Scottie Pippen would like you to know that Michael Jordan and the rest of his teammates on the Chicago Bulls don’t win six NBA titles in the ’90s without him.
The seven-time All-Star, two-time Olympic champion and recently minted member of the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team waited decades to write a memoir, but holds nothing back in ‘Unguarded’. Like a lot of superstar athletes, it turns out Pippen can really hold a grudge.
And Michael Jordan is clearly in his sights.
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Excerpts of the book have been doing the rounds for weeks in the lead up to the release but now that it’s out – one part has caused waves in the US.
Pippen weighed in on the ‘greatest of all time’ debate between Jordan and LeBron James and it ruffled a few feathers.
“I may go as far to say Mike ruined basketball,” he wrote.
“In the 80s on the playgrounds, you’d have everyone moving the ball around — passing to help the team. That stopped in the 90s.
“Kids wanted to be ‘Like Mike.’ Well, Mike didn’t want to pass — didn’t want to rebound, or defend the best player. He wanted everything done for him.
“That’s why I always believed LeBron James was the greatest player this game has ever seen — he does everything and embodies what the game is truly about.”
Pippen went on to highlight the reasons why he believed he was just as, if not more, valuable to the team than Jordan.
“That’s what was special about playing for the Bulls: the camaraderie we established with one another, not that we felt blessed to be on the same team with the immortal Michael Jordan,” he wrote.
“I was a much better teammate that Michael ever was. Ask anyone who played with the two of us. I was always there with a pat on the back or an encouraging word, especially after he put someone down for one reason or another.
“I helped the others to believe in and stop doubting themselves.”
During other stages of the book, Pippen branded Jordan “condescending” and claimed he was put on a “pedestal” in ‘The Last Dance’. He also took shots at others.
On former Bulls coach Doug Collins, his first coach in Chicago: “The best coaches are critical in a constructive manner. They don’t humiliate their players. They nurture them… Not Doug. Never Doug.”
And on late Chicago Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause: “He was always looking to get rid of me.”
Those types of digs are what will make headlines from this book, but for every cutting remark Pippen also offers ample praise for the coaches and teammates who were part of his basketball journey.
His overall point is that the media’s obsession with Michael Jordan — and No.23′s willingness to accept all the accolades and endorsements — created a false narrative that ignored just how critical teamwork is to success on a basketball court.
Pippen says he wrote the book because of all the attention garnered by the Netflix documentary, chronicling the Bulls’ final championship season in 1997-1998.
“It was almost as if Michael felt the need to put me down to lift himself up,” he writes. He touches on all the topics NBA fans know so well — from the time he refused to play the final 1.8 seconds of a playoff game in 1994 after coach Phil Jackson drew up the final shot for teammate Toni Kukoc, to Jordan taking a break from basketball that year and the next to play baseball.
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