Michael Jordan checks in at No. 1 in The Athletic’s Top 75 list

“He checks all the boxes, and nobody else checks every box,” said veteran Jordan chronicler, journalist and author Sam Smith. This isn’t new ground for him. Smith actually wrote a book about Jordan titled “There Is No Next.” Smith also wrote the seminal 1992 book “The Jordan Rules,” which humanized and demythologized Jordan at the beginning of his incredible run of winning six NBA titles in two symmetrical three-peats. -via The Athletic / February 18, 2022

But in the “image is everything” era when Jordan made exponentially more money outside of basketball from endorsements, no one backed it up on the court like Jordan. He created a new world in both sports marketing and sports myth-making. “In tennis or golf or boxing, the mystique is the individual,” Jordan’s agent David Falk said to Henry Louis Gates Jr. in a 1998 New Yorker story. “Whereas no matter how great Bill Russell or Bob Cousy was, it was the Celtics dynasty, it was always institutional. Michael changed all that. Singlehanded.” -via The Athletic / February 18, 2022

Steve Kerr won three titles with Jordan, another two with David Robinson and Tim Duncan and then three more as a coach with the Warriors. He’s played and coached against the best players in the league since the late 1980s. During the 2017 postseason, he joked about the “back in my day” philosophy comparing champions of yesterday to the unworthy teams of the present. “The game gets worse as time goes on,” he said. “Players are less talented than they used to be. The guys in the ’50s would’ve destroyed everybody. It’s weird how human evolution goes in reverse in sports. Players get weaker, smaller, less skilled. I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” -via The Athletic / February 18, 2022