Scottie Pippen on Michael Jordan: Bulls ‘Won in Spite of His Getting on Guys’

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It’s a new day, which means it’s time to peel back another layer of Scottie Pippen’s antipathy toward former teammate Michael Jordan.

With his memoir, Unguarded, hitting bookshelves, Pippen has used the opportunity to offer his unvarnished opinions of Jordan and The Last Dance documentary, which profiled the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls.

CBSSports.com’s Brad Botkin shared a portion from Unguarded‘s prologue in which Pippen contended Jordan’s treatment of other Bulls players wasn’t a necessary ingredient in Chicago’s six titles:

“Michael was wrong. We didn’t win six championships because he got on guys. We won in spite of his getting on guys. We won because we played team basketball, which hadn’t been the case my first two seasons, when Doug Collins was our coach. That’s what was special about playing for the Bulls: the camaraderie we established with one another, not that we felt blessed to be on the same team with the immortal Michael Jordan.”

For Pippen, this might be a particularly personal issue because of his close friendship with Horace Grant, who seemed to be a frequent target of Jordan’s tough love.

Sam Smith, who has documented the Bulls for years and authored The Jordan Rules, said on KNBR’s Tolbert, Krueger and Brooks in May 2020 he had been told a story of Jordan demanding a stewardess not give Grant any food on a post-game flight because of his performance.

It’s impossible to know whether Jordan’s demeanor and exacting standards were the difference between the Bulls building a dynasty and largely seeing their achievements lost to history. Correlation doesn’t always equal causation, though.

During its run of dominance, Chicago had three players (Jordan, Pippen and Dennis Rodman) who were subsequently named to the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team. Phil Jackson is one of the greatest head coaches in basketball history. And Jerry Krause was a savvy general manager who almost totally remade the roster between the Bulls’ 1993 and 1996 Finals wins.

To say the Bulls triumphed in spite of Jordan might be a bit of a stretch, but he probably could’ve dialed things back a bit and still enjoyed the same level of team success in the Windy City.