Olden Polynice Opens Up on Choosing Michael Jordan’s Jersey Number as a Rookie

Jersey numbers in the NBA are often very personal to player. They all have their reasons for choosing what number they wear. Michael Jordan wore 23 because he wanted to be half as good as his brother Larry, who wore 45. LeBron James wears 23 because his favorite player growing up, Jordan, wore 23. Olden Plynice, the former Kings center, explained how he ended up wearing 23 during his early years.

Polynice, for starters, claimed he wanted 24 on his back when he entered the league. Mainly because that was his number in college. But both him and Byron Scott, whose podcast he was on, remembered that Tom Chambers wore 24 that year. As a rookie, Polynice didn’t have the right to ask a senior squad member to give up his number. He picked 23 because it was so close to 24. But the main reason was because he and MJ were close friends throughout college.

“So, 23, my rookie year, I wanted 24, but Tom Chambers was 24, and I was like i cant ask him for that!” he laughed on the podcast. “So I took one off, I was like, me and MJ were friends in college, so I’ll go down that route.”

But 23 wasn’t the only number Polynice wore in the NBA. He wore 0 as well. Polynice joked that he could be half as good as Robert Parrish by taking a single 0 to his 00. He later clarified that the number 0 carried significance for him because his first name started with an O.

As for 34, that change came when he became teammates with Orlando Woolridge, the only other person to wear 0. Again, he couldn’t ask the older player to give up his number so he went with 34. When he came back with the Clippers, he took the number 30 after a friend’s mother gave him the religious significance of the number.

But when Olden mentioned that his last ever NBA game was against a young LeBron James, his hosts had to ask him the most common question in the NBA podcasting space- who’s better between James, Kobe Bryant and Jordan.

Olden Polynice puts Mike and Kobe over Bron

“Jordan’s no. 1 in my opinion, Kobe is second, only because he patterned so much of his game after Jordan, and LeBron is third, but it’s like I can go any one of them no. 1 and be correct!” he said. It isn’t necessarily an incorrect claim to make, purely because his sentiments are echored by a lot of people that played at the same time as him.

But he did add that Jordan’s killer instinct put him just a cut above for him. His and Kobe’s mentality, in Polunice’s opinion, is what made them just a little bit better than Bron for him. But he did add that James’ longevity cannot be ignored when these conversations.