What's the hard work to discredit MJ at? The media? Online? MJ gets overwhelming love. Where are you drowning in this world of MJ being discredited?I have never seen people work so hard to discredit one man in order to elevate another. The irony of these people talking about a machine being behind MJ, while trying to cook the books to help Lebron.
This dikkhead talking about defensive box plus minus without factoring in his comically inflated steals and blocks numbers which are the reason he did that in the first place.I watched an uploaded at least 50 games from that season on Youtube before the NBA copyright Nazi's took down my channel.
Let me lay my ashes on this hit piece real quick.
Not only did Jordan deserve to win the award, he was the obvious , slam dunk choice, no pun intended.
(1) Led the league in defensive box plus/minus
(2) Led the league in steals. And became the only player to have 200+ steals and 100+ blocks in a season, tying his record from the previous season
(3) Had 131 blocks. No guard in NBA history has ever even come close to this. He had more blocks than 17 starting Centers
(4) Was 2nd in defensive win shares
And Jordan's defense had a clear impact on his team.
The Bulls were
1st in fewest points allowed per game -- Despite having no other great defensive player of note on the team. FACTS
3rd in defensive rating
The Bulls starting 5 in that season was --- Jordan, Oakley, Paxson, Brad Sellers, Dave Corzine and Horace Grant with a rookie Pippen coming off the bench.
Corzine was one of the worst defensive centers in the league. He was literally a cone and food for everyone in the paint.
Brad Sellers and Paxson were both terrible defenders. Horace Grant and Pippen were below average defenders as rookies.
Oakley was the only semi-good defender in the Bulls starting 5 and even he was very undersized and used to get dominated in the low-post by taller big men, which is one of the reasons the Bulls traded him for Bill Cartwright.
So Jordan was really the only great defender on his team and led his team to be arguably the best defensive team for that regular season while averaging 35ppg on 54% shooting. Someone is obviously not telling the truth here, namely Tom Habestrogh
Don't let these dudes on the Klutch Sports , LeBron payroll decieve you. "Home-biased" stats. What a mongrel. The entire point of this is to discredit Michael Jordan, its not sincerly written.
If that 1987/1988 season was played by ANY other player other than Michael Jordan it would not have been questioned. Strange how that works
He’s gonna ignore this.I see the author of "Nobody Touches Jordan" has entered the thread to offer his completely sane commentary.
They weren't the best defensive team that year (Pistons, Jazz, maybe Rockets were better) and they didn't have one of the worst rosters in the entire league. Charles Oakley was one of the best defensive big men inside, Dave Corzine was a solid rim protector inside, and Grant/Pippen were both already very good defensive players even though they were young. Having bigs like Oakley, Corzine, and Grant inside and then MJ and sometimes Pippen to disrupt on the perimeter is a great defensive lineup.....and they still weren't as good as the Pistons or the Jazz on that end.
Did you not read the analysis at all? MJ's home/road discrepancy was the largest by far, the others weren't even close.
"However, Jordan’s home/road disparities stood out even among his peers that season. According to Stathead.com, Jordan posted 165 steals at home (by far the most in the NBA) compared to just 94 on the road (tied for fourth). That gap of 71 steals blew away the competition, with the next largest gap among the top 15 league leaders in steals being 47."
"Though Jordan didn’t lead the league in blocks, a similar trend emerges in that key defensive category. Jordan’s 84 blocks at home ranked eighth most in the league, a highly unusual place to find a guard. On the road, his total of 47 blocks fell all the way down to 21st (tied), a more reasonable rung on the ladder for someone his size."
In road games, MJ's steals were no different than a ton of players - Fat Lever, Alvin Robertson, John Stockton, Mark Jackson, Clyde Drexler, Michael Adams, and Derek Harper. In fact, John Stockton had 11 more road steals than MJ and Fat Lever had 22 more road steals than MJ, and that's despite him openly trying to stat-pad steals all season long. It was only due to the massive home bias that Jordan outpaced everyone else in steals that season.
And his road blocks weren't impressive at all, just 1.1 a game. It was his ridiculous rate of home blocks that elevated his #'s. And since he was 8th in home blocks but just 21st in road blocks, it is clear that other players weren't benefitting from the same level of discrepancy.
He’s gonna ignore this.
Easy to get blocks going up against a bunch of 6’3 SG’s too
They don’t want to acknowledge this because Jordan has to look super human in their eyes. He’s supposed to be able to average 35 while also averaging 3 steals and 2 blocks and despite gambling and chasing in those categories he also has to be a perimeter lockdown defender. His #’s have to be that much more gaudy than his peers but also the LeBrons, Kobes, Wades, etc.
It’s funny cause Laimbeer was one of them
He was in contention for the award because of inflated steals and blocks numbers.Him even being in contention for the award with everything else he did game to game is superhuman in itself
You guys are hopeful & hilarious
At best it warrants strict scrutiny and a serious investigation to explain the disparity at worse this can be seen as corruption or rigging in a favour of a player. This is a scandal that deserves serious scrutiny, no ad hominem attacks on the reporter can rebut the facts and evidenceThey really out here trying to justify Jordan averaging 4 steals and over 2 blocks at home
It's killing me that dude is even bringing up advanced metrics in the first place. As if the voters for DPOY were even considering "box plus/minus" or "win shares" all the way back in 1988.Bruh, how are you younger than me and not aware that defensive box plus minus and defensive win shares are the two most WORTHLESS advanced stats out there
Even the creator of Box Plus Minus said it's a horrible stat that should be ignored. You know who else leads the league in Defensive Box Plus Minus and Win Shares by a wide margin every year? NIKOLA fukkING JOKIC
Even the face of CACalytics, Daryl Morey, has said all public facing defensive advanced stats are awful and even the internal ones NBA scouts and GMs use aren't any good either. Citing advanced stats that didn't even exist in 88 to make Jordan's "slam dunk" case is already dumb, but doubly so when it's defensive shyt. A perimeter player like Jordan's impact doesn't even compare to big men; and not only that, but MJ was an undisciplined gambler in 88 who actually got considerably better on defense AFTER his DPOY season.
Face the facts - MJ shyt on Michael Cooper, campaigned for DPOY based solely on steals and blocks, and then hunted those stats all year while the media vouched for him the whole time. And then they went right back to focusing on big men, as they should have.
