“I Should Make You Take My Shoes Off”: When Michael Jordan Terrified a Rookie Chauncey Billups
There are several Michael Jordan trash talk stories, starting from the day he entered the league in 1994 to the day he played his last game in 2003. Not just basketball, it was almost impossible to do anything with the Chicago Bulls legend.
The man will break your ego like never before and while at it, he will also make your ears bleed. He never showed mercy to anybody when it came to any kind of competition. And as we know, everything was a competition for the 5x MVP.
Imagine if he could tell Kobe Bryant, “you can put my shoes on all you want, but you would never fill them,” what he would do to somebody named Greg Minor?
When Michael Jordan gave Chauncey Billups his ‘welcome to the NBA’ moment
As great as it was to watch Michael Jordan play, it was a nightmare to be on the receiving end of what he had to deliver each night.
Nobody would dare dream about having to play against their idols when they hear the Portland Trail Blazers coach and former NBA champion Chauncey Billups tell the tale of his NBA debut where he witnessed MJ obliterating his opposite number in the Celtics uniform which happened to be a 6ft 6” shooting guard Greg Minor.
“When I was a rookie, my very first game was playing against Michael Jordan and the Bulls.” Billups once remembered on ESPN. “We had Greg Minor guarding him. There is a little dust-up, Greg is playing hard, of course, you have to play hard as you can because it’s MJ, it’s opening night, and everybody’s watching.”
Chauncey continued, “They got into a little scuffle. MJ is going to the free-throw line, and he looks at Greg and says, ‘I should make you take my shoes off.’ I looked down, and I see he has Jordans on.”
Jeez!
When MJ told Kobe he wasn’t going to replace him
In 2003, when The Black Mamba had already completed a three-peat at a much younger age than Jordan could even make his first Finals appearance, Mike told Kobe the aforementioned lines to his face.
Bryant was then as close as somebody could get to His Airness as a friend. These stories might sound too savage to be real, but they have been told by the people at the receiving end of them, so they are pretty real.
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