Former New York Knicks head coach Jeff Van Gundy had a firsthand look at the greatness of Hall of Fame shooting guard Michael Jordan, spending 12 years in the Eastern Conference with the Big Apple franchise and frequently playing in the regular season and playoffs against the Chicago Bulls.
According to Van Gundy — now an NBA broadcaster for ESPN and ABC — Jordan and the Bulls had the best defense along with MJ's clutch shooting.
“When you think of the Bulls, Jordan’s talent got most of the notoriety, and then secondarily the triangle offense that Phil Jackson instituted. But for [the Knicks], the hardest thing for us in those games to try to come out with a win was being able to score enough against their great defense. They had great size at every position. They were tremendous defensively. We had a hard time rebounding the ball, particularly when we were double teaming Jordan,” Jeff Van Gundy said on ESPN's First Take on Tuesday (via Nick Schwartz of USA TODAY Sports).
“And, third, in the games we lost, critical games in the playoffs, our free-throw shooting betrayed us. Those three things were three constants, along with obviously Jordan and the triangle offense.”
The Bulls famously instituted the triangle offense during Jackson's tenure, resulting to six championships in the span of eight years.
ESPN's “The Last Dance” concluded last Sunday evening, recounting how Michael Jordan and the Bulls became one of the greatest teams in NBA history. A huge part of the story, possibly less discussed in the docu-series and public discourse as Van Gundy alludes to, is the stingy defense Chicago played for years as the best team in the league.
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