A scouting report on Michael Jordan prior to the 1984 draft has emerged and it makes for interesting reading 40 years on.
Jordan is widely viewed as the best basketball player of all time, with six NBA championships to his name with the Chicago Bulls.
He was the driving force in two separate three-peats, either side of a surprise foray into baseball with the Chicago White Sox.
But while many see Jordan as the GOAT and absolute standard-bearer in his sport, he wasn’t always a world-beating superstar.
In the star-studded 1984 NBA draft, Jordan was Bulls’ third overall pick. Their absolute priority was Hakeem Olajuwon, who ended up going to Houston Rockets after they won a coin flip.
He had excelled at college level with the North Carolina Tar Heels yet according to GM Rod Thorn, Bulls had their reservations about Jordan – with one particular area of his game a major concern.
“He was a tremendous athlete with a strong body that looked like it was going to get better,” Thorn said, as per a 2009 article on the NBA.
“He was competitive, and a fair shooter. Good ball handler, though not a great one at that time, but a good one and a good defensive player. His shooting was what we were concerned with. We didn’t know what kind of shooter he was going to turn out to be.”
As it happens, Jordan’s shooting ended up becoming one of his very best traits later in his career.
He is fifth in the rankings for points scored in the NBA, with 32 292 points across 15 seasons.
Jordan also has a record 10 NBA scoring titles and is one of the most complete players to grace a court.
His hands, being 9.75 inches long and 11.375 inches wide, are the longest in NBA history.
Yet they weren’t always put to good use, with college teammate Kenny Smith not rating his handling until MJ made serious improvements.
“He’s the only guy that I know that the weaknesses that he had, at the end of his career were his strengths,” Smith said on the All the Smoke podcast.
“I used to say, it’s like, ‘You think you could guard me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, because your handle is whack.’ I used to say, ‘Your handle is whack, I could guard you’. “We doing that, he goes to the Olympics, comes back, goes to the league, comes back for the summer cause all the players, we all come back to play. And he’s like, ‘My handle, been working on it.'”
