Michael Jordan Rightfully Won the 1988 DPOY

With apologies to friends Nick Wright and Tom Haberstroh

The following tweet was sent to me by Subscriber Andrew with his comment added:

How do we feel about the above Ethan? I think Nick Wright is despicable and the most dishonest person in sports media, but I’m more interested in the Haberstroh angle. It seems pretty unethical as a journalist to write an article “uncovering” how Jordan’s DPOY might have come from inflated stats while behind the scenes working on the article with Nick Wright, who is in Klutch/Lebron’s pocket. 

-Andrew

This is Andrew’s comment, not mine and he’s referring to friend and fellow Substacker Tom Haberstroh’s nerve-striking article titled, “A closer look at Michael Jordan's 1988 DPOY award raises questions about its validity. Has LeBron James been chasing a ghost?”

I’m not one to light up HoS guests like Andrew has, so let me start with a defense of both Tom and Nick, before getting into why I disagree with them in spirit. Generally, I don’t think it’s unethical to converse behind the scenes with any particular side, so long as your article is factually correct. I don’t think Nick is, “the most dishonest person in sports media.” I actually find him to be bluntly honest.

However, I also get why some people see a form of dishonesty in Nick’s lawyerly tendency to present absolutely the most advantageous argument for his own perspective. If you’re so aggressively accentuating details favorable to your case, it can be seen as a form of deceit. From his vantage, I’d bet he believes the following: I am correct, and the dressed up rhetorical ends usually justify the means in demonstrating that reality.

Guess what? I could see Michael Jordan holding the exact same belief about his status as 1988 Defensive Player of the Year. If the Chicago Bulls exaggerated scorekeeping in part due to Jordan’s desire for that award, I’d bet MJ’s take would be: Oh well, it helped people see the truth. This is not a defense for deception or for shoddy stat tracking. It shouldn’t happen and it’s good that modern stat keeping is more honest.

In this case, the stat-shading is particularly unfortunate because the issue has distracted from what should be broadly recognized: Michael Jordan obviously deserved this award. Any other candidate’s case has some holes. Mike was the defensive player of that season, in deed and narrative. A debate about the validity of his statistics is obscuring that basic reality.

You know how you can tell this is so? Beyond the details of that season, which I’ll get into, there’s a dog that’s not barking here. While people today debate whether this award is “fraudulent” they can’t even manage a passionate argument for who actually deserved it. If this is a crime, there is no purported victim. Why? Because, home cooking or not, the 1988 DPOY was rightfully, demonstrably, Michael Jordan’s.

Obviously I wasn’t sentient at the time, but there’s a reason the award wasn’t exactly controversial, as Haberstroh himself noted. We have numbers, highlights and ample archives of commentary from NBA insiders that season.

The 1987-1988 Bulls were a great defense and Michael Jordan was clearly their best defensive player. They had just made a leap from being the 11th best defensive team to the 3rd. Remember, this was back in the day, when Scottie Pippen is a rookie 7th man who started zero games. Michael Jordan, a non center on a team with less than heralded bigs, was as terrorizing a perimeter defensive force as the league had ever seen. This aspect is getting lost in the discussion about what was hidden in a more informal bygone era. I’ll tell you what was apparent to NBA people, regardless of home box score data: How scary it was to conduct offense in Michael Jordan’s midst.

Haberstroh’s Michael Jordan Piece

First off, I enjoyed the aforementioned article. Tom has been a content beast of late and, however you feel about his Jordan myth busting, it’s rich in information about the distant basketball past. The piece effectively, and I’d argue conclusively, demonstrates that home score keeping significantly inflated Jordan’s steals and blocks. The sloppiness of the stat padding is really something to behold through the modern lens, and you’re left to wonder if Jordan exerted behind the scenes pressure on stat tracker Bob Rosenberg.

Tom’s article also establishes a motive for the fraud. I myself had no clue that Jordan cared so much about the DPOY. I didn’t know he was annoyed that the Lakers’ Michael Cooper had won it with lesser defensive counting stats. MJ on MC, from Tom’s article:

Michael Cooper is great at ball denial. But check his other stats. This league gives defensive awards on reputation. It just tees me off.

As an aside, Cooper was before my time, so I never really got to appreciate his work. Looking back, I love him. In interviews, he sounds similar to Shane Battier in Michael Lewis’ “No Stats All-Star” article. Coop’s view was that you couldn’t stop Larry Bird, but you could turn a 15 footer into an 18 footer, thus reaping an impact in aggregate.

By the late 1980s, Cooper’s steal rate was tailing off a bit, perhaps due to diminished athleticism. Obviously there’s a lot more to defense than what gets recorded, but hyper athletic Jordan seemed irked by how Cooper’s reputation was impervious to statistical drop off.

I enjoyed getting these tidbits about Jordan from Tom’s article, along with Lakers coach Pat Riley’s perspective on the difference between MJ’s and MC’s defensive impact:

Cooper’s idea of defense is to shut a guy down with [ball] denial, cutting off passing lanes and containment by fighting through picks,” Riley told the L.A. Times. “Michael Jordan is more like a free safety in football, always gambling, blocking shots and looking for steals. He’s so good at it because of his anticipation. People aren’t going to believe it because he’s such a great offensive player, but his defense deserves more recognition than it gets.

It’s easy to take this dichotomy and turn it into a parable about how gaudy defensive stats can’t convey the true story of value. From such a tidy story you could assert that Michael Cooper is the real DPOY, unlike Michael Jordan, who was gambling as much on the court as he was off it. But here’s the issue: The Bulls were 3rd in defensive rating, absent a great defensive center, and the Lakers were 9th. Also, it should be noted that Cooper averaged only 29.4 minutes a night and missed significant time with ankle injuries. It’s just difficult to assert that 31 year-old Michael Cooper had more of an impact on his team’s defense that season than 24 year-old Michael Jordan.

Sometimes, in the interest of educating fans on how there’s more to defense than creating turnovers, we can understate the larger impact of creating turnovers. I see this happen in NFL analysis as well. Yes, defensive backs should theoretically be in position, but a guy like Ed Reed haunted the psyche of quarterbacks because he could so quickly change the game by going off script and seizing a pick 6.

Similarly, super athlete Jordan had a known tendency of turning steals into momentum-shifting dunks. The steals are important, yes, but so too is the sense of fear instilled in the opponent. A fearful offense considers fewer options, and second guesses the available ones. And how could you not be afraid? Prime Michael Jordan was liable to pop up anywhere on the floor, out of nowhere, and immediately score the other way.

Take away the juiced home stats and Michael Jordan, as a shooting guard, still would have led the Bulls in blocks. And he did it while dominating the sport offensively, all 82 games, 40 minutes per contest. Actually, let’s give some context to what “dominating the sport offensively” means, since the following numbers were certainly not juiced: 35 points per game on 53.5% shooting (24.4 shots) at the league’s slowest pace. Perhaps it detracts from my argument to bog it down in yet more numbers, but the average offensive rating back then was 108, as opposed to the 115.3 average registered last season. In 1987-1988, Michael Jordan was just on a level above everyone else.

To wit, Jordan was doing all this on offense while doing this on defense.

Among the clips you might see in that highlight package:

• Mike blocking Hakeem Olajuwon’s fadeaway

• Mike blocking Charles Barkley’s runner

• Mike swatting the hell out of Isiah Thomas

• Mike taking a 10 foot long jump to block Patrick Ewing’s fadeaway

• Mike pinning Jack Sikma’s two hand dunk to the backboard

• Mike pinning Kevin McHale’s layup to the backboard with a left handed block

• Mike swatting McHale’s seemingly open post shot

• Mike leaping high in the air from a flat footed position to snatch a seemingly routine John Stockton post entry pass

Speaking of Stockton, who might have led in steals that season but for Chicago’s shady book keeping (Though Stockton had home cooking of his own), I reassert that the following is left unanswered by our guys Haberstroh and Wright: If not Michael Jordan, then who absolutely deserved this award? Because it’s not an aging Michael Cooper and his 61 games played.

Again, if there was a crime committed here, then who was the victim? Maybe Stockton on the top ranked Jazz defense, but he wasn’t protecting any rims like Jordan was. Shot swatting teammate Mark Eaton deserves consideration, but he averaged more fouls than bocks on that 47 win Jazz team. The Pistons were 2nd ranked on D, but they boasted multiple impact defenders. Between Bill Laimbeer, Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman (who played only 26.2 mpg), credit was pretty well distributed. Hakeem with the 4th ranked defense? I mean, maybe, but he averaged fewer blocks than Eaton, plus a massive 4.1 fouls on his 46 win team.

When you consider the options, it’s easy to see why Michael Jordan ran away with the hardware. Not only was MJ the MVP, but he was that season’s defining defensive player. The NBA media wasn’t simply snookered into believing this by those cheats in Chicago. It was just noticeable to all basketball observers that there was this alien flying around the court, constantly blowing up plays, and making his team really difficult to score on.

I know that this article is part of a greater Michael Jordan vs. LeBron James legacy proxy war. The use of Tom’s revelations to this end runs into the same classic problem: Though the fringe details can be argued, we’re always left with this unassailable core of Michael Jordan as greatest player in the 3-point line era. I faced similar when asserting that Jordan benefitted from a couple seasons of shortened 3-point line. Sure, yes, probably, but does this really tilt the scales? Mike dominated a decade. Absolutely owned a time period in a way James, great as he is, never has. Why are we quibbling over the details?

I’m aware that this story overlaps with LeBron being irked that he lost DPOY to Marc Gasol in 2013. But the Heat, great as they were, finished 9th in defensive rating. More to the point, James just didn’t obviously, memorably own that season defensively in a way that Michael Jordan did in 1987-1988. It’s flat out difficult to thoroughly insist that LeBron was robbed in 2013 just like it’s difficult to thoroughly insist that Jordan robbed others in 1988.

This particular DPOY argument is almost a synecdoche of the whole broader MJ vs. LeBron dynamic: LeBron backers try to be resourceful, because facts on the ground are against them, and Mike wins anyway because he’s Mike. We start with the assertion that fraud helped Jordan gain a certain status, but, after having been prompted to investigate, I come away even more impressed with the GOAT. I hadn’t spent much time considering the 1988 DPOY before this, and maybe even reflexively thought all pre smart phone awards were suspicious. Now, I’m just amazed that one guy managed to become the NBA’s best offensive and defensive player. That’s incredible! We should talk about it far more often than we discuss Bob Rosenberg padding the stats.

The issue, at bottom, that all attempts at Michael Jordan “myth busting” run into is the following: The myth is real. Do people exaggerate? Do they ignore flaws? Yes, but the actual human being performed beyond the theoretical capabilities of human beings. Nick Wright insists that Michael Jordan worship is like a “Paul Bunyan story,” and sure. But at the same time, that guy really owned a giant blue ox. To deny the myth is to deny the reality.