Michael Jordan was a “horrible player” who was “horrible to play with,” Scottie Pippen, the top wingman for His Airness on the Chicago Bulls, said recently.
Pippen — a consensus top NBA player of all-time in his own right — has been a long-time critic of Jordan, but threw more fuel on the fire during an interview on last week’s episode of the “Gimme the Hot Sauce” podcast with former teammate Stacey King.
“Our game is a team game and one player can’t do it,” Pippen said.
“I’ve seen Michael Jordan play before I came to play with the Bulls. You guys have seen him play. He was a horrible player. He was horrible to play with. It was all 1-on-1, shooting bad shots. And all of a sudden, we become a team and we start winning. Everybody forgot who he was.”
While Jordan is known for his fierce competitive nature, Pippen said a young M.J.’s passion was for scoring and not winning
“He was a player that, really, winning wasn’t at the top of his category,” Pippen said. “It was scoring. He was going after scoring titles.”
A representative for Jordan could not be immediately reached for comment on Tuesday, though fans seemed to take M.J.‘s side in the feud between the two former teammates.
Pippen credited Bulls coach Phil Jackson with bringing the team together to win all those titles.
But during the same interview, Pippen also threw shade on the Zen Master for not harnessing his own ego.
“I just don’t know if he was ever in my corner,” Pippen said of Jackson.
“He just really turned sour to me his last couple of years of coaching, not that that took anything away form me as a player or how I played the game. He became selfish. It really was the breakup of our (team), to be honest. One selfish guy on the team, another selfish guy coaching the team. It was time for a divorce.”
Asked if he could ever repair his relationships with Jordan and Jackson, Pippen bluntly said no.
“Stacey, you’ve been around Michael. You’ve been around Phil. Their egos are huge and I don’t bow down to people like that,” Pippen said.
The current debate about the NBA’s all-time greatest player tends to break down to Jordan vs. Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James.
Pippen declined to take sides in that battle, but didn’t mind offering his take on the five greatest players he’s seen: Jordan, James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson andKarl Malone.
But he again returned to his team-first mantra, saying: “There is not a greatest player.”
“LeBron James is probably one of the greatest winners that ever played the game. He wins,” Pippen added. “Now does that make him the greatest player to ever play the game? No.”
“Michael Jordan probably is one of the greatest individual scorers that we’ve ever seen, but probably not. It’s probably Kareem. It’s hard for me to to say who’s the greatest player to ever play in the game.”
Katie Distler contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
