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Ever since the airing of The Last Dance, many players from the Bulls dynasty expressed their disappointment by the way they were portrayed in the docuseries. One of the most outspoken was Scottie Pippen, who criticized Michael Jordan and insisted that he would’ve not been able to achieve what he did without the team around him.
Despite this ongoing feud, the Hall of Famer still recognized his former teammate’s greatness in a recent interview. The former big man is currently in Australia to announce the “No Bull” Tour, alongside fellow stars Horace Grant and Luc Longley.
In an interview on Australia’s the Today Show, host Karl Stefanovic dared to ask: “It’s hard to make comparisons but from where you were standing playing, was Michael the best, the greatest ever?”
Scottie Pippen says Michael Jordan is ‘for sure’ the greatest ever pic.twitter.com/FAp38CM7Th
— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) February 28, 2024
Pippen didn’t hesitate to answer affirmatively. “Oh, for sure. I mean, you look at the MVPs that he was able to achieve. But I think it was all brought from us being successful as a team. Obviously, someone’s gonna bring those accolades home. But yeah, he was the greatest player, definitely, in basketball,” Scottie explained.
Last year, when he first voiced his discontent over The Last Dance, he even went all the way to call LeBron James “the greatest statistical guy to ever play the game of basketball” during a podcast appearance in May.
“And there’s no comparison to him. None. So does that make him the greatest player to ever play the game? I’ll leave that up for debate, because I don’t believe there’s a great player because our game’s a team game, and one player can’t do it,” the Bulls icon shared.
During the same podcast, he recalled Jordan as a “terrible player” before he joined the team in Chicago. “I saw Jordan play before I came to play with the Bulls. You guys saw him play. He was a horrible player. He was horrible to play with,” Pippen said. “He was all one-on-one, he’s shooting bad shots, and all of a sudden we become a team and we start winning and everybody forgot who he was.”
In Australia, the Hall of Famer even dedicated some praise for The Last Dance docuseries as an educational tool
It seems Pippen finally decided to judge the Netflix docuseries in a realistic manner, as he finally admitted it was very entertaining and could even be considered an educational tool to show people the greatness in basketball.
“I thought it was special,” Scottie started out. “I thought it was a special moment for us to really relive some of the greatest times in basketball history. More so, have an opportunity to see what team basketball was really like. I think during the pandemic, everyone sitting at home, it was more like an educational tool to let people see how great the game can be if it’s played the right way. If there’s sharing of the basketball, there’s unlimited things you can achieve.”
The former center’s biggest criticism of the series was mostly due to the fact that it seemed as if Jordan was credited with all the Bulls’ success during their 90s dynasty. “They glorified Michael Jordan while not giving nearly enough praise to me and my proud teammates,” he wrote in a 2021 memoir.
“Michael deserved a large portion of the blame. The producers had granted him editorial control of the final product. The doc couldn’t have been released otherwise. He was the leading man and the director,” he insisted.
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