tinman

Further adding the false urban legend about Dream, the Rockets and his legacy

Note how they DO NOT post the most important facts on the Jordan vs Dream nonsense

1. head to head matchups, how we embarassed them every time we play
2. What about the 1986 team? who took his team to the finals first?
3. VJ Singh? you compare Dream to him? F ESPN

F ESPN for pissing on Dream's legacy on this day we Rocket fans honor him!

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/colum...olajuwon-080905

Jordan or no Jordan, Olajuwon was great
Adande

By J.A. Adande
ESPN.com
(Archive)

Updated: September 5, 2008


Hakeem Olajuwon

Barry Gossage/Getty Images

With moves like this, Hakeem Olajuwon was unstoppable at times during his career.

Watching Vijay Singh snatch another PGA Tour victory in Tiger Woods' absence was a fitting way to start a week that ends with Hakeem Olajuwon's enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Singh is the closest thing any other sport has to Olajuwon, the man who best took advantage of some down time by The Man.

From 1990 to 1997, every time Michael Jordan showed up for training camp, he wound up raising the Larry O'Brien trophy over his head at the end of the season. But the two times he didn't, Olajuwon swooped into the void. That's how Olajuwon earned the highest accolade you can give him, a tag much greater than "12-time All-Star" or "franchise's all-time scoring and rebounding leader." All that needs to be said for his career is this: The Houston Rockets don't have to apologize for taking him ahead of Jordan in the 1984 draft. Olajuwon won two championships and a Most Valuable Player award. It's everything you could ask for from a No. 1 overall pick, and he delivered.

To anticipate or envy Jordan's career and what it meant to the Bulls would be excessive. Don't be jealous of the guy driving the Ferrari in the next lane; just be glad you aren't riding the bus.

Olajuwon gave the city of Houston its first big league championship and granted the Rockets access to the most exclusive club in major pro sports. Since Olajuwon entered the league in 1984, only seven teams have won the NBA championship. In that time span there have been 16 World Series champions, 13 Super Bowl winners and 12 Stanley Cup champions.

The only question is, do we devalue Olajuwon's championships and MVP award because they came while Jordan missed one entire season and all but 17 games of the next during his first retirement? Not at all.

This is where Singh comes in. You'll notice that his three major victories -- the 1998 and 2004 PGA Championships and the 2000 Masters -- came when Tiger was retooling his swing and going through his two longest major droughts. So what does that make Singh? A three-time major champion. No asterisk affixed, no questions asked. And now that Woods is out after knee surgery, Singh is zeroing in on the funky FedEx Cup. It's an open range out there, but you don't see Phil Mickelson or Sergio Garcia padding their win totals.

The further we get from the events, the less we care about how they were won. Nearly a quarter century later, Mary Lou Retton is still an Olympic hero even though her 1984 gymnastics gold medal came amid an Eastern Bloc boycott, with nary a Nadia or Svetlana in sight.

The same goes for Olajuwon. They still held the NBA Finals in '94 and '95, with or without Jordan. The league didn't come to a halt. (For what it's worth, Olajuwon's 1995 team swept the Orlando Magic squad that took out Jordan and the Bulls).

There's a whole generation of players who had the misfortune of coming of age at the same time as Jordan. It was like hoping to win a Grammy the year "Thriller" came out. Jordan is personally responsible for denying championship rings to half the Dream Team. Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin, John Stockton, Christian Laettner ... they all suffered at least one playoff loss at Jordan's hands.

But they all had an equal opportunity when Jordan was gone, and Olajuwon was the only won to cash in. He got his first ring at Ewing's expense, which makes Ewing's inclusion in this 2008 Hall of Fame class a little bit cruel. Ewing is the opposite of Olajuwon. He's the guy tormented the most and longest by Jordan, starting with the jumper that beat Georgetown and launched the Jordan legend in the 1982 NCAA championship game, and continuing through five NBA playoff meetings, all won by Jordan. (In the ultimate sign of can't-beat-'em-join-'em, Ewing wound up as an assistant coach with the Washington Wizards in Jordan's last year there and often walked around clad head-to-toe in Brand Jordan gear).

At some point during this weekend's ceremonies, Ewing will have to flash back to 1994. With Jordan finally out of the way, off playing Double-A baseball, Ewing had a clear shot at that elusive ring ... until Olajuwon blocked it. Olajuwon outscored Ewing 189-133 and outshot him 50 percent to 36 percent in a seven-game NBA Finals.

Ewing would never get as close to a championship as he did in that Game 7 defeat. It came just a couple of weeks after his greatest moment, when he followed up a missed shot by John Starks to send the Knicks past the Indiana Pacers and into the NBA Finals. Against Houston, there were just too many Starks misses, 16 of them in that last game, and not enough Ewing could do about it. Certainly not enough to overcome Olajuwon, the MVP of that series (and the next year's NBA Finals as well, after he thoroughly dismantled David Robinson in the conference finals).

Olajuwon distanced himself from his center contemporaries and put more hardware on the shelf than either Ewing or Robinson. More importantly, he separated himself from Jordan, emerging from the often-smothering silhouette that often blanketed the league. Jordan's collection is larger, but he has none of the most important items (rings, MVP awards or Olympic gold medals) that Olajuwon does not have as well.

The only missing element is an answer to what would have happened if they had met head-to-head in the NBA Finals. While that's something we want to know, Olajuwon doesn't need it. He has every bit of validation he needs.

J.A. Adande joined ESPN.com as an NBA columnist in August 2007 after 10 years with the Los Angeles Times. Click here to e-mail J.A.

Originally Posted by The_Yoyo if we are going to play pretend can I pretend its 1994 again?

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Seven

o·ver·re·act
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ClutchCityReturns

The name Olajuwon appears 21 times in this article.
The name Jordan appears 20 times in this article.

Does anyone else think that's just a little F'd up?

tinman

You see Die Hard True LifeLong Rocket fans,

This is what they feed to new NBA fans and never bother to show you the truth. They never tell you about the Maxwell shutting down Jordan, they never tell you how we embarass them in Chicago Stadium, they never tell you how Cartright took Hakeem out twice and that our GM told the league that Cartwright does this on purpose cause he's getting treated like red headed stepchild. They obvious do not tell you that in his 2nd year, the Dream took us to the NBA Finals.

This article validates everything that I've said before and proof that Evil does exist.

Originally Posted by The_Yoyo if we are going to play pretend can I pretend its 1994 again?

tinman

where is this article?

Dream or no Dream, Ewing was great

Originally Posted by The_Yoyo if we are going to play pretend can I pretend its 1994 again?

Zboy

Back handed, upside down, compliment.

But frankly I am not shocked. As great a player Hakeem was, he is underrated by "experts" and NBA fans alike. Interestingly, Hakeem is not bothered by it, as much as Rockets fans are. He knows what he has accomplished and is very much at peace with himself.

Hayesfan

Best line in the article and it's in parentheses

Andy Sheets

What a little bitch to take Hakeem's Hall of Fame day and try to disingenuously pervert it for the sake of yet another "ALL MUST BOW BEFORE THE GOD WHO IS JORDAN! THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE HIM!" editorial. Oh, and I love the little parenthetical regarding how the Rockets swept the Jordan-beating Magic in '95, as if to imply "Yeah, that happened but I'm not counting that because that would totally blow my whole point, which is that Jordan is infallible."

If the guys at ESPN want to do a hatchet job on Hakeem's career, they should just do it and let people know straight up where they stand instead of pulling this condescending *wink*wink*nudge*nudge* crap.

tinman

Jordan or no Jordan, Isiah was great
Jordan or no Jordan, Magic was great
Jordan or no Jordan, Shaq was great
Jordan or no Jordan, Bird was great

Hey Jordan was there when all these guys played
They all beat him too.

And what if they faced of in the finals? how about trying to educate the readers on what really happened when they did face off?

like Dream dominating Horace Grant and Cartwright
like Maxwell smothering Jordan (no double team needed)
like Kenny Smith blowing by BJ Armstrong

We will always be disrespected! even worse, we are disrespected by some teeenage newbs here who don't know anything except what Nike tells them, worse they don't even want to believe the truth. they just care about Tmac in Orlando and ask thousands of what if Yao questions

Clutch City is not for everyone , its for the one's who believe in the TRUTH and JUSTICE and GOOD

Originally Posted by The_Yoyo if we are going to play pretend can I pretend its 1994 again?

tinman

My anger level is at Mr T in Rocky 3. I hope I don't see any Bulls fans today.

Originally Posted by The_Yoyo if we are going to play pretend can I pretend its 1994 again?

ClutchCityReturns

Especially when you consider that Jordan had a better post season that year than you he did the next year when they won it all. People like to say "oh, but Jordan was rusty!". BS if you ask me.

1995
31.5 PPG
48.4% FG
36.7% 3PT
81.0% FT
6.5 RPG
4.5 APG
1.4 BPG
2.3 SPG

1996
30.7 PPG
45.9% FG
40.3% 3PT
81.8% FT
4.9 RPG
4.1 APG
0.3 BPG
1.8 SPG

Seven

Ewing, never won a championship. There's your difference. We all know Dream was better than Ewing. You're missing the point of the writer. Though you want the article to mention EVERY single detail about dream, that's not gonna happen.

You think you know what would happen if they met in the finals, but that's just it...It never happened and we will never know. I would think you would be more offended by this survey.
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/daily...GreatestCenters
Btw, good dialogue from Elie about Hakeem
http://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop...m-Olajuwon.html

Zboy

No kidding. I caught that too.

BTW, Terrible use of "For what its worth...:

Another Bad use of "For what it's worth"

NE Patriots lost only one game last season. (For what it's worth, they lost in the Super Bowl)

Here's a Good use of "For what it's worth"

Mavericks, with 6th best record in league history, lost to number eight seeded Warriors while Dirk was often seen flailing. (For what it's worth, Dirk Nowitzki won the MVP.)

agentkirb87

Two things that bother me about the whole "Olajuwon wouldn't have had rings with no Jordan" statement everyone likes to use.

1. Like has already been said, we've never faced Chicago in the post season, so you don't TRUELY know who would win. They just assume it would be Chicago because they won 3 times before and after. The critics would first to point out "well, thats because they didn't make the finals, if they couldn't make it to the finals those years that Jordan won, then they must not have been as good as the Bulls." The problem with that argument is we DID make the finals both years that Jordan wasn't there, which means that those two years the hypothetical Bulls team was the only thing stopping us (which brings us back to the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that they would've beaten us for sure). I would argue that the reason we didn't make the finals before was because the West was a really deep conference AND because of guys like Horry and Cassel that put us over the top.

2. If we are going to say **** like "if Jordan wasn't around, you guys wouldn't have won the Championship". Lets take the what ifs to the extreme. What if Magic didn't have to retire at age 31 (before Jordans titles btw)? What if Portland/Houston chose Jordan instead of Bowie? What if Jordan...got ran over by a bus in 1990 (please don't take this to be a diss at Jordan btw)? We could play the what if game all day. Fact of the matter is, that year we were the best team in the league. It's not fair to say "well, if this hadn't have happened you might not have won". Point is, things happened the way they did and we won the way that we did.

declan32001

tinman's not overreacting here at all. ESPN to this day crawls up Ewing's crack but this Dream/Jordan bs never goes away because Dream was drafted first and because the NBA needed a celeb to follow up the Magic/Bird era and Dream wasn't American, he had an accent and played in Houston.

For anyone who remembers '84 like yesterday let me tell you this crap is just brutally unfair. What's so crazy is Dream's game was more beautiful than Jordan's even though MJ never took never took a quarter of the punishment.

tinman rules the offseason. Even if he overreacts on occasion.

Zboy

The answers are Horace Grant (First 3) and Dennis Rodman (Last 3).

Other than Rodman, the 95 team that got swept and the 96-98 teams very quiet similar. As you pointed out, Jordan's play was equally good or even better in 95. The "rusty" myth was created on the errand pass to Pipen in the game against Magic. And frankly, people held Jordan to such a god like status that it felt better to excuse his team being ousted due to his "rustiness."

Mav-Hater

All I remember is a quote from Jordan after one of the manny dismantling's Dream gave his Bulls...."I hope we don't ever have to play those guys in the playoffs because we don't have an answer for that big guy in the locker room over there". Or it was close to that quate, anyhow, as I saw Jordan utter it with a dejected look on his face, I knew he knew what was up. Whether the people broadcasting the interview (ESPN) will ever come around, is entirely unlikely.

tinman

You mean what if Magic didn't get HIV?

Here's the truth, people don't like to see it, but its true:

http://www.basketball-reference.com...9212110CHI.html

Originally Posted by The_Yoyo if we are going to play pretend can I pretend its 1994 again?

tinman

The Bulls needed Rodman. Shaq dominated the boards and "rusty" Jordan had nothing to do with that.

Originally Posted by The_Yoyo if we are going to play pretend can I pretend its 1994 again?