The ties between former NBA champion Scottie Pippen and his legendary teammate Michael Jordan have been the subject of heavy conversation, and Pippen finally revealed that the two aren’t “tight” in a recent conversation. The former Chicago Bulls forward spoke about it in a sit-down interview with Spanish sports tabloid Marca.
When asked about his relationship with his fellow NBA Hall-of-Famer now, toward the end of the video clip, Pippen was frank. “It’s never been on the top shelf. That’s the nature of the business,” Pippen stated. “I mean, I was like that with Phil Jackson, but we’re not tight anymore, neither. So it’s just a part of life and cycles that we go through.”
The strained relationship between the two has been pushed to the forefront of sports talk, more so after the premiere of The Last Dance, ESPN’s documentary miniseries that chronicled the final season of the Bulls’ championship dynasty in 1998. In Pippen’s eyes, it elevated Jordan above him and his teammates, causing him to declare in his Unguarded memoir that he was “nothing but a prop.” He didn’t stop there.
“Michael deserved a large portion of the blame,” Pippen wrote. “The producers had granted him editorial control of the final product. The doc couldn’t have been released otherwise. He was the leading man and the director.” The two-time Olympic basketball winner also pointed out Jordan’s $10 million fee for being in the series, while he and his other teammates weren’t paid anything for their appearance.
Pippen has been candid about the lack of a close relationship with Jordan before, citing his status of being the face of the NBA worldwide during their days in Chicago. “Michael was bigger than the game, you know,” Pippen said. “Even [by] my initial arrival to Chicago he was a big, iconic figure for the NBA. So, we never really had that off-the-court relationship.”
Despite that, Pippen still regards Air Jordan as the greatest of all time. “You look at the MVPs he was able to achieve, but I think it was all brought from us being successful as a team. Obviously, someone’s gonna bring those accolades home, but he was the greatest player in basketball,” he said in an interview last year.
