Taylerama

Seems like it happens every Fall: With the NFL Playoffs falling into place and MLB trade rumors swirling, the NBA and its analysts start charting whoever’s in first place against the ‘95-‘96 Bulls 72-10 pace to drum up interest in a season that won’t be front page sports section news until the Spring.

This year’s candidate: the 20-4 LA Lakers. ESPN already has the graph up, and for some reason, they even included the 19-7 Cavs, who I boldly predict will lose more than three games between now and April.

These graphs awe me every year. The Lakers have lost 4 games. That’s impressive. The ‘95-‘96 Bulls didn’t lose their 4th game until February. FEBRUARY. The Lakers would have to go 26-1 between now and then to get back on pace with the Bulls. Wake me if that happens.

Once the awe wears off, and I wipe the dew from my eyes, I get pissed off.

As a Cubs fan, cursed with THE historical sports burden, two pieces of history get me through the long, cold winters: Chicago boasts the greatest football and basketball teams ever. The ‘85 Bears grow in stature every time Don Shula and Mercury Morris pop a champagne bottle: people hate that act so much that they pick apart the ‘72 Dolphins weak, shorter schedule and imagine what Singletary and Dent would have done to a one-legged Bob Griese in the Super Duper Bowl of All Time.

The ‘95-‘96 Bulls’ place atop Olympus seems more tenuous outside of Illinois. Unlike football, the coastal media centers have legitimate Best Ever candidates in the ‘86 Celtics and whichever one of Magic’s Lakers is in fashion (neither of whom dominated their eras as thoroughly as the Bulls did in the ’90s). And so we start hearing about how the Bulls played in a weak era, had no big man, let the Finals go to 6 games against the (64-win) Sonics, and couldn’t match up with those virtual All-Star Lakers and Celtics teams.

The talking heads always leave one question unanswered in these hypothetical Finals the Bulls hypothetically lose: on those fabled LA and Boston squads, who “matches up” with Michael Fucking Jordan?

Every ten years the British film magazine Sight and Sound polls critics the world over and releases an aggregate list of the ten best movies of all time. The most recent poll, in 2002, had “Citizen Kane” at number one, where it has placed in every Sight and Sound poll since 1962. A lot of observers in the industry and on their couches were disappointed by the results. Many had predicted that “The Godfather” would supplant “Citizen Kane”; indeed, many opined that it was “The Godfather’s” “turn”, as if greatness — or at least quantifiable greatness — had some sort of expiration date, and “Citizen Kane” had gone sour. Its greatness, a greatness that inspired an uncountable number of artists working in every facet of filmmaking, a greatness that furthered the art of filmmaking more than any other movie before or since, that greatness had become boring.

Michael Jordan is like “Citizen Kane,” not only in that he’s the pinnacle of his chosen medium, but in that his greatness, his very status at the pinnacle, is now taken for granted.

In fact, I’ll go a step further: Jordan is underrated. Yep, you heard me: the “Greatest Basketball Player of All Time” is now underrated.

There are understandable reasons for this, just as there are understandable reasons for “Citizen Kane’s” devaluation. Both Jordan and Orson Welles followed up their masterpieces with interesting if uneven work: in Welles’ case, films that were often compromised or incomplete; in Jordan’s, his comeback with the Wizards and unsuccessful executive positions in Washington and Charlotte. Both had less-than wholesome personal lives. Both made embarrassing commercials.

But while cineasts always made apologies for Welles and felt compassion for the bad luck that befell his genius, the public has turned on Jordan now that he’s no longer massacring the Eastern seaboard with that million-dollar grin on his face. Many took Jordan’s Hall of Fame induction speech, with its vindictive barbs at any and everyone who’d ever so much as seen him miss a free throw in practice, as proof that 2009 MJ is a hate-filled and empty man, divorced from his longtime wife, extorting tens of thousands of dollars from middle-aged men who want the privilege of getting dunked on by His Airness at his Vegas hoops camp, cavorting in casinos with his Cuban sexpot, and carrying on decades-old scores he seemingly settled in a succession of NBA Finals. Jordan without basketball, without an outlet for his inhuman competitive will, is not a Mike you wanna be like.

I don’t argue with any of that. Jordan has yet to find his place either in or out of the NBA post-retirement. He doesn’t know what to do with teams full of soft, spoiled millionaires handed their fortunes without toiling like Jordan did for his. MJ was never comfortable with calls — demands — that he use his wealth and his profile to help causes, which, coupled with his philandering, make it seem like the only cause he is interested in are the adventures of a newly single superstar playboy.

But, at the same time, I don’t really care about Michael Jordan’s personal life. I loved his HOF speech. Loved it. That speech was Michael Jordan. That speech was the product of a man who cared about only one thing in this life: winning basketball games. It was a cold-blooded, single-minded assassin’s creed of fuck you triumphalism. That speech, coupled with Jordan’s extraordinary physical gifts, is the difference between just being Magic Johnson or Larry Bird, and being Michael Jordan. And it’s the difference between the ‘09-‘10 Lakers, or next year’s 20-4 team, and the ‘95-‘96 Bulls.

The perception of the sizable gap between Jordan and the other mere superstars is what’s shrunk due to Jordan’s sudden brush with humanity, and due to the fact that he’s not updating his highlight reel anymore. Sports fans outside Chicago have such a short memory that some think LeBron is “better” than Michael based purely on potential, or that Kobe’s competitive streak runs just as deep. Now that Jordan belongs to history, he’s just another name on a page (even if his is usually on top), just another player in the anachronistic pick-up games that take place on NBA TV editing bays.

Yeah, sure, Jordan’s the greatest player ever, but the ‘95-‘96 Bulls would still loose to Bird’s Celts in 7.

No. They would not. Michael Jordan would not let that happen. Just like he wouldn’t let the Bulls win less than 70 in his first full season back. That’s a gap in willpower Kobe and LeBron can’t close. I doubt anyone can.

And if I’m wrong about the ‘09-10 Lakers, or if LeBron ends up winning more titles? Then so what? 72 is just a number. So is 6. So is 30.12. Jordan’s brand of greatness transcends numbers, transcends Win-Loss columns, transcends hypothetical NBA Finals match-ups on paper.

Jordan’s greatness is forever. And only one team in this conversation started Jordan at shooting guard.

Case closed. Forever.