Scottie Pippen and Michael Jordan: Analyzing Sports Duos and The Second Best Player on a Sports team
With Scottie Pippen recently inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, it brings us to the question as to just who the second best players on a team are and what their role is. Scottie Pippen was definitely the second best player on the Chicago Bulls team, because he played in the shadow of the best basketball player ever to play the game, Michael Jordan. This in no way undermines the fact that he was a phenomenal player, but it just seemed as if the pairing of him and Jordan worked when he played wingman to the great star. There have been other great team-ups over the years, but this pairing worked so well that it will probably never be repeated.
Scottie Pippen played for the Chicago Bulls and won six NBA championships with the team over the course of his career. When he was drafted into the league in 1987, no one could have predicted that the pairing of Pippen and Jordan would make such a huge impact on the game. What was so interesting about this duo was the fact that everybody including Pippen knew that Jordan was a better player than him, so this never produced a power struggle or a fight to be the number one player on the team. Jordan as well knew that he would not have been such a dominant force in the NBA had it not been for Pippen. The chemistry between these two players was amazing and they complimented each other’s playing styles beautifully.
There have been many pairings in numerous sports over the years: Pippen and Jordan, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant and Shaq, Mark Messier and Wayne Gretzky, for example. Some of these pairings had one player be the dominant one and the other have a secondary role. In the team of Kareem and Magic and Kobe and Shaq, there was always a tussle to be the number player on the team. This leads to a massive power struggle, as players do not pass the ball as often as they want to take the glory for themselves and gain the top spot. It is not a healthy working relationship. Pippen understood this and would take the pressure off of Jordan to do what he did best and Scottie would grind away and make sure Jordan got scoring opportunities. This level of unselfishness is extremely rare in sports today and it led to the duo become so powerful that they won six championships together. The two of them worked so well together that Pippen could not really find any sort of form without Jordan when the superstar retired for the first time and Jordan only came back from retirement if he could play on the same team as Pippen again.
A similar sort of scenario took place in ice hockey. Mark Messier was a fantastic player on his own, but when he was paired with the all time ice hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, he had a number two role on the team. The two of them were unstoppable for the Edmonton Oilers and they won many championships together. The difference between Pippen and Messier, though, was the fact that Pippen was never an amazing player without Jordan but Messier, when he went solo, won championships and was an all time great even without Gretzky. Even though Pippen was a great player, he needed that spark that Jordan created to lead the team to victory after victory. His impact on the game was very large though, because nowadays everyone in the NBA is looking for a player to be the next Scottie Pippen. They are looking for that phenomenal number two player that can support the number one player and the pair can win games together. That is Pippen’s legacy, and it will be a long time before someone to follow in his footsteps is found.
Over the years, many great sports duos have come and gone and it is interesting because we usually say that a whole team is good because all of its players are good, but it is rare to say that out of a whole team only two players shine. In the years to come, we will witness many more fantastic sports duos and maybe one will emerge that will be better than Pippen and Jordan, but it is unlikely.
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