By
Steven Kurutz
Dec. 2, 2024, 5:02 p.m. ET
The Chicago Bulls of the 1990s were one of the greatest franchises in sports history. Led by Michael Jordan, the team won six N.B.A. championships between 1991 and 1998. But what if the Bulls had one more multi-tool superstar on the roster? What if Elon Musk had been on the team?
Scottie Pippen, the Robin to Mr. Jordan’s Batman during the Bulls’ historic run, recently floated that fantasy scenario on X.
“How many championships would we have won with @ElonMusk?”
Mr. Pippen wrote on Saturday. His post included an A.I.-generated photo of Mr. Musk as a muscled N.B.A. player wearing a No. 13 red and black Bulls jersey, dribbling up the court.
Sports talk thrives on what-if scenarios, the more novel the better for generating conversation. But the responses to Mr. Pippen’s rhetorical jump ball were not kind — to Mr. Pippen or to Mr. Musk.
A user named
@SockDemFan posted a photo of Mr. Muskin which he had vaulted a few inches off the stage in excitement at
a campaign rally for former President Donald J. Trump earlier this year. He added a comment: “You would have won ZERO championships by having a teammate with a vertical like this.”
Another user, @3randyn, posted paparazzi photos of
Mr. Musk shirtless and looking out of shape, writing, “Considering he’s built like this, yall wouldn’t even make the playoffs.”
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Several commenters questioned Mr. Pippen’s sanity, and a few suggested that he was trying to curry favor with Mr. Musk, who owns X.
If Mr. Pippen, who recently debuted a meme coin, was looking to drum up attention, he succeeded; his post has more than 26 million views.
“Y’all are funny. I’m following my favorite comments,”
he wrote in a follow-up, seeming to brush away the criticismand embrace the jokes.
Mr. Pippen, 59, a Hall of Famer who was named to the N.B.A.’s
75th Anniversary Team, has a complicated relationship with the game, his legacy within it and his former teammate Mr. Jordan. In 2021, Mr. Pippen published a memoir, “
Unguarded,” in which he argued that he was more important to Mr. Jordan’s success than he got credit for.
Lately, he has drawn on his profile as a star athlete to become a player in the crypto space. In August, he introduced the cryptocurrency $BALL on the Ethereum blockchain. It is an effort to tokenize the game ball from Game 5 of the 1991 N.B.A. finals — the game in which the Bulls beat the Los Angeles Lakers to clinch their first championship.
Mr. Pippen was holding the ball when the buzzer rang, and he has held on to it ever since, including while sleeping, he has said.
At a crypto conference in New York in October, Mr. Pippen said that he wanted to build a community around the ball, and that he had plans to make a documentary and a digital game tied to it. Buyers of his cryptocurrency would theoretically own fractional shares of the game ball, a concept known in the crypto world as R.W.A., or real world assets.
Mr. Pippen called the Game 5 ball “big in a lot meaningful ways” and said his goal was to make it the most valuable piece of sports memorabilia. “I want to build that value up,” he said, “and I want to bring it up through the crypto community.”
Brahm Wachter, the head of modern collectibles at Sotheby’s, called the Game 5 ball “enormously historically important,” though he added that game balls “have a ways to go” to catch up to the value of game-worn jerseys. (In 2022,
Sotheby’s sold a jersey worn by Mr. Jordan in the 1998 N.B.A. finals for $10.1 million.)
Still, Mr. Wachter added, Mr. Pippen may be onto something. “Many of the most serious collectors in the sports collectible space believe that if it is done correctly and authentically,” the tokenization of sports memorabilia could be big, he said.
Speaking at the crypto conference, Mr. Pippen said he wanted to build a bridge between the worlds of crypto and sports.
“I think the people in the crypto world really don’t understand sports,” he said.
After his post suggesting that Mr. Musk could have played on arguably the greatest N.B.A. team of all time, however, some people may be wondering how well Mr. Pippen, joking or not, understood the game himself.
