Promising start to 'The Last Dance' and fascinating peek inside Michael Jordan's world
Posted April 20, 2020 12:06 p.m. EDT
Updated May 4, 2020 10:04 a.m. EDT
Just like Michael Jordan, "The Last Dance" delivered what was promised and then some on Sunday night.
The first two hours of the ESPN “30 for 30” documentary on the end of Jordan's dynasty with the Chicago Bulls in the 1997-98 NBA season were equal parts educational and dramatic.
Executive producer Mike Tollin, who is primarily responsible for getting the 10-part project made, and director Jason Hehir quickly established the tension between the good guys (Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Bulls coach Phil Jackson) and the bad guy (Bulls general manager Jerry Krause).
The first episode focused on Jordan and laid the groundwork for why so many consider him to be the greatest player of all-time.
Let’s not be confused about why this project finally got the green light after the footage from the ’97-98 season sat untouched in a vault in the NBA's office in Secaucus, N.J. for almost 20 years.
Jordan, the competitor, needs to win at all costs, even an imaginary "legacy" contest with LeBron James. According to Yahoo! Sports, Tollin met with Jordan in 2016 on the same day as James and the city of Cleveland were celebrating James' third NBA title and James was viewed as closing the gap on Jordan’s claim to the mythical throne.
In just 34 seconds of screen-time in the first hour, UNC coach Roy Williams managed to steal the show with his memories of Jordan's career with the Tar Heels, which included the memorable, game-deciding shot in the 1982 national title game.
Williams retold one anecdote about motivating Jordan. And then, as only Williams can, he said:
“Michael Jordan’s the only player that could ever turn it on and off. And he never frickin’ turned it off.”
The tales from the first two hours — Larry Bird's famous “that wasn’t Michael Jordan out there, that was God disguised as Michael Jordan” after Jordan scored a playoff-record 63 points in a loss to Bird’s Celtics in 1986 and Bob Knight’s “The best basketball player that I’ve ever seen play” comment after Jordan’s performance in the 1984 Olympics — have been told before but need to be retold to a new generation.
Especially since we are looking back through the lens of the current state of basketball, the "3s-and-dunks" only version ushered in by Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors last decade.
It’s easy to forget what basketball used to be. Big men — Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton — were the old gold standard.
When two players (7-footer Hakeem Olajuwon from Houston and 7-1 Sam Bowie fron Kentucky) went before Jordan in the 1984 draft, it wasn’t considered unusual.
“Michael’s got to realize, he’s not 7-foot,” former Knick great Walt Frazier says in the footage shown from the ’84 draft. “So he’s not going to carry a team in the NBA.”
Paging, Freezing Cold Takes.
Jordan, as a 6-6 scoring guard, obliterated that thought process. He didn’t necessarily change the way basketball was played, like Curry did later, because there just weren’t that many people who could play like Jordan.
When Jordan got into the league, he was mostly flashy dunks and smiles. His ground-breaking deal with Nike definitely changed the way we look at professional athletes.
He rescued an NBA franchise (as noted by Barack Obama cheekily labeled a “former Chicago resident” in the second episode) in a major U.S. market and carried the league’s torch from Bird and Magic Johnson
The appeal of the documentary for Jordan is educating a new generation that didn’t get to see him play or might know him better as the “Crying Jordan” meme.
The first two hours alone should square that notion. And the next eight hours will no doubt get into Jordan’s true gift — his ability to continue to improve. He came into the league as a high-flyer but developed into the best mid-range shooter the league has ever seen.
What wasn’t widely known, or has since been forgotten since “The Last Shot” by Jordan to topple the Utah Jazz in the ’98 NBA finals, was how the dynasty was taken down.
Krause went into '97-98 season, after the Bulls had won their fifth title, wanting to start the rebuilding process. He wanted to bring in Tim Floyd to replace Jackson as the coach and at least entertained the prospect of trading Pippen.
Those old storylines and the feuds between Jordan and Krause and Pippen and Krause were given fresh light. You could tell in Jordan’s recent sit-down interviews that he was reveling in getting the last laugh on Krause.
Krause, the Bulls’ general manager from 1985 to 2003 and died in 2017, is painted as an oafish savant, credited with plucking Jackson from the hinterlands of the defunct Continental Basketball Association and stealing Pippen in a draft-day trade, but also blamed for the dynasty’s end.
Given what we know about Jordan, it must drive him absolutely insane that Krause was able to do something that he has been unable to do as an executive with the Washington Wizards or as the Charlotte Hornets’ principal owner.
The ultimate test of this project, which has unprecedented cooperation with Jordan, is how much Tollin will be interested into getting into Jordan’s faults or if he will just settle, like so many before him, for another hagiography of His Airness.
