Michael Jordan is legendary for having the most lethal killer instinct in NBA history. MJ was known to take every slight—real or perceived—personally, using it as fuel to destroy any opponent who dared stand in his way. Even now, more than two decades after he played his final game, those opponents still look back with a mixture of awe and fear at what he was capable of doing on the court.
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Joe Smith, the former No. 1 overall pick and 16-year NBA vet, recently appeared on the Eighty or Eighty Thousand podcast, and like most players that crossed paths with His Airness, had to tell a Michael Jordan story.
Smith recalled a game from his rookie year, which just so happened to be the year that MJ and the Bulls set an NBA record by going 72-10 in the regular season. It was one of two times his Warriors would face Jordan’s Bulls that year, and the only time at Golden State. Smith says that, although the Warriors were up by 20 at halftime, the Bulls came out in the third quarter and put their foot down.
“We go in the locker room and we’re juicin’ like, ‘We just keep this up, I told y’all they ain’t that good, I told y’all!’ We got back out there and we’re warming up, doing out shooting, and they come out with a glow around them.” Smith said that the Bulls went on a run to erase nearly the entire deficit in the third quarter, then finished the job in the fourth.
Jordan’s Bulls were so great, good NBA players see ghosts 25+ years later
Smith is a good storyteller, and he had the hosts of Eighty or Eighty Thousand rolling as he described what it was like to be victimized by one of the best teams of all time. The only issue is that he must not have been remembering things quite right, because though he did play the Bulls six times while he was a member of the Warriors, it never quite went like this.
In the one of his rookie games at Golden State, the Warriors did lead at halftime, but only by six. The Bulls cut it to four by the end of the third, then went on to win 99-95. Smith led the Warriors with 25 points, but Jordan put up 40 in the win.
In their matchup in Chicago, the Bulls destroyed them 110-87 in a game that was never all that close. This was during Chicago’s 37-0 start at home, and Smith was held to two points on 1-15 shooting. Latrell Sprewell tried to keep Golden State in it with 26 (something Smith alludes to in his story, so he may have been combining the two games).
Smith can be forgiven for having a hazy memory all these years later, but that’s what those Bulls teams did. They were mythical in their ability to get in their opponents’ heads, and sometimes the sight of Jordan, who was sometimes called “Black Jesus” by his opponents, strolling confidently onto the court was nearly enough to win the game on its own.
