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Tag Archives: Dennis Rodman

Courtesy ESPN

Wouldn’t it be something if Michael Jordan said what he meant? Not “nice,” almost certainly, but something more than the expected, eyeroll-inducing megalomania his brand and public face have come to represent over the past forty years. He did it all because he wanted it the most; his competitiveness is lost on nearly everyone surrounding him, both teammates and opposition; the extent of his sense of humor exclusively including the very idea that he is Michael Jordan, which makes it impossible for anyone else in history to be Michael Jordan. That’s funny, to him.

If The Last Dance was supposed to prove anything, it was that Jordan’s legacy is as close to unimpeachable as that of any sports figure so far, regardless of his Machiavellian worldview. What it managed to do instead was maybe, possibly make him look worse than anyone else prominently featured. We know he doesn’t care, nor, I guess, should he.

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From sports.yahoo.com

Trading away team headcases is a time-honored NBA tradition. From Dennis Rodman’s Detroit exit in 1993 (and then from San Antonio to Chicago in 1995) to Ron Artest’s unceremonious trade out of Indiana in 2005, getting rid of serviceable but troublesome players allows both teams and players to move on from the skeletons of a marriage gone awry. In situations like these, a player’s future success (Rodman’s with the later three-peat Bulls, Artest’s with the Lakers) tends not to cast the trade in a bad light because the team had decided it simply could not function the same way anymore.

On Monday, two teams expurgated veritable Anthony Fremonts, as the Cleveland Cavaliers dealt Dion Waiters to the Oklahoma City Thunder while acquiring J.R. Smith from the New York Knicks as part of a three-team trade which also involved Iman Shumpert. Both Smith and Waiters had endured franchise-altering waves in the last few months, and now each is set to test exactly how much a change of scenery can do to help a player’s psyche, to the betterment or detriment of their new teams.

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