Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
By Joseph Bethony
Sports Editor
Michael Jordan began the third epoch in his professional basketball career last Thursday night in Detroit.
He scored eight points and grabbed three rebounds in only 17 minutes of action. Extrapolated over a full game, Michael would have scored about 24 points with nine rebounds, nearly seven points below his career average.
Extrapolated numbers are somewhat misleading though. My high school basketball career numbers, extrapolated over the course of an entire game, would suggest that I scored 64 points and grabbed 32 rebounds. Of course, this is based on my scoring two points in one minute of play.
MJ silenced most of his critics when he scored 18 points in the first quarter in Miami on Saturday.
“A lot of things have been said that can feed to my motivation,” Jordan said after Saturday’s game. “People are jumping ahead of themselves, saying I don’t look like I should. A lot of people don’t look like they should in the first preseason game. A lot of those comments were preliminary comments.”
Those who said and thought this latest comeback, myself included, was a bad idea are not quite silenced yet. Michael has not yet had to suffer through a long road trip, back-to-back games or the inevitable long losing streak in Washington, all of which will test his motivation for playing with the Wizards.
Whether Michael can sustain the numbers he has put up over the first two games is questionable.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the most successful geriatric basketballer ever, averaged 23.4 points for the Lakers at age 38, Jordan’s current age. But then again, center is a less taxing position and Jabbar had to face maybe five or six elite athletes during the year.
I prefer to remember the athletic Jordan who came into the league in 1984. This was the young and brash MJ from North Carolina who wore gold chains and could dunk from the free-throw line. This was the MJ who would duel with Dominique Wilkens for room on the highlight reels. This was the MJ who lit up the Celtics for 63 points in a double overtime playoff loss.
This was the same MJ who was asked to carry the Chicago Bulls. But with teammates like Brad Sellers and Orlando Woolridge and coach Doug Collins, his team could only get past Craig Ehlo and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
And then a funny thing happened on the way to Springfield. Along came the margin teammates like Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant and John Paxon, coached by Phil Jackson, and a legend was suddenly born.
Retirement, baseballs and bus rides later, MJ made the first comeback.
In my opinion, the post-baseball Jordan was the best of all. Gone was some of the athleticism. He couldn’t jump out of the arena any more. Allen Iverson nearly broke Jordan’s ankles with a cross-over his rookie year.
But this Jordan was mentally tough. When others would break down and tire, he was still going. And that turn-around jumper was unstoppable. All the fans in the gym knew it was coming when he had the defender on his back. Yet it surprised everyone and it never missed its mark. That defender even knew it was coming, but he was powerless.
The image that played in my brain post-retirement I, was the shot against the Jazz in 1998. Arm and hand extended, as if to savor what he thought was the final shot in his career.
Now he’s back, to create new images. He’s come almost full circle-less than marginal teammates and coached by Doug Collins.
But he wouldn’t be playing if he wasn’t going to be good. Some nights he’ll be great, like Saturday against the Heat. But that will probably only come when he can expose a slower forward or a smaller guard. On others he’ll look pedestrian, unable to stop his man.
I don’t expect the new rule changes to be of much help to him. Teams won’t play too much of a zone against the Wizards. There is not much of a reason to collapse the middle on Christian Laettner, especially if MJ is shooting lights out.
He wouldn’t be playing if he couldn’t be good, or even very good. But it won’t happen every night until he gets injured. But why would he want to struggle on a team that may only win 45 games?
