Scottie Pippen put his ongoing feud with Michael Jordan aside in a recent interview to admit that his former Chicago Bulls teammate is the greatest player in basketball history.

‘For sure, I mean, you look at the MVPs that he was able to achieve,’ Pippen told Australia’s Today Show.

‘I think it was all brought from us being successful as a team,’ he continued. ‘Obviously someone is going to bring those accolades home.

Yeah, he was the greatest player in, definitely, in basketball.’

Of course, a former teammate referring to Jordan as the NBA‘s ‘greatest’ shouldn’t come as a surprise, but Pippen offered a different answer last year when asked a similar question by former teammate and current Bulls announcer Stacey King.

‘LeBron [James] will be the greatest statistical guy to ever play the game of basketball,’ Pippen said on King’s Gimme The Hot Sauce podcast in Mahy of 2023. ‘And there’s no comparison to him. None. So does that make him the greatest player to ever play the game? I’ll leave that up for debate, because I don’t believe there’s a great player because our game’s a team game, and one player can’t do it.’

 

Scottie Pippen put his ongoing feud with Michael Jordan aside in a recent interview

Bulls teammates Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen are pictured during a 1996 game

Pippen has been in Australia this month to take part in an awards banquet for the country’s National Basketball League and a subsequent speaking tour with former teammates Horace Grant and Luc Longley.

Pippen, a Hall of Famer, was a member of all six of the Bulls’ title-winning teams. Grant won three championships in Chicago before moving on to Orlando as a free agent in 1994, which is when Longley joined the Bulls en route to the club’s second three-peat of the decade.

The trio also took aim at some perceptions around their championship Bulls teams.

Speaking at the NBL Awards, Grant called ESPN’s recent ‘Last Dance’ docuseries on the 1990s Bulls ‘BS,’ but Pippen backed off criticism of the Jordan-backed production when speaking with the Today cohosts.

‘I thought it was special,’ Pippen said. ‘I thought it was a special moment for us to really relive some of the greatest times in basketball history. More so, have an opportunity to see what team basketball was really like. I

‘ think during the pandemic, everyone sitting at home, it was more like an educational tool to let people see how great the game can be if it’s played the right way. If there’s sharing of the basketball, there’s unlimited things you can achieve.’

Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant and Luc Longley speak during the 2024 NBL MVP Awards Night

Pippen had previously been very critical of the series. The problem, from his point of view, was that Jordan seemed to be credited for the Bulls’ success in the 1990s, while his teammates were seen as minor players.

‘They glorified Michael Jordan while not giving nearly enough praise to me and my proud teammates,’ Pippen, 58, wrote in his memoir, Unguarded, which was released in 2021. ‘Michael deserved a large portion of the blame. The producers had granted him editorial control of the final product. The doc couldn’t have been released otherwise. He was the leading man and the director.’

As a result, Pippen claims, the documentary felt inauthentic.

‘I don’t think it was that accurate in terms of really defining what was accomplished in one of the greatest eras of basketball, but also by two of the greatest players — and one could even put that aside and say the greatest team of all time,’ Pippen told The Guardian in December 2020.

‘I didn’t think those things stood out in the documentary. I thought it was more about Michael trying to uplift himself and to be glorified. I think it also backfired to some degree in that people got a chance to see what kind of personality Michael had.’

Larsa and Marcus began dating in 2023 but their relationship is currently a mystery

Further complicating matters is the romantic relationship between Pippen’s ex-wife, 49-year-old Larsa, and Jordan’s 32-year-old son, Marcus.

‘Marcus and Larsa are dating and have been spending more time together in recent weeks,’ a source told Us Weekly in 2022 after the couple was spotted in public. ‘They are trying to keep it on the down low because of the rift between Scottie and Michael.’

Pippen and Larsa were married for nearly 20 years and had four children together before divorcing in 2021.

Larsa described their relationship candidly during an episode of Real Housewives of Miami, saying that the couple had intercourse four times a night for 23 years.

‘I was married for 23 years, I’ve always had sex like four times a night,’ she said. ‘So three times a week is nothing… I had sex four times a night, every night. I never had a day off for 23 years.’

There have been recent rumors that Larsa and Marcus could get married, although conflicting reports have the couple calling off the engagement.