One recurring theme in episode eight of The Last Dance is that Michael Jordan was really good at taking any slight against him — even ones he made up in his head — and turning them into the motivation he needed to destroy opponents. An example of this came prior to the 1996 NBA Finals, which the Chicago Bulls won over the Seattle SuperSonics in six games.

Jordan didn’t really need any extra motivation to win a championship, but a chance encounter with Sonics coach George Karl before Game 1 tipped off certainly helped. As Ahmad Rashad and Jordan recalled, the pair were out to dinner, and Rashad noticed that Karl was on the other side of the same restaurant. When he got up to leave, he decided it was in his best interest to give their table the cold shoulder.

“He walks right past me,” Jordan said. “And I look at Ahmad and I said, ‘Really? Oh so that’s how you’re gonna play it?’”

“He just kinda went by and I went, ‘Uh oh, should’ve never done that,’” Rashad said.

This particularly bugged Jordan, not because Karl was being hyper-competitive, but the two had a relationship even beyond the fact that they were both in the NBA.

“I said it’s a crock of sh*t,” Jordan said. “We went to Carolina, we know Dean Smith, I seen him in the summer, we play golf. You’re gonna do this? Ok, fine. That’s all I needed. That’s all I needed, for him to do that, and it became personal.”

Jordan would go on to average 27.3 points, 5.3 rebounds, 4.2 assists, and 1.7 steals in 42 minutes per game en route to Chicago winning the series and kicking off their second three-peat.

Michael Jordan’s return to the NBA 18 months after his shocking retirement was a momentous occasion. Jordan didn’t play especially well in his return in Indiana, but over the closing stretch of the 1994-95 season he had some incredibly memorable moments — most notably his “Double Nickel” game in Madison Square Garden — all while wearing 45 instead of 23.

While it’s not some long-held secret as to why he came back wearing 45, which he wore as a member of the White Sox organization while playing baseball, Jordan offered an explanation for the decision, with a big reason being his father’s death and him returning to hoops for the first time since.

“I didn’t want to go to 23 because I knew my father wasn’t there to watch me, and I felt it was a new beginning,” Jordan said. “And 45 was my first number when I played in high school.”

In the 1995 playoffs, the Bulls dropped Game 1 to the Orlando Magic, with the most memorable moment being Nick Anderson stealing the ball from Jordan, leading to a fastbreak with Penny Hardaway and Horace Grant, who punctuated an Orlando win with a dunk against his old team. After the game, Nick Anderson famously remarked “45 isn’t 23,” which Grant immediately knew was a bad idea.

For Game 2, Jordan unretired the number 23 and put 45 back on the shelf, going off for a monster 38-point performance to even the series. As he recalls in the documentary, it just wasn’t natural wearing 45.

“It just felt like 45 wasn’t natural,” Jordan said. “I wanted to go back to the feeling I have in 23.”

Given what we’ve learned about Jordan’s constant hunt for motivation from opponents, Anderson’s comments surely helped push him towards breaking 23 back out and proving that, yes, he was still that same guy. Unfortunately for Jordan and the Bulls, they didn’t have quite enough in the gas tank to get past the Magic in that series, losing in six games. Included in that were a pair of losses where Jordan had 40 and 39 points, respectively.

The 45 period of Jordan’s career was short, but memorable, if for no other reason than that number change became synonymous with comebacks.

Michael Jordan spent the summer of 1995 in Los Angeles shooting Space Jam, where he worked out a deal with Warner Bros. to ensure he had a facility on the lot that he could work out at. Episode 8 of The Last Dance provided some rare video of the pickup games that featured a who’s who of NBA talent, along with Jordan, B.J. Armstrong, and Reggie Miller’s remembrances of those games.

“I said look, I need to practice, I need a facility where I can work out,” Jordan said. “‘Oh don’t worry about that. We can build you that.’ And sure enough, when we got out there, it was all set up.”

The director of Space Jam called it the “Jordan Dome,” as it was a domed in court with full gym equipment that he used to rebuild his body from a baseball body to a basketball body with trainer Tim Grover. Jordan remembers they would start shooting at 7 a.m. and he’d get a two hour break in the middle of the day where he’d do weights with Grover, then they’d film more until 7 p.m. That’s when those legendary pickup runs would happen.

“After we finished, which was usually around 7, we’d invite people over and we’d play pickup games,” Jordan remembered.

“We had the idea that if we invited the best players in the league out here, we’d get a chance to see everybody before the season started,” said B.J. Armstrong. “And then it became like a thing, everyone had to come out to Warner Bros. studios to play with Michael Jordan. And this was his opportunity to see everybody and we would do scouting reports. This is what Chris Mullin would do. This is what Reggie Miller would do.”

Reggie Miller looks back on those pickup games at the “Jordan Dome” in a similar way Magic Johnson looked back at the Dream Team practices from 1992, while also still in awe at how Jordan was able to film all day and then play late into the night.

“It was some of the best games,” Miller said. “There were no officials, so you were calling your own fouls. So it was a little more rugged and raw. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know how he had the energy to film all day and then still play three hours. I mean we would play until like 9 or 10 at night and he still had to get weightlifting in and his call time was like at 6 or 7 in the morning. So I don’t know how, this dude was like a vampire for real.”

The footage of those games is pretty cool to see, and for Jordan, bringing in all the best young talent in the NBA — as well as some of his top veteran competition — gave him the added motivation he needed to get back into peak shape.

“Playing against the young talent, they were full of energy and I had to excel my energy and get my talents back,” Jordan recalled.

It’s the most MJ approach to an offseason, non-basketball activity possible, having the movie studio build an entire gym for him to play on and workout in so he didn’t just not lose a step while filming a movie, but actually got better at basketball in the process.

Michael Jordan had a lot of time on his hands in from late-1994 to early-1995. That period coincided with Jordan’s decision to try his hand at playing baseball, but after his first year in the minors, Major League Baseball experienced a gigantic work stoppage. When the time came for the league to attempt to bring in replacement players, Jordan was steadfast that he would not cross the picket line, and as such, the most fierce competitor in sports had no outlet.

He was, however, in Chicago while the Bulls were going through their season, and as one former Bull tells it, they met up with Jordan and eventually convinced him to come to the practice facility after grabbing a bite to eat.

“One day, he called me and said, ‘Hey, I’m in town, what’re you doing?’” B.J. Armstrong recalled. “I was like, ‘I’m about to go to practice, you know the routine.’ He was like, ‘Let’s meet at Baker Square,’ so I was like, ‘alright.’” After breakfast, we eat, eat our little pancakes and I was like, ‘Well, I gotta go to practice.’ I was like, ‘Why don’t you just come over, say hello, everybody would like to see you.’”

Armstrong’s efforts to get Jordan to visit paid off, and as a result, the retired superstar returned to the gym. At that point, as Armstrong tells it, a sequence of events that sounds a whole lot like Space Jam played out.

“So he comes over to practice and I started telling him, ‘You old, you out of the game, you can’t play no more, I’ll kick your ass right now,’ more or less,” Armstrong said. “First, it was a joke, and then before I knew it, we were playing a full 1-on-1.”

“I just could feel something different was going on that day,” Jud Buechler said. “I mean, it just had a different feeling in that locker room. And I remember asking [Ron Harper], ‘Harp, what’s going on?’ And Harp just turned to me and said, ‘The man is here.’”

Now obviously, Space Jam played out a little differently, but as we all know, the film ends with a collection of NBA players — Charles Barkley, Shawn Bradley, Muggsy Bogues, Patrick Ewing, and Larry Johnson — prodding Jordan into a game of pick-up by telling him that he’s a baseball player who can’t play basketball anymore. This led to a sequence of events that culminated in Jordan’s return to the NBA. A similar situation played out in real life, and while we cannot say definitively whether that inspired any aspect of Space Jam, it sure seems like they followed pretty similar paths.

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Stories of Michael Jordan’s intense nature and competitive fire, particularly in practice, have become legendary, and the hope when The Last Dance was announced was we would get a chance to see some examples of those with the footage from that season.

To this point, the practice footage of Jordan has been minimal, although the opening episodes did feature him berating Ron Harper for not being aggressive enough, but that changed in Episode 7. It’s the first episode to really dive in to Jordan, the teammate, starting with a section specifically on how he would go after Scott Burrell — a frequent punching bag of Jordan’s this season — and Jordan’s explanation of why he did that.

As the episode went along, he further explained his mentality and why he was so hard on his teammates, with some of those teammates reminiscing on the fear they had and how, while he crossed the line sometimes, what he did worked.

“My mentality was to go out and win, at any cost,” Jordan said. “If you don’t want to live that regimented mentality, then you don’t need to be alongside of me. Cause I’m going to ridicule you until you get on the same level with me, and if you don’t get on the same level, it’s going to be hell for you.”

“People were afraid of him. We were his teammates and we were afraid of him,” Jud Buechler said. “There was just fear. The fear factor of MJ was just so, so thick.”

“Let’s not get it wrong, he was an asshole, he was a jerk, he crossed the line numerous times,” Will Perdue said. “But as time goes on and you think back on what he was actually trying to accomplish, yeah he was a helluva teammate.”

B.J. Armstrong was asked if Mike was nice, and said that Jordan couldn’t really be a nice guy, even if he was “cordial” off the court, because his drive to win was so great and the demands he put on teammates were so high. When prompted on that same question, if his drive hurt his ability to be a nice guy or be perceived as a nice guy, Jordan offered a lengthy quote about the price of winning and how everything he did had that end goal in mind. By the end, was clearly emotional and on the verge of tears, leading to him to call for a “break” from the interview.

“Well, I mean, I don’t know,” Jordan said. “I mean, look, winning has a price and leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates came after me; didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you join the team you lived in a certain standard of how I played the game, and I wasn’t going to take anything less. Now, that means I have to go in there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, one thing about Michael Jordan was, he never asked me to do anything that he didn’t f*cking do.

“When people see this, they’re going to say well he wasn’t really a nice guy, he may have been a tyrant,” Jordan continued. “Well, that’s you, because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well. Look, I don’t have to do this. I’m only doing it because it is who I am. That’s how I played the game. That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that way, don’t play that way. Break.”

It is maybe the best encapsulation of Michael Jordan’s mentality that I can recall ever being captured from the man himself. It’s raw, defiant, and even a bit vulnerable. He clearly doesn’t like the concept of him being a tyrant, but can’t even bring himself to consider that as a valid critique because those that would lob that at him “never won anything.” He’s brought to the verge of tears by the very concept that someone could not want to win as much as him and would be willing to not do everything in their power to tap into their full potential for that goal.

What he says is backed up by what Perdue says as someone who has been punched in the face by Jordan before, but still respects him not just as a player but as “a helluva teammate.” The thing about it all is, there are only a select few that can operate in this way. Jordan was one and Kobe Bryant was another, but you have to be so good and work so hard that when you do verbally berate your teammates or chastise them for what they’re doing, there’s nothing they can do to fire back that you’re being hypocritical. The deification of Jordan has at times led to this idea that his way is the only way to handle teammates, while Kobe’s success with a similar mentality has only furthered that concept. However, they are two incredibly unique examples of the type of person that can get away with that, and when people with lesser abilities or lesser work ethics attempt to emulate them it ends in disaster.

Despite the fact that Michael Jordan retired at the end of the 1992-93 NBA campaign, the Chicago Bulls were still really, really good the following season. Chicago finished 1993-94 with a 55-27 record, just two fewer wins than they had the previous season, before making the conference semifinals and losing to the New York Knicks in seven games.

With Jordan gone, Scottie Pippen took over as the team’s No. 1 option, and while it’s hard to find anyone who thinks Pippen was better than Jordan, there were benefits to having him as the team’s top dog.

“Scottie was our prime motivator, initiator, organize the offense, he really stepped into that role,” Phil Jackson said.

“Everyone expected me to try to be the man, but we beat teams by committee and we learned to play together, and share the ball, and win together,” Pippen said.

Pippen at the helm of the triangle offense gave Chicago a more egalitarian, ball movement-heavy approach, something that worked out well for the team as it was constructed. And beyond that, Pippen’s leadership style was a breath of fresh air compared to Jordan’s desire to rule with an iron fist.

“Great,” Pippen said about the team’s first year without Jordan. “They had nobody yelling at ‘em, they got up plenty of shots.”

“Michael would just bludgeon everybody around him,” Steve Kerr said. “Scottie was the much softer touch. He was the guy who would sort of comfort you when things weren’t going well, put his arm around you and say, ‘Hang in there, you’ll be alright.’”

As we’ve seen throughout the doc, Jordan’s style at the helm of the Bulls was not for everyone, as he loved challenging his teammates in an effort to make them better. That style won three titles in a row (and eventually three more), but for a year-plus, Pippen did a good job exerting his influence on the franchise.e

While the focus of Episode 7 of The Last Dance is on Michael Jordan, his first retirement, his stint in baseball, and eventual return to the Bulls, it does dive into the 1993-94 Bulls and how they excelled without Jordan, led by tremendous play from Scottie Pippen.

That season was an opportunity for Pippen to prove himself as the leader of a team and for Phil Jackson to prove his Triangle offense could be effective even without a scorer on the same level as Michael Jordan. They both succeeded in proving themselves that season, even if they fell short of the NBA Finals, but the way that season ended in the conference semis against the New York Knicks remains a sour note, particularly in how Pippen handled one specific moment.

At the end of Game 3, with the Bulls down one, Phil Jackson drew up a play for Toni Kukoc, a sequence he said they ran a few times that season with success in similar situations. Pippen, frustrated that his number didn’t get called for the potential game-winner, refused to get off the bench and be the inbounder for the play. Kukoc ended up hitting an incredible shot to give the Bulls a much needed win and pull back to down just 2-1 in the series, but after the game, they all remembered the focus being on Pippen’s actions and not on the Kukoc game-winner.

Kukoc, Jackson, Steve Kerr, Bill Cartwright, Bill Wennington, and Horace Grant all looked back on a strange locker room scene in the documentary, recalling Cartwright giving a speech and having tears streaming down his face as he told Pippen he let them down. They also remembered Pippen being emotional and apologizing to the team as well, and even though Jordan wasn’t on the team, he called the next day to talk to Phil Jackson about it and still is disappointed in how Pippen handled that situation.

“It’s always going to come back and haunt him at some point in some conversation. Pip knows better than that,” Jordan said.

Pippen is likewise disappointed in that moment, but not so much that he thinks he’d change it if put in that situation once again.

“It’s one of those incidents where I wish it never happened, but if I had a chance to do it over again I probably wouldn’t change it,” Pippen said.

It’s a strange quote, as you would think you if you really wished it didn’t happen you would want to change the outcome if given the opportunity, but Pippen still seems to feel he’s not given proper respect for what he did on those Bulls teams (and, really, rightfully so). As such, he still probably thinks that even though Kukoc made the shot, it should’ve been his opportunity to take that shot, and even if it hurt his reputation, he wouldn’t respond much differently even with hindsight on his side.

One of my only real complaints about the first three weeks of The Last Dance is that I’ve felt it’s held back on the behind the scenes footage — namely from practices during that 1997-98 season — that we had been promised in the build up to the documentary’s airing. We were told about the thousands of hours of unbelievable amount of footage they had from this season, but with so much focus on telling the history of Michael Jordan and the Bulls, not a lot of that made the cut in the first six episodes.

Happily, we get more of those videos this week as episodes seven and eight explore Michael Jordan the teammate in more detail, including a section dedicated to Jordan picking on poor Scott Burrell, who has been a punching bag for Michael at various times previously this season. Jordan’s various teammates interviewed for the documentary were all asked about Jordan’s infamous competitive nature in practices, and offered their memories of those days in the gym.

“Every time we would play good and we were winning games, everything was OK, but everyone was always on alert around Michael after a bad game like that,” Toni Kukoc recalled. “He would say, ‘You motherf*ckers didn’t do a thing today. Come ready for practice.’”

“His theory was, if you can’t handle pressure from me, you’re not going to be able to handle the pressure of the NBA playoffs,” Steve Kerr said. “So he talked trash in practice, he went after guys. He challenged guys.”

They then show footage of him going after Scott Burrell, whooping and whistling at him, letting Burrell know it was about to be a long day.

“‘Woo,’ I remember, yeah,” Burrell said with a laugh. “He wants to win and you gotta earn everything in Chicago. There was nothing easy, nothing given to you and you gotta go out and earn it. And you earn it in practice.”

As Jordan remembers it, he targeted Burrell because he knew his work ethic didn’t match up with his talent, and he insisted on bringing out more in him. His methods in doing so were, well, very much unique to Jordan, as he says he would try to get Burrell to fight him “in a good sense” — which made me laugh a lot — but couldn’t because Burrell was too nice of a guy.

“Scottie Burrell was a talented guy. What Scottie was lacking was a commitment of determination, seriousness,” Jordan said. “So he became my guy to kinda push — keep pushing, keep pushing. I tried to get him to fight me a few times — in a good sense — like I’m tired of you picking on me, that type of mentality. I could never get him. He’s such a nice guy. But I know we’re going to need him at some point and time, and he’s going to remember this and he’s going to go out there and he’s fight.”

To his credit, Burrell handled Jordan’s prodding well and always talked right back to Mike and didn’t back down. Burrell doesn’t seem to harbor any ill will towards Mike and seems to understand where Jordan was coming from in his methodology of going after him in practice.

“You’re playing with a guy that has the highest standards of any basketball player ever,” Burrell said. “You want to live up to that challenge. It’s tough, tough love. You’ve got to go out there and do your job.”

Still, some of the stuff they showed from Jordan was vicious.

Fan-favorite performers won both the men’s and women’s Money In The Bank ladder matches this year, and both wins managed to screw over King Corbin.

While the other matches on the 2020 MITB PPV took place in the Performance Center, the show’s namesake matches went down at WWE headquarters, Titan Towers in Stamford, Connecticut. To win the match, a wrestler had to reach the roof of the build and climb a ladder in the wrestling ring on the roof to unhook a Money In The Bank briefcase. That wasn’t the only unique thing about them: the men’s and women’s matches also took place at the same time, an element that played into one of the finishes.

The men (Daniel Bryan, Rey Mysterio, Aleister Black, King Corbin, Otis, and AJ Styles) started their match in the fitness center of the building, while the women (Asuka, Lacey Evans, Nia Jax, Carmella, Shayna Baszler, and Dana Brooke) began by a bank of elevators. The groups of WWE Superstars briefly ran into each other as they fought through hallways and conference rooms, engaging in an intergender food fight and some actual intergender wrestling when Baszler choked out Mysterio.

Nia Jax and Asuka were the first two wrestlers to reach the roof, soon joined by Lacey Evans. Asuka managed to take out both of her opponents, but faced another obstacle in King Corbin, the first man to reach the ring. Corbin started fighting Asuka for the chance to reach one of the two briefcases first, but she knocked him off the ladder and unhooked the women’s white briefcase for the win. You can check out that finish here:

After the women’s match wrapped up, Otis arrived at the ring, but his weight was an issue for the ladder, as people who tuned in for the last Smackdown before MITB had seen. As Otis hesitated to climb, Corbin recovered enough to attack him, and soon the rest of the men joined the possibly deadly rooftop fight.

Eventually, both Styles and Corbin were close to grabbing the case when Elias showed up and hit Corbin with his guitar, knocking him off the ladder. Styles had a hold of the briefcase, but the impact caused him to fumble it. The briefcase fell into the arms of Otis, who shouted out a Rocky-esque “Yo, Mandy!” in his show-closing celebration.