The 1996 NBA Finals pit the Chicago Bulls against the Seattle SuperSonics. While Seattle was a really good team led by Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton, the Bulls had just won 72 games during the regular season and seemed all but assured to win a ring, something that was a game away from confirmation when they went up 3-0 in the Finals.

A major reason why Chicago was one game away from a sweep, of course, was the stellar play of Michael Jordan. Curiously, Sonics coach George Karl decided against putting Gary Payton, perhaps the best perimeter defender in NBA history, on Jordan, telling Payton that he was more valuable as a scorer and that having him guard Jordan would tire him out.

“But we got down 3-0,” Payton recalled during episode eight of The Last Dance. “I was mad. I said, ‘F*ck what you’re talkin’ ‘bout, George, I’m guarding him, whatever you say.’ I said, ‘You can’t control this no more.’”

The move worked, as Jordan had a pair of off nights and Seattle took the next two games in the series, forcing it to move back to Chicago for a Game 6. Payton explained how he guarded Jordan successfully over those two games, and gave a pretty insightful answer.

“A lot of people back down to Mike,” Payton said. “I didn’t. I made it a point, I said just tire him out, tire the f*ck out of him, you just gotta tire him out. And I kept hitting him and banging him and hitting him and banging him, it took a toll on Mike, it took a toll. And then Phil started resting him a little bit, and then the series changed and I wish I could’ve did it earlier, I don’t know if the outcome would’ve been different, but it was a difference with me guarding him and beating him down a little bit.”

The Last Dance is nothing if not a medium through which Michael Jeffrey Jordan can have strong, visceral reactions to things that occurred decades ago. As such, he was shown this clip from Payton and began making silly faces and laughing hysterically before giving a remarkably dismissive response.

“The Glove!” Jordan said. “I had no problem with The Glove. I had no problem with Gary Payton. I had a lot of other things on my mind.”

Jordan was candid about how it did take a toll on him that this was his first full season and attempt at winning the NBA Finals since his father’s passing. The clip of him cracking up is obviously extremely funny, perhaps the funniest individual moment of the entire series. Having said that, putting Payton on Jordan did lead to his numbers dropping off a bit — MJ averaged 31 points, 5.3 rebounds, five assists, and two steals per game while shooting 46 percent from the field and 50 percent from three in games 1-3. Then, in the ensuing three games, Jordan went for 23.7 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 3.3 assists on 36.7 percent shooting from the field and 11.1 percent shooting from three.

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.

The 1995-96 Chicago Bulls are perhaps the greatest team in basketball history. Michael Jordan’s first full season back in the NBA following his hiatus in Major League Baseball saw Chicago win a then-record 72 games and a championship, kicking off the franchise’s second three-peat. Having said that, while the team won a bunch, there were some major bumps in the road, like the time Michael Jordan punched Steve Kerr during practice.

The story is fairly well-documented right now, but in episode eight of The Last Dance, Kerr and Jordan discussed went into their infamous scrap. As Kerr tells it, Jordan — who spent the previous year working off the rust from his time playing baseball — came into camp in fantastic shape, but he was “frothing at the mouth” following the team’s loss to the Orlando Magic in the postseason the previous year.

Jordan, meanwhile, believed he needed to make his team psychologically tougher, as everyone outside of Scottie Pippen had not spent a full season alongside MJ.

“Steve and Luc [Longley], all those guys, they come in riding high on the three championships we won in ’91 ’92, and they had no f*cking anything to do with it,” Jordan said. “But now they play for the Bulls, but naw dude, we were sh*t when I got there and we elevate to being a championship quality team. There’s certain standards you got to live by. You don’t come pussyfootin’ around. You don’t come in joking and kidding around, you gotta come ready to play.”

In an attempt to control Jordan’s rage a little, Bulls coach Phil Jackson would call touch fouls during practice, hoping it would calm him down. Instead, there was one instance where Jordan snapped, making it a point to foul Kerr hard, to which he turned to Jackson and said “now that’s a f*ckin’ foul.”

Kerr, as one might imagine, wasn’t particularly happy with this. He got up and confronted Jordan by hitting him in the chest, which led to MJ punching Kerr in the face. He stormed off after this, and while he was in the shower, Jordan admits to having remorse because he “just beat up the littlest guy on the f*cking court.”

The two ended up talking afterward, and while this seems counterintuitive, they agree in retrospect that this was something of a bonding moment.

“We talked it out, and in a weird way, it was probably the best thing I ever did was to stand up for myself with him,” Kerr said. “Because he tested everyone he played with and I stood up for myself.”

“He earned my respect,” Jordan said. “He wasn’t willing to back down to be a pawn in this whole process.”

Now, to be 100 percent clear here, Michael Jordan should not have punched Steve Kerr in the eye, because that is extremely not cool. But the pair were able to use it as a way to strengthen their relationship ahead of an historic NBA campaign, so at least they were able to get something positive out of the whole ordeal.

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’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 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.

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.

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