Two months into the season, Michael Jordan looked bad. This is not to say he had looked bad for the whole of his first 26 games with the Wizards; that was a matter of some debate. The numbers were forgiving from some angles (23 points, six rebounds and five assists a night) and harsher from others (a shooting percentage that nudged just up above 40). The Wizards, who had set playoff qualification as a reasonable benchmark of comeback-season success, sat at a shaky 14–13. But on the night of Dec. 27, 2001, things reached a nadir no measure of nuance could rescue. In a blowout loss to the Indiana Pacers, the 38-year-old Jordan was sweatlogged and slow, hobbled by the pain of recent operations to drain fluid from his knee and not yet buoyed by their effects. He clanked eight of his 10 shots, and, in the third quarter, coach Doug Collins let the best player in the history of the game strap on the ice packs. Jordan finished with six points, then the fewest of his career.
During his years with the Bulls, when precious little criticism materialized and still less reached his ears, Jordan nevertheless honed a remarkable talent for unearthing it. Now there was no need; columns and SportsCenter segments scanned as obituaries. “Those bad games were his new Calbert Cheaneys,” Steve Wyche, then the Wizards beat writer for The Washington Post, says, referring to the Washington Bullets swingman whose physical style Jordan occasionally saw as an affront in the 1990s and who drew some of his most focused and explosive outings. “You could see it in warmups [of the next games]: ‘He’s lathered up, he’s not playing around today.’”
Two nights after the Pacers debacle, Washington hosted the Hornets. Less than a minute into the game, Jordan opened the Wizards’ scoring with a fadeaway jumper from the right elbow. Thirty seconds later, another. Old rhythms sounded. Faking another fade, he pivoted and ducked under his defender’s armpit to bank a four-footer off the glass. Tracking a teammate’s missed shot, Jordan slipped into the lane to tap the ball back over the front rim. He didn’t quite recapture his former ways of moving—the Air Jordan XVIIs just didn’t get as far off the floor as the XIVs had—but he was attuned to the degrees of momentum and stillness that great scorers prey on. When his opponent gave him an inch too much space, he put the jumper over top; when someone lurched out, he dropped his shoulder and powered past. He scored Washington’s first 13 points and 34 of its first-half total of 56. The Wizards won big in the end, but nobody cared; Jordan had scored 51. Steve Martin, Charlotte’s play-by-play TV announcer, laid out the game’s real purpose in the second quarter: “Relive the memories, folks.”
