The 49ers’ 2024 campaign has a ton of urgency, but it’s not quite a ‘last dance.’
There’s an understandable emotion surrounding the 49ers’ 2024 campaign that lands somewhere between urgency and dread. Their three consecutive late-postseason failures combined with an aging roster that could see significant overhaul next offseason has led some to ponder whether the 2024 season will carry a vibe similar to the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls that were profiled in ESPN’s ‘The Last Dance’ documentary.
Our friends at Niners Nation ran a poll that saw nearly 40 percent of fans calling this year a ‘last dance’ type of year for the 49ers. While the feeling is understandable, things aren’t quite that dire for San Francisco.
As with all things there is some nuance to this. It probably is the last chance for this very specific version of the 49ers’ core to win a championship. Trent Williams is a candidate for every season to be his last as he reaches age 36. Deebo Samuel could be out the door as the team’s financial burdens constrict their ability to keep the All-Pro WR. George Kittle’s future is also uncertain, not to mention Dre Greenlaw and Jauan Jennings are due to hit free agency this offseason.
However, the story of the ESPN documentary surrounded the Chicago Bulls’ last ride before the team was set to break apart from the top down. That’s not the scenario the 49ers are in.
Kyle Shanahan isn’t on the proverbial hot seat. Brock Purdy is in line for a sizable extension next offseason. Brandon Aiyuk is set to get one this offseason. Fred Warner and Nick Bosa are both locked into long-term deals. Christian McCaffrey isn’t likely to go anywhere. And the 49ers have started gearing up to try and transition to a new core that features Bosa, Warner and Aiyuk, while adding players like safety Ji’Ayir Brown and wide receiver Ricky Pearsall to the mix.
There is definitely urgency for the 49ers. Losing in two NFC championship games and a Super Bowl in consecutive years creates a sense that a window is closing since windows don’t typically stay open beyond a three or four-year period.
For San Francisco the hope is to build a roster with sustainability in mind. They’ve pushed ‘all-in’ recently, but they’ve also managed to give themselves avenues toward keeping their top draft capital with enough financial flexibility to keep a different version of their core together beyond the 2024 season.
Whether it works or not will be decided on the field, but it’s clear from all angles that the 49ers certainly aren’t viewing 2024 as a ‘last dance’ type of year.
The greatest basketball player to ever walk the earth is turning 61 today as Michael Jordan celebrates his birthday (sorry Kyle Hamilton). Jordan starred at North Carolina long before Notre Dame joined the ACC but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have connections to Notre Dame throughout his playing days.
Five of these connections were highlighted during the 2020 documentary series, “The Last Dance”. For a kid growing up in the ’90s, that documentary was a great walk down memory lane and incredibly informative for stories about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dynasty.
What connections to Notre Dame did that documentary have? Let’s look back at just a few:
I’m not going to argue that the top two on this wound up sealing wins for Notre Dame over top-ranked teams in the nation. However, you can’t convince me there is a more impressive play on the list than the two goal line tackles made on the east coast to seal victories.
Notre Dame released another NDTop10 over the weekend with the greatest defensive plays to seal victories being counted down. In looking at this list it’s important to go realize they’re still thinking biggest wins and not so much actual toughest or most-amazing play to win the games.
Before I share my thought after and what I would have put number one, take a watch for yourself. Some great memories in this one, almost all I could tell you where I was watching the moments unfold.
Well, except for the couple I wasn’t born yet for…
I’m not going to argue that the top two on this wound up sealing wins for Notre Dame over top-ranked teams in the nation. However, you can’t convince me there is a more impressive play on the list than the two goal line tackles made on the east coast to seal victories. Stanford in 2012 resulting in a 12-0 regular season I think makes it more impressive than any one of the tackles on that stand, as great as it was.
To me the most impressive plays on the list come in 1995 against Army and in 1998, especially the third down tackle against Boston College. Both tackles are like running into brick walls, just entirely stopped dead in their tracks, even if bigger opponents and games were won by balls being batted away.
Watching the Last Dance doc has Georgia football players thinking about winning the CFB national championship this year.
Whether it be the older folks reliving the greatest era of NBA basketball or the younger fans finally getting to see how special Michael Jordan really was, ESPN’s ‘The Last Dance’ documentary was exactly what America needed during the coronavirus pandemic.
We may not have experienced the same rush of emotions that we do when watching live sports, but this evoked a different kind of emotion. Seeing how badly Jordan wanted to win and then seeing the passion pour out of him when he did win struck a chord with fans and athletes.
As for Georgia defensive end Malik Herring, a senior, he is longing for that feeling that Jordan had when he won his sixth title in 1998. He also made mention of LeBron James, who is considered to be his generation’s Jordan, and referenced LeBron’s first title in 2012 with the Heat.
“Seeing Jordan get his sixth ring and Lebron get his first ring. Their emotions is everything. I just want that feeling man I swear I do,” Herring wrote on Twitter.
Herring was a member of that 2017 team that came so close to bringing a national championship back home to Athens. He was a freshman at the time, and has had to live with that bitter feeling since that day.
Since, Herring and Georgia have fought and fought but have not been able to return to the College Football Playoff.
Seeing Jordan get his sixth ring and Lebron get his first ring. Their emotions is everything. I just want that feeling man I swear I do 😭
And then there’s wide receiver Demetris Robertson, also a senior, who transferred to Georgia after that 2017 season.
As a member of the Dawgs, he’s come close as well, losing to Alabama in that heart-breaking 2018 SEC Championship Game and then making it to Atlanta last year just to lose to LSU in a blowout.
“Time to get ours this year,” Robertson said, in response to Herring’s tweet.
Both Herring and Robertson return for one last dance at UGA in 2020, and they don’t want to leave with anything less than a national championship.
Boston’s Kemba Walker quickly learned of Michael Jordan’s love of trash talk – before he was even drafted by his organization.
If you thought Michael Jordan only trash-talked his opponents, you should probably take an afternoon to watch the recent ESPN documentary series “The Last Dance” to see how he berated teammates he felt weren’t giving their all.
Or, you could ask Boston Celtic starting point guard, who got a bit of a rude awakening after making the jump from the University of Connecticut to the NBA.
Even before joining Jordan’s Charlotte Hornets soon after the legend dove into the world of franchise ownership, the Bronx native realized the Chicago Bulls superstar hadn’t calmed much with age when it came to their sport of choice.
“I was nervous, but I knew I had to try my best to impress him—I think I did,” he added. “It was a really fun workout. All I remember was he was talking trash, which he usually does a lot. He was talking trash on the sideline, but it was fun.”
Talking trash might just be Jordan’s favorite pastime, if history is any judge. He’d do it before games, during and after — he even lit up Larry Bird years after he’d retired when the Bulls eliminated the Indiana Pacers squad Bird was coaching in the 1997 NBA Playoffs.
What did Walker do to become the object of His Airness’ ribbing?
“They put two balls on the floor and they were trying to have us palm the basketballs.
“And as I was going up he said, ‘Man, get out of here, you can’t palm the ball like that.’ I was like, ‘You’re right.’ I didn’t even try. [Laughs] I can’t palm it. But just stuff like that. He’s a good dude. He’s the best, man. Super down to earth. A really good guy to be around.”
One might suspect that the four-time All-Star might be blowing smoke given it was his boss he was speaking about at the time, but Walker has long been a vocal fan of the player many consider the greatest to play the game.
And he could have left well before he finally made the decision to decamp from Charlotte to join the Celtics in a return to his northeast roots.
Jordan is sometimes cast as a bully, and he may well be one in some circumstances.
But the support — even admiration — of the man doesn’t seem particularly diminished by those he ribbed the hardest, whether Scott Burrell, Steve Kerr, or even Kemba Walker.
Boston Celtics All-Star point guard Kemba Walker shared some of Michael Jordan’s advice to him from his time with the Charlotte Hornets.
Boston Celtics All-Star point guard Kemba Walker has a special connection with his former boss Michael Jordan, and the ubiquity of the ESPN documentary series on Jordan’s Chicago Bulls sparked some reflection by the UConn product in a short interview conducted for the team.
Drafted out of Connecticut immediately after dragging his Huskies to their third NCAA National Championship, Walker joined the Charlotte Hornets organization as their highest draft pick in the still-new Jordan era of ownership.
Don’t think that reputation he’d earned in his days at UConn made him immune to the sort of pressure His Airness put on his teammates in “The Last Dance,” though.
Jordan’s early advice to the Bronx native was cut from the same cloth, if anything.
“MJ, the advice he always gave me was [that you] just had to bring it every night, man,” related Walker. “He always told me, ‘Don’t get comfortable.’ That’s his thing — ‘don’t get comfortable, don’t get comfortable,’ and I always heard it, too. ‘I ain’t getting comfortable; I’m keeping this job forever.'”
“Every time he’d tell me that, that was just my mentality. I’m not getting comfortable. I know who my boss is! You know? I’m not about to let you down,” he added. “He’s been very influential in my basketball career.”
Walker and Jordan may be on separate paths now, but the former Charlotte guard still looks back on his time with MJ fondly.
And while their leadership styles couldn’t be more night and day with the former Husky choosing to lead quietly by example, the same killer instinct and insatiable desire to compete is exuded by the Celtic point guard.
While few today likely recall a moment in time where the Boston Celtics hoped to sign Michael Jordan, it really did occur.
It would have been the kind of move legendary Boston Celtics team president Red Auerbach was known for — and the opposite of what the man who tried to pull it off is remembered as.
In 1995, while Michael Jordan was out of the NBA playing minor-league baseball, newly-hired Celtics head honcho M.L. Carr attempted a power play that would have transformed the fortunes of the Massachusetts franchise that instead famously fell into a tailspin under his tenure.
To be fair, what Carr did was intentional — that the losses continued many season beyond when they should have ceased, less so.
Yup, I’m pretty sure it was Steve Levy that reported this on Sportscenter. I’ll never forget seeing Jordan in that old school SC graphic with the Celtics logo behind him and feeling giddy over the thought of him and Dominique in green https://t.co/EPwT07mNTI
But that version of Celtics history very possibly could have gone quite different, though the moves which preceded it did bring one Boston veteran another ring as a result, ironically.
Signing Wilkins made a return for team stalwart Robert Parish impossible, and after a stint with the Charlotte Hornets, he would win one more ring with Jordan in Chicago in 1997.
Carr, shortly after securing the services of an aging Dominique Wilkins as one of his first acts as team president, made a call to Chicago Bulls vice president Jerry Krause, and asked permission to speak to Jordan about signing with the Celtics.
“I was dead serious,” said Carr via the New York Times. “I don’t know how serious Krause was. But if I had a chance to talk with Michael Jordan, I’d give up a first-round draft choice … I just threw the idea up one time on the phone. He probably thought I was crazy. The offer is out there. I’d like him to call and tell me I could talk to Jordan.”
Alas, history has since demonstrated conclusively that whatever happened behind the scenes, it did not turn out in Boston’s favor.
“You may think it’s far-fetched but you don’t know what he’s thinking,” said the then-Celtics GM. “I’ll shag balls for him. I’ll do anything. Please, Michael, come to Boston.”
We still don’t know what he thought of the proposal. We may never.
But oh, how the 1990s (and most of the 2000s) might have been.
Even in victory over a long-retired foe turned friend, Michael Jordan couldn’t resist a few choice words for Celtics legend Larry Bird.
Even after he launched his final shot of his career as an NBA player, Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan couldn’t resist getting in a dig at Boston Celtics luminary Larry Bird.
Of course, by the time Jordan’s Bulls beat the Indiana Pacers team the Hick from French Lick was coaching in the season covered by the ESPN documentary series “The Last Dance”, the duo had long ago become fast friends.
In fact, they’d even been teammates on the “Dream Team” Olympic squad from 1992.
But, as could be witnessed in the final installment of ESPN’s documentary series, Jordan had to throw some trash talk Bird’s way after sending his Pacers fishing.
“Enjoy yourself, dog,” began His Airness. “You [expletive], [expletive] you — y’all gave us a run for our money.”
“All right, take care — now you can go work on that golf game of yours,” he threw in, just as the Boston legend was almost out of earshot.
Love him or hate him, Jordan was consistent when it came to trash talk and competition. He could never get enough of either, and it defined him — even among his peers and friends.
“The Last Dance” director Jason Hehir spoke with Boston Celtics team reporter Marc D’Amico on his fandom for the Cs and much more.
The Boston Celtics might not be prominent in the ESPN Michael Jordan documentary series “The Last Dance” ending tonight with the release of episodes nine and 10, but that doesn’t mean the team hasn’t had a profound impact on the creative mind who guided the series into being.
“The Last Dance” director Jason Hehir recent spoke with Boston team reporter Mark D’Amico in a video produced for the team about his personal Celtics fandom, as well as his general experiences creating the documentary with an eye to where that fandom and the documentary’s production overlapped.
Fans were very nearly without the documentary series as a means for coping with the isolation and lack of sports quarantine in this pandemic necessitates, as it wasn’t quite done.
But, Hehir and his team hunkered down and delivered, making good on delivering the full 10 episodes for fans to see; “As we tape this [interview], we just turned in Episode 10 yesterday,” related Hehir.
“We’re just wild to get this thing done, but it’s been a busy eight weeks in quarantine. I’m actually thankful that I’ve had something to do. I don’t think I’m going through quite the mental anguish that other people are, bouncing off the walls because because I’ve been laser focused every day.”
And the product he and his team created has indeed helped us have something sports-related to channel our own attention towards in the midst of a news cycle and reality that is, otherwise, inescapable.
One of the first instances of the Celtics present in the series was the golfing incident that occurred in between Games 1 and 2 of the first round of the 1986 Eastern Conference Playoffs.
It turned some contemporary heads, as more than a few older players have griped about modern NBA players being too friendly with one another — implying a lack of competitive spirit.
“It didn’t occur to me that there was going to be any sort of backlash because I know that today’s players get a lot of the criticism of [LeBron James’] banana boat and trading jerseys and how it used to be rough and tumble in the 80s and 90s. Guys wouldn’t help each other up off the floor and all that, but I think these players are human beings and and off the court, they left a lot of those things on the floor.”
Such as, by Hehir’s own admission, each other. But, any student of the game of that era will quickly realize Hehir is correct.
While the general vibe of the league was certainly less collegial than it is today, it certainly wasn’t monolithic, and that animosity was — as it is now — usually tied to specific relationships between players with history.
“Some of them carry it over; if you want to talk to the [Chicago] Bulls and the [Detroit] Pistons about that these days, I bet the Celtics and the Lakers probably have something to say about that too,” he added.
“But actually, I just thought it was funny because it speaks to how much Michael was addicted to golf even back then, that he wanted to find a place to play. I think they had two days off — Friday and Saturday — between games one and two, and he wanted to find a place to play.”
Hehir acknowledged Ainge as a pretty significant part of Jordan’s early career,facing him not only in Boston, but also later with the Portland Trail Blazers and the Phoenix Suns.
“[Ainge and MJ] had that altercation they had that fight at half court when Michael stuck his finger in his face and said, ‘Don’t touch me,” he recalled. “Danny was scrappy man.”
The 1986 team in particular was a topic of much conversation, as was the baptism of poor Rick Carlisle by Jordan — then still many years away from his coaching career and a player on Boston’s roster; “I think it was Rick Barry saying that Rick Carlisle wants his mommy,” Hehir noted.
There will evidently be more Celtics connections as well in the final two episodes, as a certain famed forward is due for an appearance.
“You haven’t seen the last of Larry [Bird], because he’s the coach of the [Indiana] Pacers in episode nine when the Bulls face the Pacers in ’98.
“I just thought it was so cool that Larry got to have a little arc in this documentary, because you see him in episode two, facing Michael, … and it was only so significant because he did it against the Celtics. It wasn’t like he just went and did this against a random [Atlanta] Hawks team, it still would have been a record — but to do it against perhaps the best team ever.”
The full interview runs for a little over a half-hour, and is filled with all kinds of details and easter eggs fans of the series will want to catch, so be sure to catch it in its entirety in the video embedded above.
We’re just hours away from the finale of the highly-anticipated series, with episodes nine and ten debuting tonight at 9pm ET.
What we’ll use to fill the basketball-sized holes in hearts afterwards remain to be seen, but until we figure that out, enjoy the last dance of “The Last Dance” this evening.
How did Michael Jordan’s Bulls stack up against the Boston Celtics in his prime? We took a look at how the two teams fared against each other 1990 to 1998.
As the ESPN serial Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance” draws to a close, Boston Celtics fans will have noted a conspicuous absence of their beloved team from much of the narrative under analysis.
Those of us who were old enough to recall the sad shape of the franchise for the bulk of Jordan’s prime may recall the general state of affairs for Boston being among the primary reasons, but few of us could rattle off exactly how the team fared on a game-by-game basis in that era.
So, to that end, The Celtics Wire assembled a game-by-game analysis of how Boston did in each of the games it played against Jordan’s six championship-season Bulls.
Chicago won it all for three years running between 1991 and 1993, and then three more in a row from 1996 to 1998. We’ll look at Boston’s best and worst game of the season as well as the others in those seasons.
We’ll also cover the two years Jordan missed the finals in 1994 and 1995 just to illustrate, with the former season the sole full campaign missed by His Airness — incidentally Boston’s best season against Chicago of this stretch.
