Scottie Pippen (59 years old) AND Michael Jordan (61 years old)formed one of the best partnerships in NBA history.
Between them, they won six championship rings for the Chicago Bulls (1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997 and 1998), but there were always doubts about the relationship off the court between these two great basketball stars.
“Michael Jordan was God, Scottie Pippen was Jesus and I… the devil”
Dennis Rodman
The romance between Marcus Jordan, Michael’s son, and Larsa Pippen (Scottie Pippen’s ex-wife) has not helped to bring the two basketball stars closer together.
“Michael is a very difficult person to deal with,” explained Scottie Pippen on the ‘PBD’ radio podcast about his basketball battle partner in the 1990s.
“We never had dinner together. He was a good teammate, but we were never great friends,” the former Bulls, Rockets and Blazers player confirmed to Patrick Pet-David.
In 2011 Dennis Rodman, another of the pillars of the legendary Bulls, pointed out that “Michael Jordan was God, Scottie Pippen was Jesus and I… the devil”.
Scottie Pippen: “Michael Jordan was a horrible player”
In 2023, Pippen stated on the ‘Gime the Hot Sauce’ podcast that “Michael Jordan was a horrible player” before the Bulls became a winning team.
“Our game was team play and one player couldn’t do it. I had seen Jordan play before I came to play with the Bulls. It was all one-on-one, taking bad shots… but all of a sudden we became a team and we started to win,” he recalled.
We will always have that mutual respect, but our friendship is not like people see it on TV
Scottie Pippen
Three years ago, Scottie Pippen revealed in his memoir ‘Unguarded’ that he felt “nothing more than an accessory” and criticized Jordan for being the only Chicago Bulls player to make money from the documentary ‘The Last Dance’.
“It wasn’t what you saw on the court. We’ll always have that mutual respect, but our friendship isn’t like people see it on TV,” Pippen explained in 2021 during an interview with Michael Strahan of Good Morning America.
Scottie Pippen: “I’m going to go so far as to say that Michael Jordan has ruined basketball”
The documentary ‘The Last Dance’, which was a huge success on Netflix, further eroded the relationship between Jordan and Pippen: “The last two episodes, like the previous eight, glorified Michael without giving too much importance to me and my teammates… Here I was, in my fifties, seventeen years since my last game, watching us being degraded once again.”
One of the hardest passages in Scottie Pippen’s campaign against Michael Jordan was when in his book ‘Unguarded’ he claimed that “I’m going to go so far as to say that Michael Jordan has ruined basketball”.
“In the 80s, in schoolyards, everyone played by moving the ball, passing it to help the team. In the 90s that ended. Everybody wanted to be like Mike. Well, Mike didn’t want to pass, didn’t want to rebound and didn’t want to defend the best opposing player. He wanted everything done for him and everything done for him. That’s why I think LeBron James is the greatest of all time. He does it all and gets his teammates involved,” Pippen justified his sentence.