There is a well-known video of Bobby Knight talking about Michael Jordan. Knight had coached Jordan in the 1984 Olympics. In the video, Knight describes Jordan as being the best athlete he’d ever seen in basketball; one of the most skilled players he’d ever seen; and one of the greatest competitors he’d ever seen. And for Knight, the combination of those three things made Jordan the best basketball player he had ever seen.
There are several things notable about this. First, you have Bobby Knight declaring Jordan the greatest player he had ever seen before he had played an NBA game. Here’s a guy who played with John Havlicek and Jerry Lucas, who played against Oscar Robertson, who coached Isiah Thomas and Larry Bird, who coached against Magic Johnson, who saw Kareem, Bill Walton, and David Thompson. But he said Jordan was better than all of them. Certainly we knew Jordan was great – he was the National Player of the Year in 1984 – but nobody else that I know of was going around saying he was the greatest player of all time. Knight famously counseled Stu Inman, the GM of the Portland Trail Blazers, to draft Jordan with the second pick. Inman said he planned to go with Sam Bowie because he already had good guards in Fat Lever, Clyde Drexler, and Jim Paxson, but he needed a center. Knight said “Play Jordan at center. Play him anywhere. Just get him on your team.” Inman drafted Bowie, Jordan fell to the Bulls, and the rest is history. Score one for Bob Knight.
The second thing I notice is how Knight concisely summarizes the formula for athletic greatness: athleticism, skill, and competitiveness. I don’t think that can be improved upon. I’ve been using that as a lens to think about comparative greatness. Take Grant Hill. Hill was one of the few players you could say was close to Jordan in athleticism and skill – but he lacked Jordan’s competitiveness. Or Christian Laettner. He had the skill and the competitiveness, but not the athleticism. Or Larry Bird. He was nowhere close to Jordan’s athleticism, but he had every bit of Jordan’s competitiveness and he was perhaps even more skilled than Jordan, which somewhat made up for the difference in athleticism, so you can at least talk about him in the same sentence with Jordan. It seems to me that in order to be truly great, an athlete must be elite in two of these three dimensions. It’s a really helpful framework for thinking about athletic excellence.
It seems to me that of these three dimensions, skill is the one that is most teachable. If you have someone with the athleticism and the competitiveness, and then you expose them to great coaching, you’re going to see exponential improvement as their skill level develops. That’s the story of Jordan. I remember reading about Roy Williams’ astonishment at how quickly Jordan was picking up, mastering, and improving upon everything they threw at him early in his career at Carolina. It’s also the story of Len Bias. He had that Jordan-esque combination of athleticism and competitiveness, and once he got to college, you could see his skill growing almost game by game. A baseball example would be Randy Johnson. He had the athleticism, in the form of being 6’10” and throwing 1000 miles per hour; he had the great fire and competitiveness; but he had to develop the skill. From 1991 to 1995 he had that period of exponential improvement where he went from a sideshow to the best pitcher in baseball.
It’s fun to think about what Jordan’s career would have been like had he played for other coaches.
- Bobby Cremins: 40 minutes per game, 30 points per game, no national championship
- Tony Bennett: 15 points per game, National Defensive Player of the Year
- Gary Williams: would have set the all-time record for steals in a season
- Roy Williams: he would have been a one-man fast break. The footspeed of Ty Lawson with the athleticism and finishing ability of Jordan. Frightening.
- Mike Krzyzewski: can you picture Jordan slapping the floor?
I summarized Jordan’s accomplishments in the Phil Ford post, so I won’t repeat that here. You know as much about him as I do. We will never see his like again.