The Last Dance: In Praise of One Lone Gold Hoop Earring

otm

The league has a lot of stars. The best player on the 11th best team is generally considered a star player. In my world, a superstar is more like a consensus top 5 player in the league over at least five consecutive seasons, the type of player kids /everywhere/ idolize and pretend to be, whose jersey still gets worn by fans a decade after they retire. You know, a /super/star. Not Rony Seikaly.

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For you to sit there, Max Kellerman, and look me in the eye and say that Babe Ruth, a dear dear friend of mine, could not play into today's game is blasphemous....preposterous...things of that nature

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To me, Luka Doncic has the potential to be a superstar. He's certainly a star player. We could move this to the understandably moribund Regular Degular part II thread.

he was one of the best offensive players in the nba this year so he may have reached superstar status

if there was no baseball strike back then, MJ would've threepeated the world series

luka got enough votes to start in the all-star game and also he rules and is a superstar fin

Arguing that Luka is not a superstar? That is special.

Is Joe Flacco elite?

Finished this morning--haven't caught up with all the posting.

-- Jordan's kids showed up in the final episode; I don't think his wife was ever in it.

-- I know Karl Malone was famously quiet, but I'm surprised with all the time that had passed there was no interview

-- I loved that one thing Phil Jackson said when Rodman disappeared again during the '98 Finals; "It's not a distraction for us, it's a distraction for you"

-- god, the NBA was low-scoring in the late '90s; I know the 3-point shot hadn't taken off yet, but what happened?

Idk anything about basketball but Phil Jackson and basically every Bull who's not MJ come across like total mensches in this

totally

did krause do an actual interview for the doc? can't remember anything

he died in 2017

ahh

which was very convenient for reinsdorf

Not endorsing this, but here's a long thing Joe Posnanski (primarily a baseball writer) posted yesterday that some of you might find interesting. It's behind a paywall so I put it on a Google doc, which he says is okay now and again.

http://docs.google.com/document/d/1fqfAFj1Oji9g2TJvOzYHSq5grtRn4G_cOmMrhZ1ROdc/edit?usp=sharing

The short version is that it's a rebuke to that Magic Johnson quote above about the game being so much better when we played (common to all sports).

xxp yeah I definitely noticed that everyone in this doc seems comfortable with their past except for the man who has the greatest basketball legacy of all time. it's not that MJ hasn't aged well he just looks deeply unhappy

his wife not showing up is definitely odd. I wonder why that is.

god, the NBA was low-scoring in the late '90s; I know the 3-point shot hadn't taken off yet, but what happened?

game was way more physical, you could get away with so much more defensively

Maybe they could have at least arranged for an interview with ILX's Karl Malone, that would've been fun.

i'm glad Stockton talked at least.

Now we know what Karl Malone thinks of Michael Jordan pic.twitter.com/Q7a7QdFHZp

— E60 (@E60) May 20, 2020

That cigar is one hell of a flex

i haven't seen karl malone in years, that is exactly the way i wanted him to look and sound in 2020. what an amazing clip.
what a bad sumbitch

I don't think his wife was ever in it

her being his EX-wife prob had something to do with that

damn Karl is cool af

All in all, really glad I spent the 10 hours on this. I think two things above all else make it successful: 1) Lots of time given to Jordan's teammates and coach--Pippen most of all, but also Jackson and Rodman and Kerr. (I knew about Kerr's father from I book I read last year on the Warriors' rise). I don't think you could come away from this complaining "Hey, Jordan didn't win all those titles by himself." 2) It allows you to make up your own mind about Jordan. As I wrote in my first post, he never seemed guarded to me, for better or worse. All the things that drove him--the grudges, real and imagined, and the dismissiveness of other players that creeps in sometimes--they're all there. It mostly stayed clear of race after the Harvey Gantt/Nike flare-up--there's more in a single line from Do the Right Thing, when Spike Lee reminds John Turturro that Michael Jordan is his favourite player--than in all of The Last Dance, but that didn't feel like a glaring absence. I don't know if it's an absence that says more about Jordan or the filmmakers

I was wondering what other sports subjects might support something equally ambitious. The most obvious one to me would be Tiger Woods, a rise and (spectacular) fall and rise-again story like nothing else (with, at least for the first part of the story, a dramatic foil in Phil Mickelson). The key would be getting Tiger to let down his guard (and assuming there's actually a there there worth opening up on--hard to tell sometimes).

I don't know anything about football--the Brady/Belichick/Patriots dynasty?

It's almost impossible to sustain a modern-day baseball dynasty like the Bulls had, with the exception of the Joe Torre Yankees. But there's no figure compelling enough there to hold the center of the story the way Jordan does. (Sorry, Derek Jeter.) The Braves had an even longer dynasty, but coming away with exactly one championship rules them out, unless that becomes the story itself. I think you'd have to go back to the Robinson Dodgers or Stengel/Mantle Yankees for a subject that might be up to it.

The Federer/Nadal/Djokovic might be worth something equally lengthy, but I don't know how interesting those guys are off-court. Serena Williams is interesting enough, but her dominance might pose a problem dramatically.

i wouldn't mind seeing ten hours on Madden's years with the Raiders. I wonder how many of those guys are still alive.

tiger is m/l the only other one i think can compare. plenty of other teams/players that could use a 1-4 hour documentary but not ten hours worth.

the problem with golfers is they never really retire

The dramatic tension is generated by Darths Krause and Reinsdorf actively working against their own squad - I don’t think there is a comparable story, at least not with someone with MJ’s dominance and influence at the centre of it

Charley Finley's Oakland A's could totally justify ten hours

Plus the pristine never-seen film footage of that very year - it’s extraordinary

It is film, right?

xpost

I guess one with Tom Brady is already in the works and it's absolutely gonna suck

her being his EX-wife prob had something to do with that

yeah see somewhere in the 10 hours they could've mentioned that

Charley Finley's Oakland A's could totally justify ten hours

Read a really good book on them--their dynasty was short, but in many ways they are the most interesting potential baseball subject of the past 50 years (with the parallel story of free agency).

The Braves had an even longer dynasty, but coming away with exactly one championship rules them out, unless that becomes the story itself.

Dumb idea. Greg Maddux is one of my favourite players ever, but watching him shrug his shoulders for 10 hours might not make for compelling television.

yup

Coming in 2021 ...

Man in the Arena: @TomBrady pic.twitter.com/sObLdTXbIl

— ESPN (@espn) May 21, 2020

not sure what the audience for this is outside of Pats fans. Brady is just not a compelling figure at all, the Pats dynasty is extremely boring and marred with stupid cheating scandals, and the vast majority of the country actively cheered for them to lose. plus being buddy buddy with Trump prolly ain't gonna help sell this

yeah see somewhere in the 10 hours they could've mentioned that

I didn't know there'd been a divorce either. I'm guessing his wife had more control over her absence from the documentary than Jordan did, to the extent she could block any mention of her whatsoever.

in my reading on jordan i don't get the sense that she played into any of the significant moments in his career, and wouldn't have any interesting perspective on them, even if they did have a relationship, which they do not.

she wld prob have an interesting perspective...

(xpost) That seems to be the case. Not the best source, I'm sure, but it's all I could find.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/11650721/michael-jordan-wife-yvette-prieto-the-last-dance-netflix/

But some fans have been left confused why Yvette doesn't contribute to the series.

As it turns out, director Jason Hehir didn't believe that interviews with Jordan's wife, ex-wife or children would benefit the documentary.

He told The Athletic: "I wasn't interested in the opinion of any wife or kids in this.

"We had the storytellers we wanted and I felt like we had the story covered from every angle."

I guess he changed his mind on the kids at some point.

I'm thru epi 6 and thought there'd be a lot more of that "all access" footage, based on what I'd heard about the doc. Also hasn't been as much of the current Jordan interview(s) as I expected.

think I've said this before on ILH, but why can't we get the full footage of that Dream Team Monaco scrimmage????????????

tbc that piece is referring to his second wife, who was like 19 during the last season.

Didn't know that, either. Maybe she's not even allowed to be mentioned in newspaper pieces explaining why the second wife's not mentioned.

ugh at brady's last dance if for no other reason than the GUY IS STILL PLAYING, it makes no sense to do a jumbo retrospective on an active player

also brady has approx. 1% of the charisma of jordan.

hey just wanted to koolaid man into this thread to say the real karl malone sucks