Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls managed to do what most couldn’t, winning two three-peats in the same decade. The 90s belonged to MJ and his crew, but the Houston Rockets managed to steal two from under their noses. To be fair, Michael Jordan was out of the league for the time that the Rockets and Hakeem Olajuwon took over.
Over the years, Jordan has clarified that if it weren’t for baseball, the Bulls would have had 8 trophies. Vernon Maxwell disagrees.
Maxwell, a starter for the Rockets during the early ’90s, was someone who even had someone as outlandish as Michael, terming him “crazy.“. The duo’s matchup was often physical, and in a 2015 interview, the Houston guard even declared that he wanted to put his hands on His Airness.
“I wanted to fight him, really,” said Vernon to the media present at the Rockets reunion event.
But during his 20-year exile from Houston, the former Rockets guard seems to have thought about those matchups against Mike a lot. He even thinks the Rockets had the Bulls number during their 90’s run. The Rockets did go 9-9 against the Bulls during that time frame, the 10 years that the Bulls dominated the league.
“Just Google the times we played them. They couldn’t beat us. Like we couldn’t beat Seattle. If we could get past Seattle, we get the championship. We’d knock Chicago off”, said Maxwell.
Unfortunately for Maxwell, The Rockets and the Bulls would never face off in the playoffs, as the Magic and Shaquille O’Neal defeated the Bulls in the 1995 playoffs, facing off with the Rockets in the finals. That same Magic team with O’Neal would get swept in four games by the Rockets, leaving the fans wanting a possible Rockets-Bulls matchup. It never happened, but if it did, former Rockets players have Maxwell shutting down black Jesus.
Robert Horry had Maxwell clamping up Michael Jordan in a hypothetical matchup
There have been many so-called “MJ-stoppers” who graced the league over the 80s and 90s. Among the bunch, a few stood out, like Gary Payton and Vernon Maxwell. The former Houston guard thinks he could have given Jordan a lot of trouble if they had matched up, but Maxwell isn’t the only Rocket saying it. Even Robert Horry thinks the same.
In a sit-down on the popular hoop podcast “All the Smoke,” Horry gave out his plan for how a possible Rockets-Bulls matchup in the 1995 Finals would have gone, and he even had a defensive answer for Jordan. Calling Vernon a Jordan-stopper, Hory told his hosts,
“Vernon Maxwell could have handled Black Jesus.”
Maxwell even got the moniker “Mad Max” for his antics, a nickname even Jordan found to be fitting for the pesky guard. But in reality, the Houston Rockets stood no chance against the Bulls and Jordan in the 90s, even going 2-5 in regular season contests since No. 23’s return to the sport in 1995.