Each week during the 2022-23 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether the trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.
[Last time on Fact or Fiction: The East and West playoff pictures are coming into clear view]
Is Michael Jordan also the GOAT of the NBA’s worst current team owners?
Michael Jordan is the greatest player in the history of basketball. He made the NBA a global brand. The Chicago Bulls sold for $16.2 million in 1985. They are worth $4.1 billion today. Jordan is a primary reason for that growth. He deserves every cent the sport can possibly repay him over the course of a lifetime.
Jordan is also a trailblazing businessman, serving as the NBA’s lone non-white principal owner for nearly a decade after purchasing a majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets for $275 million in 2010. He became the first billionaire athlete six years later, the same year Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jordan’s philanthropy includes donations of $100 million “to organizations dedicated to ensuring racial equality, social justice and greater education,” $10 million to Make-A-Wish America, $5 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, plus millions more elsewhere.
The man is an icon. Maybe the icon.
News broke Thursday that Jordan plans to sell his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets, maybe for another billion, retaining a minority share in the franchise. No word on whether he will retain the title of “managing member of basketball operations,” which he first assumed as a minority shareholder in 2006.
These caveats are necessary before we reach another conclusion that is less heady in the grand scheme: Jordan’s record as an executive at the helm of a basketball operations department is abominable.
He hired former Bulls teammate Rod Higgins as general manager in 2007, followed by Rich Cho in 2011 and fellow University of North Carolina alum Mitch Kupchak in 2018, but Jordan is always the biggest voice in the room. Charlotte has been his NBA home since he assumed…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-fact-or-fiction-michael-jordans-record-as-hornets-owner-is-something-to-behold-204120537.html?src=rss
Author : Yahoo Sports
Publish date : 2023-03-17 20:41:20
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