Stop if you’ve heard this before. Michael Jordan was a competitive man. He wanted to win at everything. Not just basketball but anything. His mission was to become the greatest player in NBA history. That is how he viewed himself when he played. So try to put yourself in his shoes and imagine media outlets saying there is this other guy in the league who is just as good as you are. Some even have the nerve to say he’s better.
That would probably make you angry, right?
This is exactly what happened back in the early 1990s. Despite being a league MVP, a Defensive Player of the Year, a multiple-time scoring champion, and an NBA champion by the end of the 1991 season, some weren’t quite ready to crown Jordan as the best in basketball. Especially since his Chicago Bulls wound up facing the Portland Trailblazers in the 1992 Finals. A team led by their own superstar shooting guard Clyde Drexler.
He was the one a lot of experts felt was on Jordan’s level. A statement Jordan found insulting. It was this that provided the spark for one of the greatest games of his career.
Michael Jordan showed everybody there was no comparison
In the first game of that series, the Bulls icon set the tone with an unforgettable stretch of the first half that saw him drain six three-pointers. The last stamped by his famous shrug to the sideline. He finished the night with 39 points and Chicago crushed Portland 122-89. Jordan would go on to be the leading scorer in five of the six games between the two teams. Drexler managed it just once. The Bulls wrapped things up with a comeback win in Game 6.
That was the last time anybody even tried to make a comparison between the two. Drexler went on to a Hall of Fame career and got his championship in 1995. However, a lot of people tend to forget him because of Jordan. That is not by accident. It’s exactly what M.J. intended.
