Steve Kerr says Michael Jordan left Bulls for baseball because he was emotionally 'fried,' says teammates didn't resent Scottie Pippen
With no live professional sports taking place in North America this month because of the coronavirus pandemic, Sunday's debut of the ESPN docuseries "The Last Dance" about the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls team that won the club's sixth and final world championship of the decade became one of the country's most-discussed sports topics of April while setting viewership records.
On Monday, former NBA player and ESPN analyst Jalen Rose suggested that current Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James is the fifth-greatest player in NBA history during a conversation sparked, in part, by the documentary. That same day, former Bulls forward Dennis Rodman said Chicago teammate Scottie Pippen "was the best player in the world" for the brief period when Michael Jordan left the Bulls from the fall of 1993 through March 1995.
On Tuesday, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who played alongside Jordan and Pippen during Chicago's second championship three-peat of the 1990s, spoke with ESPN's Rachel Nichols about multiple topics related to "The Last Dance."
"I always will maintain that the real reason he went and played baseball was because he was fried, emotionally, from the scrutiny that only he felt," Kerr said of Jordan's short stint with the Birmingham Barons, the Chicago White Sox minor-league affiliate.
Another widely addressed topic from episode two of "The Last Dance" was Pippen's decision to undergo surgery late in the offseason ahead of the 1997-98 campaign. As explained by ESPN, Pippen was only the sixth-highest paid player on the Bulls at that time, and he didn't want to disrupt his summer by having surgery immediately after the '97 NBA Finals.
On "The Last Dance," Jordan admitted he believed Pippen was wrong to delay the foot operation that caused the forward to miss the start of the subsequent season. Kerr offered a different take on Tuesday.
"We felt his frustration," Kerr said about Pippen. "He probably should have been the second-highest-paid guy in the NBA or definitely top five. So we all felt for him, nobody resented him for having that surgery. Later, we all understood, all right, let's give him his space, and he's going to be there for the second stretch of the season for us."
More must-reads: