Michael Jordan may be the best player of all-time and The Last Dance is reliving it. But how did he play against the Phoenix Suns during his career? The answer is well. Very, very well.
With the sports world on hold, all competition-hungry eyes have been tuned into The Last Dance docu-series on ESPN. More than anything, it has re-spurred the argument about who is the greatest player of all-time, Michael Jordan or LeBron James. Even Phoenix Suns role players are weighing in on the topic, much to the disgust of the Internet.
Of note, somehow, Kobe Bryant keeps getting left out of this debate, and I don’t know why.
Anyway, it feels like a good time to take a look back at Michael Jordan’s career against the Phoenix Suns and see how great His Airness played against them.
In total, Jordan played in 31 games against the Suns and finished with an incredible 21-10 record. 27 of those games were as a member of the Chicago Bulls and four were in his strange time with the Washington Wizards.
Of course, six of those games were in the 1993 NBA Finals where…yeah…let’s not talk about it.
In his career, Jordan averaged 34.1 points, 6.3 rebounds, 5.8 assists, and 2.4 steals per game against the Suns, all of which are above his overall career average. On top of that, he shot an unreal 53 percent from the field.
He scored over 50 twice, once in 1989 (53) and the other in Game 4 of the 1993 NBA Finals where he put up 55, the second-most points ever in the Finals.
As a member of the Bulls, he never scored less than 22 points in a game against the Suns.
Another stat I find fascinating even though the rational side of my brain quickly makes sense of it is the lack of 3-pointers Jordan shot. Jordan grew up playing basketball in an era where the 3-point line did not exist, so I get it.
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Also, advanced analysts back then were just some dude with a calculator and a notepad so the 3-point-heavy-league of today wasn’t even fathomed.
Still, after making his one and only 3-point attempt in his very first game ever against the Phoenix Suns in 1984, Jordan didn’t make another against them for the next five seasons. And if you exclude the 1993 NBA Finals where, for some reason he shot a ton from behind the arc, Jordan only made three 3-pointers in his entire career against the Phoenix Suns.
Again, I get it, but when you juxtapose that stat against his 34.1 points per game averaged, it’s mind-blowing.
I’m not going to get into the Jordan-LeBron debate. I’m in the minority here and really like both of them for different reasons, but like I’ve said before, that kind of nuance has no place in 2020, so I’ll retreat to my cave of overt logic and wait society out for a while.
What I do know is that Michael Jordan dominated the Phoenix Suns in pretty much every way possible during his docu-series-worthy career.