Shouldn’t it be a dream for every basketball player to team up with the great Michael Jordan? Not if you’re Jerry Stackhouse.
On ESPN’s podcast “The Woj Pod” Wednesday, Stackhouse explained why his time playing for the Washington Wizards, including a season with Jordan, left him frustrated.
“Honestly, I wish I never played in Washington and for a number of reasons … It was really challenging to be able to be in a situation with an idol who at this particular point, I felt like I was a better player,” Stackhouse said. “And things were still being run through Michael Jordan.”
The claim that he was the better player between the two at the time comes down to age: Jordan turned 40 in the middle of the 2002-03 season, while Stackhouse was in his prime.
Stackhouse has the distinction of being the only teammate of Jordan’s to finish a season with a higher scoring average than the man most consider the greatest of all time. He averaged 21.5 points per game that season while Jordan, in his final NBA season, still put up a respectable 20.0 per game.
Still, Stackhouse, now the coach at Vanderbilt University, said the Wizards changed up their offense that season to make it flow less through him and more through Jordan because Jordan wanted more opportunities in isolation.
“And it just kind of spiraled in a way where I didn’t enjoy that season at all,” Stackhouse said. “Kind of the picture I had in my mind of Michael Jordan and the reverence I had for him, I lost a little bit of it during the course of that year.”
Stackhouse was traded from the Detroit Pistons to Washington in 2002, and he missed out on a chance to win the 2003 NBA title with the Pistons in the 2003-04 season.
• Adam Zielonka can be reached at azielonka@washingtontimes.com.
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