![Shane Jacobson, Luc Longley, Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen at the Darling Harbour Theatre on Tuesday night. Shane Jacobson, Luc Longley, Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen at the Darling Harbour Theatre on Tuesday night.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/gk4M5TtAHFtAbb98BYfYMb/5dfddf59-dc70-406d-9be7-bcabd73f4f74.jpg/r0_221_3204_2250_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Opinion
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
No Bull Tour, Darling Harbour Theatre, February 27
NBA great Scottie Pippen was asked face to face, on stage on Tuesday night, who was the greatest basketball player of all time (the GOAT). Should we have been surprised by his answer?
The former Chicago Bulls forward was at Sydney's Darling Harbour Theatre on a speaking tour with former Bulls championship teammates Horace Grant and Luc Longley, titled "No Bull" and billed as offering great access and insights into those glory days.
Pippen's answer we all wanted to hear, given he played alongside the man widely recognised as the greatest, winning six NBA championships with the Bulls - plus Olympic gold - before they fell out.
"We" was a crowd of about 2000, mostly men my age (15-17 when Bulls fever swept the world in the early 1990s, do the maths yourself) plus our sons. There were exceptions of course but you get the picture.
We were there to show the love for these basketball champions, a love they probably felt was underplayed in their glory days, given their success came alongside a basketball player so great, so transcendental, it caused an explosion of basketball worldwide and hooked a generation of fans.
The Man in question, of course, is Michael Jordan. Pippen's answer came in his oh-so-deep honey brandy voice that host Shane Jacobson claimed he wanted to hear any time there was bad news to deliver, to lessen the blow.
But Pippen's words showed the enmity is still deep between arguably the finest duo to ever hit the hardwood together.
"As far as ... a GOAT, out of the greatest players of all time, I don't see a GOAT," Pippen said.
"I just see a greatest team of all time."
Slightly awkward moment as some in the crowd digested the fact that almost 26 years since their sixth championship together, 32 years since they won Olympic gold, Pippen still wasn't going to name Jordan as the best ever.
Immediately beforehand, Longley had acknowledged "MJ" was the greatest.
Pippen will have his reasons, but most prominent may be the ESPN documentary The Last Dance, which followed the Bulls' pursuit of their sixth championship ring and was produced in association (read: veto power) with Jordan. Pippen has been vocal in his criticism of how he was portrayed, slamming The Last Dance in his book Unguarded.
Longley had been hard done by too, left out of the making of The Last Dance despite being the team's starting centre. But the 7-foot-2 redhead was big enough to praise Jordan when the time came. Seeming to have grown himself over the years, Longley was the comedic star of this show - charismatic, candid, a great storyteller, and flat-out hilarious.
He recalled how he was still remembered in Chicago - by ratcatchers who told him they used to call an unusually large marijuana joint a "Longley".
When Jacobson praised one of the stars praising the other as 'it's important to get a chance to tell people how you really feel', Longley quickly slipped in "you're an arsehole", leaving his teammates, and the whole room, in stitches.
Pippen probably feels he never quite got his due, and fair enough - he's without doubt one of the very greatest defenders ever, named by the NBA among its top 50 players of all. But it's always going to be hard as a conventional weapon lined up next to a thermonuclear device.
It's not the first time he's made similar comments about the GOAT debate; last year he praised Jordan's closest rival LeBron James as the "greatest statistical guy" ever, but also said "I don't believe there's a great player because our game is a team game and one player can't do it".
And he's right of course - the Bulls didn't make the NBA finals until they surrounded Jordan with a strong enough supporting cast. Clearly that's Pippen's thing: team game. As it would be, given this tour involved three of those teammates who helped Jordan scaled the summit.
They were clearly chuffed to talk about their brilliant careers and the crowd loved giving them our appreciation.
But this show managed an even more astonishing achievement: highlight packages of the six championships without a single Michael Jordan moment included. Not even Jordan's championship-winning shot over Bryon Russell to ice Game 6 of the finals against Utah in 1998 made it. It's like Jordan was a ghost haunting the narrative.
Is this mean-spirited? Perhaps, but fair's fair: Jordan made mean-spirited competition an art form, so he wouldn't complain. But this tour was promoted as a "once in a lifetime opportunity to get unprecedented access to what it was like playing with Michael Jordan" by Australia's NBL, and this was a subject largely avoided.
Jacobson kept it light, perhaps missing a few chances to dig a little deeper. Of course he wasn't there to grill the stars like Sarah Ferguson might interrogate a PM on 730, but given the premise of the show included the tough stuff, some friendly probing might have made the show more entertaining.
Often what is not said can be as telling as what is - even when the words come dripping in a honey brandy voice.