Legacy
The banners in the rafters, and the seasons behind them. Four defining years for each player, told in order.
’91: The first one
Seven seasons in, Michael Jordan had every individual honor the league offered and a reputation for not being able to win the one that mattered. The Detroit Pistons had eliminated the Bulls three years running with a defensive scheme built specifically to stop him. In the spring of 1991, Chicago swept Detroit in the conference finals, and the Pistons walked off the floor before the final buzzer rather than shake hands.
The Finals matched Jordan against Magic Johnson and the Lakers. The Bulls lost Game 1 at home and then won four straight, the last three in Los Angeles. Jordan averaged 31.2 points, 11.4 assists and 6.6 rebounds in the series. The lasting image is from Game 2: Jordan rising for a right-handed dunk, switching the ball to his left hand in the air, and laying it in. After the final game he sat in the locker room holding the trophy and crying, his father beside him. It was the first of six, and the one that changed how he was seen.
’93: Three in a row
By the 1992–93 season the Bulls were the team everyone wanted to beat and Jordan was the most famous athlete in the world, with everything that brought. Chicago won 57 games, fewer than the previous two years, and faced a Phoenix Suns team led by league MVP Charles Barkley in the Finals.
Jordan's response to losing the MVP award was the greatest scoring series in Finals history. He averaged 41.0 points over the six games, a record that still stands, and scored 55 in Game 4. The series ended in Phoenix on John Paxson's three-pointer with 3.9 seconds left in Game 6, set up by a sequence that began with Jordan bringing the ball up the floor. He was the Finals MVP for the third straight year, the first player ever to do that. Four months later, after the murder of his father that summer, he retired from basketball to play baseball.
’96: The best team ever
Jordan returned in March 1995 wearing number 45, and the Bulls were eliminated by Orlando in the second round. He spent the summer in the gym and came back the following autumn in a different gear. The 1995–96 Bulls, with Dennis Rodman added at power forward, went 72–10, breaking the 1971–72 Lakers' record for wins in a season. Jordan won the scoring title at 30.4 points a game, the MVP, the All-Star Game MVP and the Finals MVP, a sweep only Shaquille O'Neal has matched since.
In the Finals the Bulls beat Seattle in six games. Jordan averaged 27.3 points in the series, and the clinching game fell on Father's Day, three years after his father's death. He finished it lying on the locker-room floor with the ball, sobbing. The 72-win team is still the standard against which every great regular season is measured.
’98: The last dance
Everyone knew the 1997–98 season would be the end of the Bulls as they had been built. Phil Jackson had been told it was his last year, Scottie Pippen was injured and unhappy, and Jordan, at 35, had said he would not play for another coach. The Bulls won 62 games anyway and Jordan won his fifth MVP.
The Finals were a rematch with Utah, and Game 6 in Salt Lake City produced the most famous forty seconds of Jordan's career. Trailing by three with under a minute left, he scored on a drive, stripped Karl Malone in the post at the other end, dribbled up the floor, crossed over Bryon Russell and hit a jumper from the free-throw line with 5.2 seconds left. The Bulls won 87–86. Jordan averaged 33.5 points in the series and was Finals MVP for the sixth time in six tries. He retired, for the second time, that winter.
’12: The weight comes off
LeBron James arrived in Miami in 2010 and said the Heat would win not one, not two, not three titles. In their first season together they lost the Finals to Dallas, and LeBron played the worst series of his career, averaging 17.8 points and disappearing in fourth quarters. The criticism that followed was the harshest any player of his stature has faced.
The next season he answered it. He won his third MVP, and in the playoffs, with Miami trailing Boston 3–2 in the conference finals and facing elimination on the road, he scored 45 points with 15 rebounds in a game that has become the reference point for his big-game reputation. In the Finals the Heat beat Oklahoma City, with Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden, in five games. LeBron averaged 28.6 points, 10.2 rebounds and 7.4 assists and closed the series with a triple-double. The first title took nine seasons. The second came a year later.
’16: The promise kept
Cleveland had never won an NBA championship, and the city had not won a title in any major sport since 1964. LeBron returned to the Cavaliers in 2014 with a letter that promised to try to change that. In 2015 they reached the Finals and lost to Golden State with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love injured. In 2016 they faced the Warriors again, this time a 73–9 team, and fell behind three games to one. No team had ever come back from that in the Finals.
The Cavaliers won Game 5 in Oakland, with LeBron and Irving scoring 41 points each. They won Game 6 in Cleveland, with LeBron scoring 41 again. In Game 7, with the score tied at 89 and under two minutes left, LeBron ran down Andre Iguodala from behind and blocked a layup against the backboard, a play that has its own name now. Irving hit the three that won it. LeBron led both teams in every major statistical category for the series, the only time that has happened in Finals history, and was a unanimous Finals MVP. He fell to the floor and wept.
’20: The bubble
The 2019–20 season stopped in March when the pandemic arrived, and resumed in July inside a sealed campus at Walt Disney World in Florida, with no fans, no travel and every game played on neutral courts. LeBron was 35. He had led the league in assists at 10.2 a game during the regular season, and the Lakers, with Anthony Davis alongside him, had the best record in the West.
Inside the bubble, playing in a near-silent arena, the Lakers lost just five games across four rounds. LeBron averaged 27.6 points, 10.8 rebounds and 8.8 assists in the playoffs and beat Miami in six games in the Finals, closing with a 28-point, 14-rebound, 10-assist triple-double. He was Finals MVP for the fourth time, with a third franchise, and became the first player to win the award with three different teams. Eight months earlier Kobe Bryant had died; the Lakers' title was dedicated to him.
’23: The record
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's 38,387 career points had stood as the NBA record for 39 years, and for most of that time it was assumed to be unreachable. LeBron, who had never led the league in scoring except once and had spent his career as a passer first, chased it down through sheer accumulation: twenty seasons of 25 points a game.
On 7 February 2023, against Oklahoma City at home, he needed 36 points to pass the record. He scored them, the 36th on a fadeaway jumper from the left baseline with ten seconds left in the third quarter. The game stopped. Abdul-Jabbar walked onto the floor and handed him the ball. LeBron, 38 years old, in his twentieth season, was the all-time leading scorer. He has added several thousand points since, and became the first player past 40,000 in March 2024. The season ended in the Western Conference Finals, but the banner that matters from 2023 is the record, which may stand as long as Kareem's did.