Scottie Pippen: Michael Jordan’s stats were fabricated

We all know that Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen had a very strained relationship, especially ever since the documentary The Last Dance came out a few years ago.

Pippen has always felt slighted by the media and uses most opportunities to take swipes at Jordan, but this new allegation may be the most outrageous.

Pippen says in his book Unguarded that NBA scorekeepers fabricated some of Jordan’s defensive stats so he could win NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 1988.

“Say I deflected the ball and tapped it over to [MJ]. I should get the credit with the steal, right? Nope. More often than not, the steal went into his column in the stat sheet and I could do nothing about it… One night a scorekeeper came into the locker room… to hand the stat sheets to Phil Jackson… I couldn’t believe the look the guy gave Michael: ‘See MJ, we take care of you.’”

Yahoo’s Tom Haberstroh looked into it and found that Jordan’s defensive stats were more inflated at home than on the road.

“Breaking out his numbers into game location, we find that Jordan averaged a mind-boggling four steals and 2.1 blocks at home. But on the road, those numbers shrunk to a more normal rate of 2.1 steals and 1.2 blocks,” Haberstroh wrote. “Put simply, Jordan’s steals and blocks nearly doubled at home compared to the road. To account for possible uneven playing time effects, we can look at per-36-minute numbers for a truer portrayal of the phenomenon. Jordan’s combined block and steals numbers (“stocks”) were a whopping 82 percent higher at home (5.5 stocks per 36 minutes) than on the road (3.0).”

Pippen has always questioned the validity of Jordan as the greatest player of all time. This new information coming out makes his argument a little stronger.

{Tom Haberstroh}