There Will Never be Another Michael Jordan, but There Will be Players Who are Better
The development of the NBA since His Airness has made a legacy like Jordan’s likely irreplicable
A more Hollywood script couldn’t be written for the widely claimed “Greatest of All Time.” Michael Jordan enters the NBA an ambitious youngster who takes a franchise in despair to 6 championships. The tale of outworking his competition in order to elevate his game and reach NBA finals, and bring a trophy to Chicago, cements an American value that we see repeatedly in many aspects of our culture. His final shot as a Chicago Bull was even a game-winner to clinch their 6th NBA Finals win.
The mysticism of Jordan’s career helps embolden his status as the GOAT, for it’s going to be impossible to emulate again. He made basketball a global sport and saw the NBA explode as a league that the world, not just the United States, pays attention to. This catalyzation of basketball reaching every corner of American and international culture is a once in a sport’s lifetime occurrence. You can’t re-globalize something after its been globalized.
No matter how far the NBA advances as an organization, or how talented its players get, there will never be another Michael Jordan. His imprint on the game of basketball is the largest of any person past, present and likely future. However, there will be players who are just as good, if not better, but they will never receive the same treatment or have the same legacy.
While Jordan will never, and should never, be overlooked as one of the games most talented and athletic players in its history, the larger reason for why nobody will match his legacy is because the floor of the league is getting higher, not that Michael Jordan’s ceiling is impossible to reach.
Due to the evolution of both the league’s talent and economic landscape, a Jordan-esque tenure in the NBA is likely impossible to replicate.
The caliber of talent in the modern NBA is vastly superior to the players of the 80s and 90s. Nobody could shoot 48% from 30 feet out like Steph Curry, nobody could handle the ball like Kyrie Irving and nobody would even think that a near 7-footer could move and score like Kevin Durant or Giannis Antetokounmpo. Steve Kerr, a former teammate of Jordan, has even stated that there’s no chance he’d be able to play in the modern NBA.
Nor did players strength train like they do now. Michael Jordan famously built 15 pounds in muscle in the 1990 offseason, coming up on his seventh season in the league, in order to match the physicality of the “Bad Boy” Pistons — his first time going through a real strength training program. He beat his rival to reach the NBA Finals later that season. Now NBA players have likely been intensely training since their early days of high school. You can no longer pick up weights for the first time and get stronger than most of the league.
Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas of the aforementioned Pistons squad has even said that the caliber of today’s players are higher, stating that “10 to 11” guys have Jordan-like athleticism, compared to Jordan being on a level of his own in their day. He then ponders the question of what LeBron or KD in the league back then would’ve looked like. It’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t put up better numbers and win more games than they do now. Not to mention that LeBron James is heavier and more athletic than any member of the Bad Boy Pistons rosters, the ultimate example of basketball physicality to many.
Beyond anecdotes, by looking at the league’s history we can evaluate how efficient the league collectively was at scoring. We can do this by looking at the effective field goal percentage (eFG%) of the league as a whole by season. eFG% is a statistic that adjusts for 3-pointers being worth more than 2, giving a more honest look at overall scoring abilities.
If we make the cutoff when the league collectively reached .500 (50%), there are 9 seasons to evaluate. The top 8 of those seasons occur within the last 11 years. The top 5 spots are occupied by each of the last five NBA seasons, with each consecutive season getting better. The 9th spot is the 1994–1995 season. When looking at the top 20 seasons, 13 of them occurred in the post-Jordan era. Jordan competed in 5 of them.
When looking at individual teams in each season, 40 out of the top 50 teams in NBA history for season eFG% competed in the post-Jordan era. Only 10 played during the entirety of Jordan’s tenure, including the seasons he was temporarily retired.
All this shows that the current state of the NBA is the pinnacle of the NBA’s offensive prowess.
One counterpoint to this is usually that teams today don’t play defense like they used to. In regards to hard fouls, it’s correct to say that the league has ramped up repercussions for intentionally fouling someone, thus deterring people from potentially harming players, but that doesn’t make up what vast majority of defense is.
When looking at the league’s average field goal percentage (FG%) by season, 12 out of the top 20 seasons occurred during the Jordan era. Not a single season from the post-Jordan era is in the top 20. Only at spot 21 do we begin to see modern NBA seasons come in. We already know the league today is more efficient at scoring, so how can their eFG% and FG% be so different?
It’s because the league is actually better defensively now. Jordan played in an era that didn’t allow anything that resembled a zone defense, and while there is still a 3-second defensive violation in today’s NBA, players can’t get penalized for not explicitly guarding a player anymore. In the 90s, if you were caught patrolling an area of the court the other team would get a technical free throw — impeding help-defense. Nor could defenders sit below the free throw line if their man was above the 3 point line. Removing the rules against zone defense, on top of players being stronger and faster defensively, makes it harder to score closer to the basket. This is in part why the 3 pointer has taken over the league, and its result has been an offensive explosion in the NBA unparalleled to anything before it. The NBA’s offensive prowess has increased in spite of defense getting better, not because its getting worse.
Another talking point is that the hand-checking in the earlier eras would cripple modern players, particularly guards. This notion doesn’t hold up either. David Thorpe, a former lead ESPN analyst and coach of players from high school to the NBA, has commented on what he considers the myth of hand-checking being as frequent and consequential as some say:
“If I wanted to get close enough to hand-check you, I better just be able to grab you, because being that close, you could change directions and change speed on me and now I’m behind you, and I’m not allowed to hold you as you go by me. So it was bad defense to be that close too often.”
Thorpe also states that hand-checking wouldn’t stop anyone for the simple reason that “screens were legal then, and they are now too.” The athleticism and skill of Steph Curry, James Harden or Damien Lillard drastically out-weighs any player placing a single hand on them. It’s important to not get lost in revisionist history and remember that exerting force forward to push a player or holding a player to limit movement was still a foul back then. Even with the “offensive-minded” rules and “lighter fouls” in today’s game, teams shoot a lot fewer free throws today than in the 80s or 90s.
When the competition is stronger, faster and better, with more high-level players, there is going to be a higher diversity of champions since more highly talented and athletic players will be dispersed amongst more teams. In Jordan’s 13 years with the Bulls, there were only 4 different NBA champions. In the last 13 years of the league, there have been 8.
The economics of the modern NBA also diminish the likelihood of any player’s or team’s championship window replicating Jordan’s. In today’s league, players and the Players Association are more effectively prioritizing their value as a player over any sort of hokey franchise loyalty. This gives the players more power positions for future collective bargaining negotiations.
Scottie Pippen signing a seven-year deal, getting severely underpaid his worth and being denied the opportunity to renegotiate his contract undoubtedly allows Jordan to assign 6 titles to his name. This doesn’t happen in the modern NBA as the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) allows for a max of five years per contract. With current CBA rules, after the five years of his contract, Pippen either gets paid enough money to stay in Chicago, preventing the Bulls from signing Dennis Rodman (teams could only sign free agents for the league minimum salary if they were above the salary cap, which the Bulls would’ve been), or Pippen walks away and leaves a gigantic hole in the roster — one that might be impossible to fill. When Jordan said that “winning has a price” at the end of Episode 7 of The Last Dance, that price was paid by Pippen more than anyone else.
Championships bring diminishing returns if your value as a player is getting undercut. Because of this change in the CBA, the Jordan-esque days of having the same core of players win 6 championships over 8 years are likely over.
Michael Jordan existed in the perfect time. He was the perfect player for a perfect system in a franchise that absolutely needed him. The game of basketball absolutely needed him. But that doesn’t justify dwelling on the past and disregarding the league’s evolution.
Players will continue to get better in no small part because of the impact Jordan had by expanding basketball’s reach. If the game continues to evolve, 20 years from now people growing up today will probably still say that Steph Curry is the greatest shooter of all time, even if someone can shoot 55% from 30 feet away from the rim by then. Our perceptions are often tied to our nostalgia and own feeling of belonging to cultural trends. The sands of time don’t wait for anyone, and pretending they do inhibits our ability to appreciate higher levels of greatness going forward.
