The NBA offseason was relatively quiet as far as free agency and trades. With no star player movement, there hasn’t been the summer-long projections and analysis of what landscape-altering moves might have this season.
Steph Curry’s heroics helped Team USA win Paris Olympics gold, but the months after the Boston Celtics won championship banner No. 18 have mostly been filled with inane blather, mostly from NBA players who now spend their time talking into a microphone for podcast tapings.
The list of outrageous opinions from these shows is long, but a clear-cut “winner” has emerged as the worst of all terrible hot takes. And it surprisingly came from longtime NBA prophet Rasheed Wallace on his podcast, “The Sheed and Tyler Show,” with co-host TylerIAm.
“Mike wasn’t all that good of a defender,” Wallace declared about Michael Jordan.
Rasheed Wallace calls Michael Jordan overrated on defense 👀
“I seen this MFer get his a** bust”
(🎥 @SheedXTylerShow / https://t.co/tqOJmAEMQd) pic.twitter.com/whhJZtVZtE
— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) August 27, 2024
That one sentence alone is disqualifying. So there’s no need to delve any further in Wallace’s argument, which he proffered with examples of nights that he saw Jordan being unable to stop scorers like Clyde Drexler, Joe Dumars and even J.R. Rider.
The pin that pops Wallace’s argument is Jordan’s nine first-team all-defensive honors, including six straight selections from the 1987-88 season to the 1992-93 campaign, which ended in the Chicago Bulls’ first championship three-peat and was followed by Jordan’s first NBA retirement. That six-season stretch also happens to be when both Drexler and Dumars shined as All-Stars.
Could Jordan have looked bad on defense against the two Hall of Famers? Sure. But did MJ lock down the rest of the league? The all-defense voters definitely thought so.
Jordan won his lone Defensive Player of the Year award in his fourth season in 1988 when he won the first of his five league MVPs. When he returned from playing baseball in 1995, Jordan was named first-team all-defense the next three seasons during the Bulls’ second three-peat.
The GOAT argument between Jordan and LeBron James will forever be debated, but to call a nine-time first-team all-defensive selection and former DPOY not as good as his record and reputation suggest? That’s just saying something for clicks.
In that respect, Wallace was right. Because I just wrote a story to call out just how wrong his Jordan take was.