have been seen. with the Detroit ' Bad Boys' , the team that deprived him of reaching the NBA Finals during his first years in the league.

"I hate them, I still hate them," he explained in one chapter, referring to the moment when, after finally beating the Pistons, star Isiah Thomas and his teammates left the track without greeting the Bulls. "You are not going to convince me that Isiah did not act like an asshole, " says Jordan in 'The Last Dance.' Both in the show and in the interviews he has done after its broadcast, Thomas justifies the gesture in how different the NBA was then, and questions Jordan's theoretical historical superiority over other basketball greats. "He dominated when others were already finishing our races," he acknowledged, and placed Abdul-Jabbar, Bird and Magic ahead of '23'.

The disagreement with the 'Bad Boys' is not the only thing that Jordan faces in the documentary. " Scottie was selfish, " he says, about Pippen's transfer request, his great squire and one of the best players in the league during that decade, in the 97-98 season, when he collected only 2.7 million, for the 33 that the Bulls paid Michael. Nor did he talk too much with Rodman , in a situation where Dennis' character didn't help either: "We had no relationship outside of basketball," acknowledges the center in one of the chapters.

But what Jordan refers to as a "bad person" may be due to the treatment that he and Pippen gave to Jerry Krause , who died in 2017, during those years . The general manager of the franchise, the architect of Scottie's election in the draft and of getting the transfer by Rodman, he seems the villain of the documentary, the culprit of the end of the dynasty, and is the object of the mockery of the team stars during all that time, even more after an unfortunate phrase: "They are the organizations, not players, that win titles. " All this twitched Jordan, who was already hesitating. "Are those pills to keep you dwarfed or are they for diet?" He says in one of the chapters. "Jerry, do you want to play with us? They'll have to lower the basket," he scoffs another time.

Jordan had a hard time accepting Krause's decision to promote Phil Jackson and fire Doug Collins , the coach who had made Michael MVP of the league and with whom he had averaged 37 points per game for an entire season. Jackson was a Krause bet and came with the 'offensive triangle' under his arm, an attack tactic in which Jordan was going to see his possession of the ball reduced. "Doug was like a father to me, he understood me," he explained. That decision by Krause laid the foundation for Jordan's 'greatness': six rings in nine seasons.

Despite everything, the hatred of '23' to the General Manager is palpable and there are even fans who compare Krause with Mr. Swackhammer , the 'boss' of the team of aliens that Jordan competes against in ' Space Jam '. Many viewers criticize that 'The Last Dance' fattens the deceased, without giving voice, at the moment, to some of its defenders, such as Toni Kukoc , completely absent throughout the 'show' and vital during the last three rings of the Bulls. "I wish he was alive so I could tell his side of the story," Kukoc told 'ESPN.' "It is easy to love Michael, Scottie, Dennis and Phil. I adore them. But you have to listen to the other party too and Jerry built the team, you have to give him credit, " explains the Croatian, who admits that Jordan and Pippen called him 'Jerry's Boy'.

Kukoc was one of the 'second echelon' members of the squad whom Jordan pressed to improve and win more titles. The show shows the anger that the '23' throws at Paxson or Kerr during training, and other former teammates like Will Perdue or Bill Wennington also recognize Jordan's character. "My name was Will Vanderbilt, from my home university, because I thought he was not worthy of my last name, " Perdue explains in an interview with 'Fansided'. "One day, Perdue put an illegal cap on him and the next day he had a black eye," Horace Grant acknowledged in 2015. "I blocked him once and he challenged me, physically and verbally, throughout training," said Wennington, a former center for the team.

That was Michael Jordan's other ' fight' to win six rings. "It was a seven-year fight, " he said, heartbroken in the locker room after winning his first championship. A fight on the track, on the training court and in the offices. Against everyone and for everything. And it worked.

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