Michael Jordan has a strong opinion against NBA players who team up with otherstars to create superteams. MJ stayed with the Chicago Bulls during his best days and he never went after another superstar assome players do nowadays. Back in the day, the Bulls built a team around Jordan and that made him win six NBA championships from 1991 through 1998.
As expected, the widely-considered GOAT isn’t a fan of superteams, squads that tried to diminish their competition by ‘stealing’ talent and recruiting the best players from less strong teams. During the 2010s we saw various teams doing this exact thing, like the Miami Heat of LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade, the failed Los Angeles Lakers superteam of Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard and Steve Nash and the infamous Golden State Warriors of Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green.
When we talk about superteams, the Warriors are the first team you think of, but the league has seen many more over the past 15-20 years. During a 2017 interview, Jordan expressed his opinion about these teams, making it clear that he’s not a fan. He never pursued Charles Barkley, Gary Payton, Magic Johnson or any other player to join him and he doesn’t like seeing current players doing that.
Jordan goes off on superteams, claiming they destroy the league’s competitiveness
During an interview with Cigar Aficionado, His Airness expressed that superteams only damage the league’s competitiveness, unbalancing the league with moves that will hurt most of the teams and will favor just a couple.
“I think you want to be able to have competitive balance in the league,” Jordan said. “And if a player is able to choose/determine what team he wants to play for, then you are going to have some talent discrepancy in the league. So if everybody wants to go to Chicago, then all the best players are going to be in Chicago. You start to see a little bit of it now where all the stars try to get together on the same team, but I think it’s going to start to hurt the overall aspect of the league from a competitive standpoint. Only one or two teams will be great and the other 28 will be garbage.”
Back in the 80s and 90s things were very different. You didn’t see players trying to team up with their rivals to beat other rivals. That’s what Jordan and his generation learned and that’s the way they see basketball. Yet, things have changed a lot and some players don’t seem to care too much about their legacy or reputation if they can just win, regardless of the method they use.