GQ magazine published an excerpt from Scotty Pippen's memoirs this week.
I love the NBA. I spend a lot of time every day reading NBA-related articles, listening to NBA-related blogs, and watching NBA games. Sometimes I can even write down some NBA-related texts myself. But sometimes I also ask myself: Am I spending too much time in the NBA?
Then I think back to when I first signed up for a Facebook account, and I guess it was five years ago. I joined one of the biggest NBA fan bases I could find — I couldn't believe what I saw there. Again, I'm not a digital native. I've never even dared to add NBA talk to Twitter, not even Spurs-related tweets, which is just a distant term to me. I've never experienced it firsthand, and I intend to keep it that way. Or go back to my previous facebook experience, which made me realize that I didn't spend much time in the NBA (because I found worse examples than I did).
There are players, or players who have retired, who have a group of volunteer PR teams on social media who look like they're going to spend their whole lives trying to find conclusive evidence of why Player X is the best player in history, not Player Y, and vice versa. There will be another group of at least a considerable number of volunteer PR teams on these social media, who are as if they are completing the last thing in their lives, tirelessly trying to convince you that player X and player Y are not the best in history, but player Z. My experience in the Facebook group chat finally came to an abrupt end. I decided to give my opinion and said, "Advanced data – a practical tool for evaluating players, or a tool created to disparage player Z." "Then I was instantly kicked out of the group chat.
It's good that I was kicked out. Because frankly, I don't want to be in an environment where the infinite cycle of the best discussions about history is endless and never comes to a conclusion. For me, the most important thing is always the next game. However, it is undeniable that the NBA also needs some simple and rough narrative methods. And even though Player X is probably the best in history, this guy is a master of storytelling, and by the way, this guy is michael Jordan. You should know about this matter if you don't watch "The Last Dance" (the "Last Dance" is a Jordan documentary released in 2020), and I haven't seen it. But I witnessed the media reaction to it, and there was a strong response from all walks of life. In a sense, this is still the case.
But basketball is a five-on-five game after all. So if you don't have good enough teammates, there's a good chance you won't be the greatest player in history.
I know most of us as Spurs fans don't like Charles Barkley, but I think some of the things he said during that tit-for-tat interview with Jordan's famous Oprah show made a lot of sense:
Barkley said at the time: "'How many championship rings do you have?'" He (Jordan) snubbed me like this every time. I knew I wasn't lucky enough to play with Scotty Pippen. If I had Pippen and Dennis Rodman as my teammates, I could have won a few rings. ”
Jordan replied, "So you don't like your teammates?" ”
Barkley went on to say: "I love my team-mates, but they're really not as good as Pippen and Rodman. ”
But that interview was a long, long time ago. But Jordan does know exactly how to hold on to his honor, and "The Last Dance" is the latest example. When I wrote this sentence, I could feel the reaction to this documentary.
Earlier this week, GQ magazine published an excerpt from Scotty Pippen's forthcoming memoir, Unguarded, in which he criticized The Last Dance: "The documentary glorifies Michael Jordan without giving me enough praise to my proud teammates." The headlines of the media when covering the news almost exclusively quoted Pippen as saying, "I'm just a supporting character." ”
Realistically, "The Last Dance" ends up giving Pippen a very good opportunity to express himself and prove his worth. Then he said the words mentioned above.
But I would say that these headlines about Pippen's memoirs make me very proud to be a Spurs fan, and you know why? Because it's hard for us to imagine, very hard to imagine hearing Manu Ginobili or Tony Parker complain at any time about "I'm just a supporting character," or something like that.
For Parker, the reason he wouldn't complain was relatively simple: He was the Most Valuable Player (FMVP) of the 2007 Finals, and he deserved it.
The situation in Ginobili is different. Considering that Ginobili has been willing to sacrifice his chances to become a superstar on the bench for most of his career, he can complain that he is not valued. But I guess he won't. Not only because he was the one-of-a-kind Ginobili, but also because, for example, a guy named Tim Duncan said about Ginobili after the Spurs won the championship in 2005, which I always remember vividly.
Duncan had been fighting in the League for eight years. He has won three championship rings, three FMVPs and two regular season MVPs in eight years. You could have called him the best player on the planet. However, the best player on the planet said of Ginobili, who followed closely behind in that year's FMVP selection: "I think the ability he is showing so far is just the tip of the iceberg. He will continue to improve and grow, and our team will continue to improve and grow around him. ”
Can you imagine Jordan saying something like that to anyone on this planet except himself? I can't anyway.
But what's more important to me is that if there was an opportunity to trade the six championships Jordan won for the Chicago Bulls for the five championships Duncan brought to the Spurs, and duncan's Spurs achieved two consecutive triple crowns in the nineties, I wouldn't accept it.
And here's why: as a fan I want the team to win, but the team culture is what I really appreciate. Duncan brought both to us.