Iranian-American businessman Patrick Bet-David hosted Scottie Pippen on his podcast recently. During their conversation, the Hall of Famer was pressed about various matters involving his former teammate, Michael Jordan.
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In one of the segments, Bet-David presented Pippen with an interesting hypothetical. “Would you rather have won a ring without Michael or would you have rather made an additional $100 million while you played in the NBA?” the 46-year-old asked the six-time NBA champion.
“Gimme that $100 million,” Scottie quickly answered. “I got a gold medal ring without Michael so that did mean a lot. But yeah, definitely would have loved to play in this era.”
During his 18-season career, Pippen earned $109 million in the NBA. As he alluded to, the league was in a far different financial landscape at the time and an additional $100 million would practically double Pip’s career earnings.
Bet-David then asked Scottie if he would choose the money over winning a ring during Jordan’s first retirement. After all, that would cement his claim that MJ wasn’t a good team player and help him retire with one championship more than his teammate-turned-adversary.
“I would’ve taken that $100 million,” Pippen maintained. However, when asked if he would choose $50 million over a Jordan-less championship, Scottie finally reconsidered his preference. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll take the ring. It matters to be known as the best… It pays to be at the top,” he added.
With taxes and agent fees, $50 million simply wouldn’t make the same splash according to Pippen. And he’s right to say that a Jordan-less ring would help him earn more money in the NBA, especially since winning the 1993-94 championship was a very real possibility for his Bulls.
MJ had retired prior to the season and Pippen would step up in a big way, averaging 22 points, 8.7 rebounds, 5.6 assists, and 2.9 steals to lead Chicago to a 55-27 record, good for the third seed in the East. The previous year, with Jordan in the lineup, Chicago finished the year 57-25.
Already, that goes a long way to show how impressive Scottie was on his own. He would also make a deep Playoff run, culminating in a tightly contested seven-game series in the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals. The Bulls would fall to the Knicks, who made it all the way to the Finals before succumbing to the Rockets in seven.
If Chicago had taken down New York, Scottie would have had his shot at a Jordan-less championship and it would go a long way in cementing his legacy without His Airness. However, it’s incredibly fair that he picked money over glory.
Along with Pippen’s underrated contributions on the court, it was his ridiculously undervalued contract that helped the Bulls succeed during the 1990s. Before he finished his fourth NBA season, Scottie signed a 7-year $19.4 million contract.
When he signed it in 1991, the salary cap was around $12 million. But by the time his contract expired, the cap had ballooned to nearly $27 million. Despite his attempts at renegotiating the deal, GM Jerry Krause and owner Jerry Reindorf leveraged Pippen’s salary to build contending rosters around him and MJ.
By the time they won their sixth championship in 1998, Scottie was the sixth-highest-paid player in Chicago and the 122nd-highest-paid player in the league.
