Gary Payton responds to Michael Jordan laughing at him in 'The Last Dance'

This week, in a Bleacher Report AMA session, Payton fired back:

“It’s like this to me. He wouldn’t be Michael Jordan if he would have bowed down there. Everybody knows about his competitiveness. He was a guy who came every night to play. I respect him for that because I came every night to play. I was never gonna back down to him and he knew that.

“If it was my documentary and they asked me the same thing I would have laughed too and been like, ‘No he couldn’t go at me neither.’ Every night I played Michael Jordan he brought the best out of me.

“Wish I could have started off on him in the championship and it would have been better, but their team was better than mine at the time and they won it all. He did a documentary, he felt the way he felt. What I can do is I can say the same thing hahaha.”

While Payton did an admirable job against Jordan in that Finals series, the fact that Chicago won, and with relative ease, speaks for itself.

That said, Payton handled "The Last Dance" in a much more level-headed way than most others would have.

Scottie Pippen was far angrier with Jordan over the documentary than Payton appears to be. Same with Horace Grant.

Jordan got brutally honest about a lot of things in "The Last Dance," and whether people like it or not, his dismissiveness of Payton was just more of that.