The Opening Rebound

Ask any basketball fan of my generation who the greatest player of all time was. You may find your slaves to statistics who bow down to Bill Russell’s nine rings, and you may find your contrarians who choose Magic Johnson or Larry Bird. Fans who’ve stuck with the game may tip their hats to Kobe Bryant or LeBron James, or even Steph Curry for his radical approach to the game threatening to redefine how it’s played.

Clear out those exceptions and you’re left with the critical mass who’ll tell you Michael Jordan was the best to ever set foot on the hardwood.

You can support arguments for MJ by the numbers, including leading teams that twice “three-peated,” collecting six championships in eight years and never losing an NBA Finals series (not to mention that he collected Finals MVP honors in all six of those outings). He was a five-time regular season MVP and led his team to win seventy-two regular season games in the 1995-1996 season (a feat only matched or bested by Steph Curry’s 2015-2016 Golden State Warriors who, unlike the comparable Bulls team, didn’t end up winning a title). All-Star Game berths? He had fourteen and won that game’s MVP superlative three times, too, not to mention winning a Slam Dunk Contest two of those weekends. He led the league in scoring ten times, and also led it in steals thrice and took home a Defensive Player of the Year award once.

For all of the items on Jordan’s near-peerless basketball resume, there’s a single moment from his last run with the Bulls that stands out in my mind, confirming his place as the best ever. It wasn’t a moment from a Finals series like hitting the game winner over Bryon Russell to take the title in 1998 or dominating game five of the 1997 title series despite playing with the flu. It wasn’t a time when he scored at all, made a dramatic defensive play, or registered anything positive on a stat sheet. To my knowledge, the moment was never immortalized in any highlight reel.

The moment in question came in the 1998 Eastern Conference Finals—a series for which a bruising, blue-collar Indiana Pacers team had accomplished the unlikely. Seemingly overmatched, they’d nonetheless won all three games on their home court to force a final, winner-take-all seventh game with the Bulls, in which the winners would head directly to the NBA Finals and the losers’ season would be over.

The Pacers won the opening tip off and got off the first shot of the game. Jordan, for all his greatness, primarily played as a two-guard and was never particularly well-known for his rebounding (a specialty that belonged, instead, to MJ’s teammate Dennis Rodman). And yet, for this game, he soared.

Jordan skied over taller men. I don’t know for sure, but I have to assume that meant seven-foot-four center Rik Smits and others to grab the ball from the air. A ridiculous show of athleticism, intensity, and skill. Also a foul, for going over the back—a penalty when it involved making contact to move someone to get over them, and from my vantage point, it wasn’t immediately clear that he’d done something wrong. The Pacers got possession of the ball, but the message was clear that Jordan wasn’t playing it cool. He was going after every moment of this game with every bit of determination he could muster, willing the Bulls as far as he could toward victory.

The closest analog I could draw to Jordan attacking that board was Patrick Ewing’s performance in the NCAA Finals during his college years, which started with him goal tending shot after shot. Sure, the opposing team got the points for the field goals they attempted, but they got neither the satisfaction nor the momentum that comes with actually seeing the ball go through the hoop, besides the promise that Ewing would rack up legitimate blocks alongside the contested ones.

But here was Jordan, operating outside his wheelhouse, unlike Ewing, a seven-footer known for guarding the rim. That ability to not only offer a standout performance in his area of expertise, but to transcend his position, if not the entire game, shone through in Jordan grabbing the ball, refusing to be denied despite every physical probability.

I suppose I make too much of this moment. Every time I’ve discussed it with a fellow basketball aficionado from that era, they don’t remember it and are often as not inclined to dismiss it. What’s one big rebound, fueled by a surge of adrenaline at the start of a big game, especially next to the rest of Jordan’s big moments and accomplishments?

Is that championship winning shot over Russell—an open look after a careful review would suggest Jordan pushed his defender out of the way—more impressive? Of course, in the end, there’s no meaningful way to rank moments. We’ll assign our values and biases to them and it’s difficult to evaluate a moment that immediately garners a championship vs. a demonstration of great skill vs. a moment when the stars aligned to yield high drama.

But for me? I’ll take the moment of desire. The moment when a man wanted it more than the other nine players on the court and that was enough to get him to the ball, even if a referee’s whistle took it from him moments later. For that’s a moment of passion and a moment of taking control. That’s a moment of a mere mortal playing bigger than his body, and as such a moment of unparalleled greatness.