Michael Jordan might look unstoppable and everything, but there’s a player who troubled Gary Payton even more
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Payton came into the NBA in 1990, when Michael Jordan was already an MVP, 5x All-Star, Defensive Player of the Year, 4x All-Defensive first team and everything The Glove aspired to be but an NBA champ.
That too realized the very year after MJ led the Bulls to their first Championship against Magic Johnson’s Lakers in the 1991 Finals.
Within four years Payton also went on to get his first All-Star and All-Defensive First Team selections. By that time Jordan had become a 3x time NBA champ and retired from the league and was playing Baseball.
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Those four years should have been enough to get Payton the sense of who was the best, but he feels there was another player from Jordan’s very draft class of 1984 who was an even tougher matchup for him.
John Stockton troubled Gary Payton more than Michael Jordan
Back in the day, in a roundtable show, Payton did a revelation that shocked everyone around him. The 1996 DPOY talked about who was the toughest player to guard in his 17-year-long career.
The 9x All-Star and 9x All-Defensive First Team selection (NBA record) found it tougher to guard John Stockton over His Airness. Don’t believe it? Listen to it yourself.
Now, we understand that disbelief because Stockton, despite being the #1 on all-time assists and steals lists and #7 in points among point guards, is not even considered a top-3 point guard in the history of the game.
And the first point guard to ever receive a DPOY award who is also arguably the greatest two-way PG of all time, saying Stockton was tougher must have sounded mind-boggling to many.
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Though, he did accept that his belief could have come off from the fact that he played John much more than he played Mike because of the conference they played in.
Or he might still be secretly sour about that one time he met Jordan in the Playoffs, which obviously would be the Finals (1996), and got swept.
