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Michael Jordan won basically every single accolade an NBA player can secure over the course of his legendary career. That includes the sole Defensive Player of the Year award he earned in 1988, but it seems like he benefitted from some serious home cooking based on a new examination into some seemingly fake stats.
It’s easy to argue Michael Jordan is the best basketball player of all time thanks in no small part to the résumé of a man who won six NBA titles while being named Finals MVP in every single one, was voted the Most Valuable Player in the regular season on five occasions, played in 14 All-Star Games, and led the league in scoring 10 times.
In 1988, he also added the Defensive Player of the Year trophy to his growing collection after he’d previously stated he felt he was being overlooked for his efforts on that end of the court, and the award made it infinitely easier for him to silence critics who’d suggested he was hurting the Bulls by reserving the bulk of his energy for his offensive talents.
However, the merits of that achievement have now been called into question courtesy of an article Tom Haberstroh recently penned for Yahoo Sports.
I think most sports fans are familiar with the concept of “home cooking,” a concept that suggests the official scorekeepers who are tasked with logging stats at the venues where they’re employed have a tendency to give members of the home team the benefit of the doubt when it comes to tallying various aspects of the game.
For example, there have been scenarios where baseball scorekeepers have been accused of attempting to preserve a no-hitter by logging an error on a play where one may not have actually been committed. In football and hockey, it can be manifested via inflated tackle and hits totals, and basketball boasts plenty of stats like rebounds and steals that can get a similar treatment.
You may remember the Grizzlies found themselves at the center of an overblown controversy in 2023 after their statistician was accused of cooking the books in an attempt to help Jaren Jackson Jr. win Defensive Player of the Year, and now, the Bulls are being accused of a similar practice thanks to Haberstroh’s analysis.
As the reporter notes, Jordan averaged 4 steals and 2.1 blocks per game while playing in Chicago during the 1987-88 season, but those numbers respectively fell to 2.1 and 1.2 when he was on the road. There were also some other major red flags, like a game where the Hawks were credited with ten turnovers and the Bulls logged ten steals, which implied Atlanta didn’t commit a single dead-ball turnover (i.e. traveling or a charge).
Haberstroh ultimately tracked down six tapes from home games during that campaign and found multiple discrepancies while determining Jordan only had 12 legitimate steals despite being credited with a grand total of 28.
Bob Rosenberg—the stat keeper who retired in 2023 after working for the Bulls since their inaugural season in 1965—didn’t respond to a request for comment after the revelation came to light, but something smells very, very fishy.