Michael Jordan has the highest scoring average both in the regular season (30.1 ppg) and in the postseason (33.4 ppg) but the Iceman believes he was not quite like him.
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George Gervin was one of ABA’s biggest superstars alongside Dr J and had to come to the NBA after the merger. It couldn’t have been better for the 6ft 7” guard who became even better in the NBA.
“The Iceman” is one of the game’s most prolific scorers who averaged well over 26 points per game in 7-straight seasons between 1977 and 1984.
And in case you don’t know the story of the 1978 scoring title involving David Thompson and George Gervin, here it is: pic.twitter.com/eC1ag66eUs https://t.co/sDYqX0fmKf
— Honest☘️Larry (@HonestLarry1) June 28, 2022
The San Antonio Spurs’ first superstar would play two more seasons after NBA’s biggest ever superstar came into the league in 84 as the #3 pick to the Chicago Bulls.
A combined 12x All-Star (3x ABA, 9x NBA) Gervin never won an NBA title but won 4x scoring titles during his prime and had an NBA career conversion rate of 51.1% from the field averaging 26.2 points per game in 10 years on the greatest basketball stages of all.
“Michael Jordan couldn’t score like Ice!”: George Gervin
Jordan meanwhile, proved himself to be a totally different animal as soon as he came into the league. He averaged well above 28p/6r/6a/2s in his first season in the league and it would be his least scoring average for the rest of his 12 years with the Bulls, in which he played at least 78 games (10 seasons).
In those 10 seasons, he won 10x scoring titles, 5 MVPs, and 6 Finals MVPs while leading his team to 6 championships between 1991 and 96. But Iceman believes that out-of-the-world dominance still wasn’t enough for him to see MJ as good a scorer as himself.
“He’s one of the greatest entertainers, one of the greatest winners, he could flat out play, his stats proved themselves, but he couldn’t score like Ice… He had his own way of scoring. He didn’t score like me,” said Gervin to The PostGame in 2017.
The Hall of Famer and NBA’s top-50 players of all time roped in The Mamba as well while at it. Gervin pointed out that unlike him, Jordan, as well as Kobe Bryant, shot the basketball more than most of the elite scorers in history, “so that means they missed a lot.”
While he is right as Jordan was a career 49.7 percenter, his perspective is limited like his game was. Both Jordan and Kobe were not only better than him in scoring but in all the other specifics of the game.
Both of them had a combined 18x NBA-Defensive First team selections for instance, while Gervin had none. That might be one of the reasons why they led their teams to 11 championships.
