It appears that Isiah Thomas will continue taking shots at Michael Jordan until Jordan “apologizes on international television” as Thomas demanded in 2024.
Thomas, now an NBA TV analyst, offered high praise for Kevin Durant while bringing Jordan down in the process during an appearance on FanDuel TV’s Run it Back on Thursday. Durant recently passed Jordan for fifth on the NBA’s all-time scoring list.
“I said this recently to Kevin Durant, and I’m going to say this to all of you sitting on the panel,” Thomas told Michelle Beadle, DeMarcus Cousins, Chandler Parsons, and Lou Williams on Run it Back. “And I said to Kevin Durant, ‘Hey, if you would have played back in our era, and they put you in the triple-post, at that mid-post area, and they took Michael Jordan out, and you played with (Scottie) Pippen, and you played with (Toni) Kukoč, and you got to run into the mid-post?'”
“Would he have won six championships? Absolutely,” Thomas continued. “With (Dennis) Rodman, and Pippen, and Kukoč, and B.J. (Armstrong), and Craig Hodges, and all of them around him? And he gets to post up in the mid-range, and that ball is targeted to him every night? And he’s getting up 25, 30 attempts? Yeah, he can do the same thing.”
That’s one heck of a leap and hypothetical.
Durant is one of the greatest scorers the game of basketball has ever seen and a two-time NBA champion in his own right, but jumping to the conclusion that he would win as many rings as arguably the greatest player of all time (and most would indeed say the greatest) is, A) a weird thing to say, and B) hating just to hate.
In addition to being a mind-blowing talent offensively, Jordan was a nine-time NBA All-Defensive First Team selection and led the league in steals three times (Jordan averaged 2.3 steals per game in his career, while Durant has averaged 1.0). He’s also one of the most competitive and determined people to ever play sports. There are numerous winning qualities to Jordan that contributed to reaching his six championships with the ’90s Chicago Bulls, beyond just his incredible scoring abilities. Assuming that Durant or any other player in basketball history would have accomplished the same is misguided, to put it nicely.
Thomas and Jordan have a longstanding beef that began during the Bulls’ ’80s-’90s rivalry with the Detroit Pistons and escalated during The Last Dance ESPN docuseries in 2020. Jordan denied being the reason that Thomas was left off the 1992 USA “Dream Team” and also referred to Thomas as an “a**hole” regarding the Pistons walking off the court without shaking hands after the Bulls swept them in the 1991 Eastern Conference Finals.
And that’s what led to Thomas demanding an apology. Expect this beef to continue forever, and don’t expect Thomas to be reasonable when evaluating Jordan’s career.
About Matt Clapp
Matt is an editor/writer at The Comeback and Awful Announcing.
He can be reached by email at mclapp@thecomeback.com.