Jordan, Barkley Share Disappointment on 'Big 3'

[Jeffx]

http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/1365 ... heat-big-3

Both make excellent points. Magic & Larry would never think about joining forces. They wanted to beat each other's ass. That's the way it SHOULD be, but it's a different NBA.

[Clutch]

love Chuck's line, "If you're the two-time defending NBA MVP, you don't leave anywhere. They come to you."

[NovU]

Didn't Barkley leave his team after his 8th season, 1 more than Lebron?

Perhaps, what Andrew said in another thread will apply to Lebron's case once the season starts and play well. However, no doubt some will always consider this move damaged Lebron's legacy no matter what happens.

[shadowgrin]

Didn't Barkley leave his team after his 8th season, 1 more than Lebron?

"If you're the two-time defending NBA MVP, you don't leave anywhere. They come to you."

Chuck wasn't exactly a two-time MVP then and the Sixers sucked monkey nuts and he had a falling out with management. Unlike the 60-win Cavs which LeBron left.

[benji]

"There's no way, with hindsight, I would've ever called up Larry, called up Magic and said, 'Hey, look, let's get together and play on one team,'" Jordan said

Because at the time he was more interested in recruiting a big man, both Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon, to come help him take out the Pistons. Something to which he's admitted before.

I think this B-R commenter got it right:

So when it turned out that Kobe was a great player by 2001, Shaq should have demanded a trade so that he could defeat him instead of teaming up with him? Robinson should have thrown a fit when the Spurs drafted Duncan, right? Because it's about competition. Magic should have told the Lakers he was not interested in playing with them because it would rob him of the opportunity to defeat Kareem?

I just don't follow that rationale. Where is the line? How good of a teammate is a great player allowed to have before it becomes a cop out? I need a graph.

[hova-]

I guess you also can't compare the situations. It's a difference between Jordan, Bird and Magic, who were definitely rivals since they lost to each other's teams in the playoffs.
Bosh and Wade did not even have a chance to reach the 2nd round since 2006 which does not really make them rivals of LeBron.

Rationally, everybody should accept that two of these big three are no Hall-Of-Famers yet and should not even closely be brought together with names like Bird, Jordan or Magic.
So the Big Three of Wade, Bosh and LeBron is great, but also overhyped. A big three of Bird, Magic and Jordan would have been from another planet.

Honestly, what has Chris Bosh reached so far?? 24/10 and a block per game last season on a mediocre team.

[Sauru]

lol if magic and bird would have teamed up.

[kingjames23]

ok, this is really stupid... c'mon MJ

just because you are competitive, doesnt mean you dont need help or dont welcome a teammate who can put you over the top so you can dominate and win multiple titles.

Jordan had a HATED rival on his team during his second championship run in Dennis Rodman. The Worm had 2 rings already... yet MJ never thought to say to Charles Barkley (his close friend, who never won a title) "come play with me". when MJ was winning titles Bird and Magic were on the decline and already had their 3 and 5 respectively. So MJ saying he would never play with those guys has little meaning here. he was in fact trying to get a dominant big man on his team that whole time, as previously stated.

Jordan also had Pippen, who at that time was probably the 2nd best player in the league. the only 2 guys that fit into the argument at the time were Olajuwon and Robinson. so Pip was at LEAST top 5. think about it, the first time Jordan retired the Bulls went 55-27 in 1994 WITHOUT HIM, only 2 more losses than they suffered the prior year 1993 (57-25)

that year Pippen posted these numbers 8.7 REB 5.6 AST 2.9 STL 0.8 BLK 22.0. PPG while shooting 49% from the field
Pippen was no slouch. you cant even argue that these aren't sub MVP stats.

the point is, its not like Jordan took a team of nobody's and won titles. the only nobody's on his title teams were at the center position. he was always surrounded with great shooters (Paxon, Armstrong, Kerr) great rebounders(Grant, Rodman), and defenders (lets just say the whole team here) and a sidekick (Pippen)who could do everything MJ did, but at a lower level.

Wade has 1 title, and he had a team built to fail after one title run. its not like Lebron is joining a dominant title contender ex: Jordan leaving the Bulls to play with Larry's Celtics or Magic's Lakers during the 80's.... the only way this argument is relevant is that Wade and Bosh should have come to Lebron's team. if you are THE MAN, you don't leave to join forces with others... you make them come to you. Miami is Wade's team. at the moment.

Who did Lebron James have on his team these last few years that even compares? nobody. old and busted Shaq? Jamison? MO Williams? Sideshow Bob? Mother Fucker?




Garnett had Peirce, Allen

Magic had Kareem and Worthy

Bird had Parish and McHale

Duncan had Robinson/Manu, Parker

Kobe had Prime Shaq/Gasol (he begged for help and got it with Gasol... result? Championships)

Wade had Shaq and Payton, Mourning and a descent version of Williams and Walker chucking up 3's

Billups had Sheed, Ben and Rip (again they added Sheed. .. result? Championship)

Isiah had Dumars Laimbeer and Rodman all tough sons of bitches

Hakeem had... added Drexler for the 2nd title and had...well, a really balanced team. Cassell, Jet, Thorpe (and no Jordan to contend with... relevant? i think so!)

think about it, most title teams in recent history had multiple all stars either in or just out of their primes. to say LBJ, WADE & BOSH are doing something so unusual is unfair. HOW they did it is the part that is upsetting people. the fact that they are all just hitting their primes and the way they planned it out themselves is unsettling. usually its the team owners who make the moves to build teams. these guys did it themselves.

Jordan is being hypocritical, he never "did it all by himself" no Pippen, no Grant or Rodman = no titles. seriously.

and Barkley's gotta be kidding himself to think he wouldn't have jumped at a chance to join MJ. he went to Phoenix to try to beat him, then Houston... he should have just called MJ up after that and said "i cant beat you, let me join you"

i bet Ewing, Barkley, Stockton, Malone, Miller, Wilkins and many, many others saw what LBJ, Wade and Bosh pulled off, looked down at their ring-less fingers and all said to themselves "damn, i wish i would have thought of doing this back in the day"


hah... i think that's the topic for another discussion.....

[hova-]

lol if magic and bird would have teamed up.

Well, despite only knowing them from old video clips etc (born in 88), I think at that time that would have been so awesome and tough to beat. A Wade-LeBron combo should be nothing against it, because from their IQ and basketball skills Magic and Bird were so superior.

[Sauru]

bird and magic are both better than any of this new big 3 and if one of them joined the others team they would both be playing with a great core of players unlike the heat.

[benji]

Which is kinda the point of the modern CBA.

[hova-]

The Pippen thing is pretty correct. I'm a big Scottie fan, and he was no side-kick, he was an perennial All-Star and definitely a reason why Jordan has 5 rings.

Still I think the problem is not the fact that Jordan says he "would never have teamed up with his big rivals". That's pretty clear. The problem is that you cannot compare the Bird-Magic-Jordan rivalry with LeBron-Wade-Bosh.
LeBron is a two-time MVP but has no ring on his finger. Wade has won one Championship but no MVP and did not reach the 2nd round of the Playoffs the last two years. And Bosh ... success-wise this guy is a nobody like any other player in the NBA.
You just can't compare a big-three combo out of players who are pretty good on their position and players who belong to the best the NBA ever had.

[Rip32]

i bet Ewing, Barkley, Stockton, Malone, Miller, Wilkins and many, many others saw what LBJ, Wade and Bosh pulled off, looked down at their ring-less fingers and all said to themselves "damn, i wish i would have thought of doing this back in the day"

Ewing had far too much pride to walk away from the city of NY to go find another star to win a championship with. He was drafted as the savior of the city and, criticize him if you must, but the dude worked his ass off for 15 years trying to win there.

Barkley started his career playing along two other Hall of Famers (Julius Erving and Moses Malone) and did have a falling out with management as someone else pointed out. I understand why Barkley would be all worked up about these guys playing together, but he must have forgotten about the time when he and the rest of the retirement home (Hakeem, Drexler, Pippen) tried to team up his last three years in Houston.

Stockton and Malone played together and the only reason they lost is because of Jordan, they really couldn't do much else.

Reggie Miller was another one of those loyalty guys who saw finishing the job in the place he was drafted as being more important than jumping ship on the town he owned for greener pastures.

Dominique was good, but I don't think any superstars were clamoring to play with him... he wasn't a true number one guy when he was forced into the role in Atlanta, he should have sucked up his pride and played with another star but things happen and instead he got banished to the Clippers and Boston. It's too bad he couldn't have stuck around in San Antonio, he could have stuck on to that 98-99 championship team.

And even Gary Payton, who has a ring, can be thrown into this argument. Does his corpse riding Wade and Shaq to the title in 2006 really impact his legacy at all? He was abused when he played in the Finals as a key player vs the Pistons, but when he was a bench player he was a useful guy in short doses. All that tells me is that Gary Payton wasn't a No. 1 when he couldn't win in Seattle and obviously wasn't in Miamia and is a guy who should never have been relied upon as such.

Jordan can criticize LeBron all he wants, but really, we can't definitively say he would or wouldn't have done something like this. Sure, MJ is the greatest ever and is the grittiest competitor to ever live, but he never won anything until Scottie fell into his lap, so really, he wasn't anywhere close to the same situation as LeBron. Hell, just for arguments sake does anyone remember the drop off in wins when Jordan left the Bulls for the first time? Two! So that shows he had quite a supporting cast and had absolutely no reason to leave for a better team. We'll get to see the same thing this year with the Cavs sans LeBron. Maybe the Cavs end up doing surprisingly well and grab a 7th or 8th seed without their former king... or maybe they end up being TERRIBLE.

All I know is Michael Jordan didn't win anything until he played with one of the 50 Greatest Players of All-Time, so until LeBron leaves a team with one of those caliber of guys Jordan doesn't really have a way to judge whether LeBron's move was a cop-out or a basketball move-- he was never in the same situation.

[kingjames23]

hey sauru

good point.
Magic or Larry joining forces would have been soul crushing to any other team in the nba back in the 80's, more so than what just happened with Lebron and co.

Jordan would have been joining a great core of players had he jumped ship before the 90's to join Boston or LA, again would have crushed all.

Lebron jumped ship to join 2 guys with no "team" to speak of. but then again... its not like he jumped to join a direct rival he couldnt beat... like Kobe for instance. which would essentially be like if Jordan had jumped ship from the Bulls to join the Lakers....



hey Rip32

Ewing did eventually walk away... if you remember... Seattle... Orlando....

good point about Barkley joining Hakeem, Pippen and Drexler... how soon we forget, eh Chuck?

[rise]

I don't think MJ would whine about this if they all moved to Charlotte.

[Rip32]

Ewing did eventually walk away... if you remember... Seattle... Orlando....

If I remember right he was traded for Glen Rice in some sort of deal (correct me if I'm wrong). Then he signed in Orlando and teamed up with Shawn Kemp to create one of the slowest forward-center combos in NBA Live 2003

[kingjames23]

right right. i would have thought however that having "home team pride" like that he would have just retired after the trade.

[benji]

If I remember right he was traded for Glen Rice in some sort of deal (correct me if I'm wrong).

He was traded for every bad contract the Knicks could find (and then Rice was flipped for any more they could find):

As part of a 4-team trade, traded by the New York Knickerbockers to the Seattle Supersonics; the Los Angeles Lakers traded Travis Knight, Glen Rice and a 2001 1st round draft pick (Jamaal Tinsley) to the New York Knickerbockers; the Phoenix Suns traded Luc Longley to the New York Knickerbockers; the Seattle Supersonics traded Emanual Davis, Greg Foster, Horace Grant and Chuck Person to the Los Angeles Lakers; and the Seattle Supersonics traded Lazaro Borrell, Vernon Maxwell, Vladimir Stepania, a 2001 2nd round draft pick (Eric Chenowith), a 2001 2nd round draft pick (Michael Wright) and a 2002 1st round draft pick (Kareem Rush) to the New York Knickerbockers.

Ewing had requested the trade, and waived his no-trade clause as he considered Seattle to be a contender.

[kingjames23]

i think Benji, the plethora... the myriad... of information that he is.... must eat sleep and breathe basketball. i must conclude that he is some sort of automaton created by the gods with every stat and transaction in NBA history stored in his memory banks.
either that or he has all his reference web pages bookmarked for instant pwnage of noobs and the uninformed.

i'll just go back to reading the tea leaves and the stars... and random patterns i find in the universe
hens-forth gathering insight from my bong, and what i see at the bottom of this bottle of Jack...

[Clutch]

So when it turned out that Kobe was a great player by 2001, Shaq should have demanded a trade so that he could defeat him instead of teaming up with him? Robinson should have thrown a fit when the Spurs drafted Duncan, right? Because it's about competition. Magic should have told the Lakers he was not interested in playing with them because it would rob him of the opportunity to defeat Kareem?
I just don't follow that rationale. Where is the line? How good of a teammate is a great player allowed to have before it becomes a cop out? I need a graph.

The difference is those teams got better and those pairings born through luck of the draft, not the merger of established marquee players, as is the case in Miami.

These are go-to guys, leaders of their respective teams, who've played several seasons in the league as centerpieces of their given franchises, having warred against each other in numerous battles but suddenly now, in the prime of their careers, they've chosen to stop fighting… and hold hands?

No graph needed there; it's unprecedented and it's a cop out imo. If not, I'm not sure what is.

On Rodman? MJ USED the Worm to get exactly as he wanted and what his team needed - rebounding & defense. Rodman was a two-dimensional specialist in, guess what? rebounding & defense, hardly a leader of a team or marquee player teams are built around.

Rodman knew his role and his place when he joined the Bulls. That place was behind and out of Jordan's way; hardly any joint decision or equality there. Much different than the equality lovefest existing on Miami's surface, atm anyway. Ironic since there's nothing 'equal' about it in a broader sense, considering the Three Starlets consume the majority of the team's payroll, while the remaining players are forced to make due with scraps just for the privilege to share the same locker room.

On Jordan needing Pippen, one of the Greatest 50 All-Time? That needs to be corrected too; Jordan MADE Pippen into one of the Greatest 50 All-Time. Without MJ driving him, Pip might've topped off at a 90's Trevor Ariza for all we know, especially considering how unaggressive he was during his early years. Don't toy with the idea he might've been greater without MJ (unless you need a good laugh.)

Incidentally, MJ & Pip… yet another pairing born of the draft, and not the collaboration of overblown egos cocky enough to suggest their mere assemblage secures them not 5… not 6… not 7… future NBA championships as if the Heat are now some kind of invincible basketball Voltron.

[Andrew]

ok, this is really stupid... c'mon MJ

just because you are competitive, doesnt mean you dont need help or dont welcome a teammate who can put you over the top so you can dominate and win multiple titles.

That's not what he's saying though. I read it as him saying that when he came into the league, he saw those great players and wanted to prove himself against them. He landed in Chicago, they were established in Boston and Los Angeles. He saw them as the players and teams to beat rather than future teammates. Nothing wrong with that though it's perhaps an outdated philosophy as Jordan himself notes. The various sportswriters are spinning it as Jordan and Barkley condemning and criticising LeBron, though reading Jordan's quote he does stop a bit short of that:

"There's no way, with hindsight, I would've ever called up Larry, called up Magic and said, 'Hey, look, let's get together and play on one team,'" Jordan said after finishing tied for 22nd in the American Century Championship golf tournament in Stateline, Nev. "But that's ... things are different. I can't say that's a bad thing. It's an opportunity these kids have today. In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys."

That quote isn't being explicitly critical, it's Jordan weighing in on the situation as everyone has a right to do and his view is that it's a path that he personally wouldn't have taken. I guess you could say it's there in the undertones but to me his take sounds more along the lines of "There's nothing wrong with what he did per se, though it's not something I would've done". Barkley, as is his nature, is a bit more blunt.

"If you're the two-time defending NBA MVP, you don't leave anywhere. They come to you. That's ridiculous. I like LeBron. He's a great player. But I don't think in the history of sports you can find a two-time defending MVP leaving to go play with other people."

Of course he also says that he and Jordan are in complete agreement about it, so who knows. In any case, I don't think either are suggesting that you can win a championship alone, just that the path taken here is not the first one that would come to mind for their generation. Fair call.

[Sauru]

I don't think MJ would whine about this if they all moved to Charlotte.

this pretty much sums it up. the problem alot of people are having is players setting themselves up like this is in the end going to be bad for the nba. imagine if all the good players all end up on 5 or 6 warm weather teams? imagine a nba where players take huge pay cuts and sign 1-2 year deals get the ring they want then break up and all demand max contracts?

[Andrew]

Is anyone really "whining" though? Why should anything that isn't glowing praise be dismissed as whining/bitching/crying/whatever?

[benji]

Because it's hypocritical. If Lebron landed on their team, they wouldn't give a shit. Look at everyone saying how "Chicago was the best option and had the most talent" now they complain he picked a team with "less talent" and would have praised him if he landed in Chicago? (And then promptly wrote a bunch of articles about how he'd never live up to Jordan's legacy!)

It's really just fear the team is going to be unstoppable and roll over everyone for the next five years. Because if all the guarantees the team will never win any title because LeBron has "tarnished his legacy" are to be taken seriously, why should anyone care at all?

These are go-to guys, leaders of their respective teams, who've played several seasons in the league as centerpieces of their given franchises, having warred against each other in numerous battles but suddenly now, in the prime of their careers, they've chosen to stop fighting… and hold hands?

They're best friends in their mid-twenties who want to live and play together in Miami and have fun getting paid millions. Why should anyone give a shit about some bullshit "grand narrative of the legacy of the universe"? They're doing what they want, and good for them.

No graph needed there; it's unprecedented and it's a cop out imo. If not, I'm not sure what is.

Ah, so everyone should only be allowed to play with complete unknowns pulled from the local rec center who can't dribble without looking down at the ball or their accomplishments aren't valid. Got it.

Ironic since there's nothing 'equal' about it in a broader sense, considering the Three Starlets consume the majority of the team's payroll, while the remaining players are forced to make due with scraps just for the privilege to share the same locker room.

And Jordan once made more than the rest of the team combined. Big deal.

Jordan MADE Pippen into one of the Greatest 50 All-Time.

No, the voters for it did.

Without MJ driving him, Pip might've topped off at a 90's Trevor Ariza for all we know, especially considering how unaggressive he was during his early years. Don't toy with the idea he might've been greater without MJ (unless you need a good laugh.)

So one unfalsifiable counter-factual is laughable but the other is not because...might have, could have, should have, feh.

Incidentally, MJ & Pip… yet another pairing born of the draft, and not the collaboration of overblown egos cocky enough to suggest their mere assemblage secures them not 5… not 6… not 7… future NBA championships as if the Heat are now some kind of invincible basketball Voltron.

Yeah, nobody should ever say they think they might win a bunch of championships. How dare they be so cocky to have confidence in themselves and each other!

And Jordan and Pippen not being "overblown egos" or "cocky" was the "good laugh."

[Clutch]

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