Revisiting the Jordan Years We Pretend Didn’t Happen
MJ’s time in Washington is often seen as a sad epilogue — but the truth is more complicated.
Note: The following post is an updated version of a classic Neil’s Substack post that ran in 2023.
Two of my favorite basketball YouTubers — Jonny Arnett and Clayton Crowley — are giving voice to a very specific debate about the career of Michael Jordan: Was his time with the Washington Wizards a blemish on his otherwise GOATed résumé? Or was it a surprisingly impressive chapter in MJ’s story, too often written off or discounted by NBA fans?
Arnett first made a video around the premise that Jordan’s post-Chicago seasons were underrated — that, in fact, they were downright impressive if we consider Jordan’s performance within the context of his age (he was 40 by the end), the injuries he fought through and the state of the Wizards team around him. Then Crowley issued a thinly-veiled rebuttal,1 arguing that MJ’s Washington seasons were a failure because they added nothing positive to his all-time legacy. Finally, Arnett released a counter-rebuttal this week which checked some of Crowley’s facts and re-emphasized some of his earlier points.
So, after watching all of these videos and doing my own research, who is right? I think they both are — and that’s not just a cop-out conclusion. How you view Jordan’s second and final return from retirement largely depends on what you think MJ was trying to accomplish in his comeback, and what standard of comparison you choose to apply to those seasons.
If we view them relative to the mammoth expectations set by MJ’s storybook tenure with the Bulls, then his Wizards years were without question a disappointment. He came back to lead a couple of Washington teams that ultimately went 74-90 in his two seasons, missing the playoffs both times. The greatest athlete of the 20th century returned for this? Ruining the picture-perfect final image of that game-winning shot against Utah in the process? Why??
Worse yet, Jordan was a reduced player with the Wizards. It makes sense: He was 38 years old at the start of the comeback, and hadn’t played in three full seasons. But part of MJ’s mystique was that the normal rules of mere mortal players didn’t apply to him. That illusion was broken some when we saw what type of player he was upon returning. Gone was the freakish combination of high usage and scoring efficiency that had been the hallmark of Jordan’s Bulls career. Instead he more resembled a gunner who still shot a ton — because who was going to tell him not to?2 — but was nowhere near as effective at turning those shots into points.
In the table below, I’ve listed the average yearly percentile ranks (relative to all NBA players) for Jordan in a variety of categories, broken out by both his Bulls era and his Wizards era. As you can see, he retained some similar elements between the two periods, including similar rates of scoring, passing, rebounding and avoiding turnovers. But there was a major decline in Jordan’s efficiency stats with Washington, to the point that he fell from the 84th percentile in True Shooting % to the 16th — dropping from one of the most efficient scorers in the NBA to one of the least.
I also borrowed from my percentile-based similarity score system to find the most comparable career players (since 1976-77) to each version of Jordan. For the Chicago era, his 10 most similar players are littered with all-time legends like Dr. J, LeBron, Larry Legend, T-Mac and Kobe. But the Washington version of Jordan was most similar to empty-stat compilers and/or otherwise flawed wings like Tyreke Evans, Larry Hughes, Kendall Gill and Rudy Gay.
While we don’t know how Anthony Edwards’ trajectory will ultimately play out, the only truly great player on the D.C. version of Jordan’s list is Rick Barry, and our sample only includes his final handful of seasons. It’s kind of a bummer to think that MJ came out of retirement just to become Caris LeVert or a taller Terry Rozier. (Maybe that’s why Charlotte signed Rozier to that big extension a few years ago?)
So Crowley is right that Jordan’s tenure as a Wizards player utterly failed to meet the GOAT-worthy standards that MJ had set for himself during his time in Chicago. And that’s without even getting into the team-building aspects of MJ’s Washington era, which saw him draft — then wreck the confidence of — 19-year-old prep-to-pro rookie #1 pick Kwame Brown (perhaps setting Brown on an inexorable path to bustdom), install his own hand-picked coach in the often-overbearing Doug Collins, greenlight a trade that sent 23-year-old future NBA champion Rip Hamilton away for 27-year-old Jerry Stackhouse and foster a dysfunctional front-office environment with majority owner Abe Pollin, as detailed witheringly in Michael Leahy’s book “When Nothing Else Matters”.
And yet, I’m not sure adding to his GOAT legacy or mentoring the next generation was the primary (or even secondary, or tertiary) reason Jordan came back. In that same book by Leahy, Jordan the then-Wizards executive said he badly missed competing against other great players and showing he could still play at the highest level.
“I read something about Kobe or Vince Carter and it gets the competitor in me going, you know,” [Jordan] said. “And you hear things that bother you. Somebody has a big game, Vince, Kobe, and people on television talk about them the way they would’ve talked about Michael Jordan. And that gets the competitor in me going because what they don’t understand is Michael Jordan did all these things and—” He paused, checking himself. How far did he want to go with this? “I miss the insanity of being out there. The insanity, the wildness, everything on the line. I’d really love to play those guys.”
[…]
What’s better, being president and an owner or being on the court?
Jordan laughed, looked out the window.
“No way this compares,” he said. “Playin’ it, bein’ it, makin’ the shot… it’s huge, it’s a whole difference. Nothin’ compares to that. But that’s gone.” For the moment, his position would be that his playing career was gone, irretrievable. “I didn’t want it to be,” he said softly, “but it is.”
If Jordan truly came back just to prove to himself and others that he still belonged on the court after all of those years, he could have done a lot worse. Because Jordan’s Wizards years don’t fit alongside Johnny Unitas as a Charger or Babe Ruth as a Brave in the pantheon of broken-down ex-greats in strange uniforms.
Looking at the same Consensus Plus/Minus (CPM) metric I used here — which surveys many major public player-rating metrics to arrive at a single blended value — the stats say Jordan was more than 1 point per 100 possessions better than average in both of his Washington seasons, ranking 58th in the league overall (he was the second-oldest member of the Top 60, trailing only John Stockton) and 12th among small forwards. While the Wizards had a below-average scoring margin with MJ on the court both years and Win Shares were down on MJ’s first season back, the rest of the metrics were unanimous that Jordan was at least pretty good — if not very good — during his Wizards days:
And as Arnett points out in his video, much of Jordan’s return was marred by a serious knee injury that he tried to play through, and which clearly affected his performance. The peak form of Jordan’s second comeback came from Dec. 6, 2001 — the game after Jordan sat out a 15-point loss to the Spurs — to Feb. 7, 2002 — the game in which Jordan ran into teammate Etan Thomas and crumpled to the floor with a hurt knee. During those 30 games, the Wizards went 21-9 (a 57-win pace per 82 games) with MJ scoring 25.3 points per game and earning MVP talk.
But much like Kobe Bryant’s quest to get 60 in his final game no matter how many shots it took, even the peak period of Jordan’s Washington era wasn’t quite the same as the rest of his illustrious career. While Jordan’s usage rate during that span was a jaw-dropping 38.0% (far beyond his Bulls-era average of 33.5%), his True Shooting was only 47.6% — well below not only his previous career mark of 58.0% but also the NBA average of 52.0%. We can credit this older version of Jordan some for having gas left in the tank… but only to a certain extent. Even at his best, he wasn’t at his best.
That’s why the story of Jordan’s second comeback from retirement can be interpreted so many different ways. Did it make sense to return? Only if you think MJ’s unfinished business was personal on a level that transcended adding to his laundry list of previous accomplishments. Did he fail or succeed? The answer depends on the barometer for comparison. Jordan didn’t advance his GOAT case in a Wizards uniform, and he might have even slightly hurt it. But that was probably beside the point. MJ took another shot at greatness because he thought he still had some of it left in him — and occasionally that was true, even if it wasn’t often enough.
He never actually specifically addresses the video as a reply to Arnett.
Jordan was not only the team’s star player, but also a minority owner and the de facto general manager. And he personally hired the coach.
I love this! Definitely need to get Leahy's book.