Earlier this week, a bombshell article from Yahoo Sports detailed how scorekeepers inflated the defensive stats of Michael Jordan during his 1987-88 NBA season in which he won the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year Award. And some previous comments from Scottie Pippen seem to add a little bit more validity to that report.
The deep dive from Tom Haberstrah of Yahoo Sports showed that Michael Jordan had the largest disparity in steals and blocks between home and away games in the history of the NBA with Jordan totaling 82% more at home than on the road – a sign that home scorekeepers were artificially inflating his stats.
In a six-game sample of the season, Jordan was awarded 28 steals, while he had only 12 based on the actual footage that was reviewed by Yahoo Sports. In one of those games, Jordan was even awarded more steals than the opposing team even had total turnovers, which is obviously statistically impossible.
Adding validity to this report, longtime Chicago Bulls teammate Scottie Pippen actually exposed this scandal years ago in his 2021 book “Unguarded,” detailing times when scorekeepers took steals away from him and gave it to Jordan instead, saying “I could do nothing about it.”
“Michael was better at getting people to do whatever he wanted,” Pippen wrote. “I saw it over and over, from the first training camp in 1987 to the last victory rally in 1998. Here’s how it worked: Say I deflected the ball and tapped it over to him. I should get credit with the steal, right? Nope. More often than not, the steal went into his column on the stat sheet, and I could do nothing about it.
“One night, a scorekeeper came into the locker room after the game to hand the stat sheets to Phil Jackson and the coaching staff. The sheet breaks down the points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots, turnovers, and so on for everyone who played the game. I couldn’t believe the look the guy gave Michael: ‘See MJ, we take care of you.’ No wonder in the nine full seasons we played together, he averaged more steals than me in every year except two.”
Needless to say, this is not a good look for Jordan or his legacy.
