How Michael Jordan's 1988 Defensive Player of the Year award raises questions

Yahoo Sports senior NBA writer Vincent Goodwill is joined by Yahoo Sports NBA contributor Tom Haberstroh to discuss his reporting into the scorekeeping practices during the Chicago Bulls' 1987-1988 season and some discrepancies that call into question some of the statistics behind Jordan's award-winning campaign.

Video Transcript

Tom, you released an article on Yahoo Sports that went deep into the 1987 88 defensive player of the year conversation.

That award went to Michael Jordan.

He won MVP and defensive player of the year that year for the Bulls.

It was like groundbreaking in a way because he has such an inordinate amount of steals and blocks and what you've come up with in terms of how games were scored back then by scorekeepers home and road.

What it seems that there was an inordinate difference, a vast difference between steals and blocks at home and steals and blocks on the road.

So before we even get to that, what brought you to, what was the impetus for this piece?

Yeah, this isn't just I'm doing a drive by on uh Michael Jordan's career.

That is not what I'm doing here.

This is I was fascinated by the Jared Jackson story last year.

Do you remember that Jared Jackson story that came up and it was gone before it even arrived was uh a reddit poster was accusing Jarron Jackson junior of being the beneficiary of home cooked stats.

Basically his defensive player of the year candidacy was invalid because he had huge home road discrepancies and that the Memphis Grizzlies stat keeper was basically gifting him blocks and steals.

Uh and basically his candidacy was uh fraud that turned out to be a false alarm.

And that story fizzled in record time because today we have the ability then to look at all the blocks within like 10 seconds, we can get pull up the video, whether it's synergy or second spectrum or on nba.com and watch them in like an hour.

And people like Kevin o'connor, uh they're at national analysts that within that hours of that story breaking, we could, we could actually truth squad that story.

But 1988 if we look at the home road discrepancy between Michael Jordan's block and steal rates at the home arena at Chicago Stadium versus on the road.

It is the largest gap of any defensive player of the year award winner in NBA history.

So since 1983 when the defensive player of the year award was uh initially handed out, I looked at home road splits blocks and steals because those things are highly influenced by this, the home stack keeper.

And it is a, I guess you would say a subjective ST is when there's a, a loose ball when a guy tips a ball and then another guy recovers it.

Who do you give the steal to?

It's not totally clear in the, in the rule book and a lot of times the star player will get the benefit of the doubt there.

And Michael Jordan's 88 season had the largest gap between the home rate and the road rate.

And all of that is like cool like that might be just statistical uh circumstance.

But then I talked to a stack keeper for Pablo Torre finds out the show over on Meadowlark media with Pablo Torre, I reported out a story with a former stack keeper with the Grizzlies and in the late nineties with the, with the Vancouver Grizzlies as the expansion team, he admitted to inflating home stats for the Vancouver Grizzlies.

This is the Bryant Reeves big country, Vancouver Grizzlies.

This is the Sharif Abdul Rahim Vancouver Grizzlies and he said on the record that it was kind of, it was part of the league culture that uh he went to a stack keeping convention in Detroit and they all got together and he came away from that meeting, understanding that there was a power of the star treatment.

And so he felt like, you know, I can do this, I can give the benefit of the doubt to Sharif Abdul Rahim whose home road splits were crazy in the blocks and steel columns.

And so we had a stack keeper was like, yeah, homer bias.

It's a real thing.

And then you see Michael Jordan's crazy.

Home road splits in the blocks and steals column for the that year.

And so I started digging and that's how I got on to this journey of investigating the 88 depoy that I think you tell me, I think would be like the most important defensive player of the year in NBA history.

Is it not I, I guess is it under the premise that that is the thing that Michael Jordan has that lebron James does not?

Or Karine or Kobe or Wilt or you name it like the the goat conversation is gonna start with Michael Jordan about six and oh, like if you go with the goat conversation about Michael Jordan, you can talk about his scoring titles, fine.

You can talk about his all defense teams fine.

It's gonna start with six and oh, but right behind that, you hear it from Stephen A or Jalen Rose or whomever is lebron James doesn't have a defensive player of the year award Michael Jordan does.

And so when we look at it through the prism of the differentiator in the goat conversation or just in the ad nauseam breathless debate about who's the greatest of all time in that conversation is that 88 defensive player of the year.

And so that's why I think it is a huge award given out to Michael Jordan.

And if it's not as valid as we thought, that's a story I see for me, I don't look at it that way.

I understand the point of, of saying it's the most important defensive player of the year award because of when you're talking about matching up accolades and everything else.

This is to me, I won't say eye test because Michael Jordan clearly, especially from your story was pissed that he didn't win it in 87 when Michael Cooper won the award, right?

And Michael Jordan being a competitive psycho that he was, was like, ok, I'm going to win this award and led the league in steals by an enormous rate and almost averaged two blocks a game, right, which is really fed for a guard, 1.6 blocks per game for a guard.

They had two blocks like, and this is after a year where he averaged nearly three steals and averaged a block and a half, right?

And didn't win defensive player of the year.

So, so much of this is want to so much of winning a defensive player of the year award is want to, you saw with Marcus Martin, you saw with Gary Payton, you saw especially as a guard.

It's really hard to do that because defending at the rim and rebounding is such a thing that we see that is so quantifiable, you know what I mean?

It's a big man's award.

It's a Hakeem, a David Robinson, a generational defender, a Dennis Rodman, a Ben Wallace at the King mutumbo.

It's that type of award Michael winning it in the 88 is an anomaly, right?

It's an extreme anomaly.

I would also venture and I know I'm trying to get into the gold argument of it is, it doesn't do anything for me per se because he was probably the best perimeter defender in the league for a decade, regardless of what the blocks and steals said he was a dude you didn't want in front of you and don't get me wrong.

He got torched, but he was just a dude you didn't want in front of him.

But I think from your point of, you know, just the stats being a bit on the, you know, on a bit on the cooked side.

One thing I found really fascinating in reading your article was that there was one game against the Hawks where Atlanta had 10 turnovers and all 10 turnovers were charged to Chicago Bulls, Steels, not Michael Jordan steals, but 10 Chicago Bulls steals.

And that is damn near impossible for a team to have 10 turnovers and not one of them just be, oh, I dribble the ball off my foot, you know what I mean?

Or, you know, that sort of 24 2nd violation, 24 2nd.

Any anything, right?

So how, how much of an anomaly do you think this entire thing was or how, how do I put this intellectually dishonest?

Do you think this thing is?

Well, I wanted to make sure I was being fair here and wanted to look at like Michael Jordan versus his peers.

Did they have a statistical difference in the blocks and steals as large as Michael was this just like common practice around the league that Michael Jordan had 80% higher rate blocks and steals on the at home than on the road.

Like he averaged four steals a game at home in that 88 season and it was almost half that on the road, uh, same with his block rate.

So it was about double at home than on the road and looking at it no other player in that year um had nearly the same rates of inflation.

Home road, there was inflation, no doubt.

And we should expect that like players play better at home.

Um And in a world in which stat keepers aren't facing the ridicule of social media where if you do give a a generous stat to someone, it's not gonna be flagged and ridiculed on Twitter within seconds like, well, why, why would have that in 1988 routinely if there was just like Phantom steals being handed out like candy?

So I looked into that statistically.

Uh what you see is that Michael Jordan had a larger bump in inflation on his stats than anybody in that era.

And what's also interesting is not just the statistics, like you said, we had to go look at the film.

I wanted to get my hands on game film, which is very hard to come by.

But my friend in Latvia who is a a NBA historian who's also a basketball executive in Latvia Reus Latsis.

I came across him because he did a bunch of uh audits on Nick Van Axel's game when he had 23 assists.

He watched that game and by the way, that was scored by the Vancouver Grizzlies, uh stack keeper.

Um, he had like 15 assists actually in that game, uh Shaq had a 15 block game.

He watched that film was more like 10.

And so he's doing this historically and I was like, do you have any Michael Jordan games when he had a bunch of steals or blocks in that season?

And he's like, hold on.

I'm part of this like underground trading network of European NBA fans that this is the only way we can watch old school NBA because we, we, we didn't get CBS, we didn't get these uh national TV games.

So we all hoarded these VHS tapes and watched our favorite players.

Let me, let me come back.

So he gives me the five tapes and we watch five tapes start to finish.

And that Atlanta Hawks game was one of them that we were like, what's going on here?

10 turnovers, 10 steals.

So no 24 seconds, no charges.

Uh where you can't attribute that turnover to a defender as a steal, no passes out of bounds, no dribbling off your foot and it turns out, yeah, it wasn't legit that there were errors in that game.

And there was a surplus of steals that seemed to be given and allocated to Michael Jordan.

And as we watched more tapes, Vinnie, we saw, we saw a pattern where if a guy was going up for a layup and Horace Grant blocked the shot, but the referee called a foul Horace Grant wouldn't get the block.

It was just a foul.

We know that that's not supposed to be a block and a foul call.

But when Michael Jordan did the same thing where he contested a shot that was called a foul on Michael Jordan and it looked like a block.

He had an excess of blocks in that game.

And the problem is we don't have play by play data.

So we can't be like, oh, on that play at 154 in the second quarter, when Michael Jordan was called for a foul, was he also called for a block.

What we can say is that the box score, we could watch the game be like, oh, here's how many blocks we saw and here's how many blocks were actually in the box score.

And more often than not Michael Jordan was the beneficiary of excess blocks that were unaccounted for in the viewing of the game.

Same with the steals.

And so at the end of those five games, Vinnie, there were 23 steals in the box score in those five games for Michael Jordan.

And by watching the game independently, the scorekeeper and I, we saw eight, eight steals for Michael Jordan in those five games, 1.6 per game and that is 15, fewer than the box score said he had.

And so the pattern we saw was when you go back and watch Vinnie, you would see when Michael Jordan batted the ball away from Joe Dumars and it went out of bounds and the Pistons got the ball back.

That would be an instance that Michael Jordan may have possibly have gotten a steal when a deflection was considered a steal or when, hey, uh Kevin Willis is laying out Michael Jordan on a screen.

Kevin Willis gets called for an offensive foul on the screen moving screen.

Michael Jordan might be given a steal in that case, even though that's not by the rule a steal.

These are moments in the game where we're like, man, did they really give Michael a steal on that play?

Because you can't find it anywhere else by the book.

There were eight steals and yet he had 23 steals in those five games.

So it wasn't enough for me to just go by the stats and be like, yeah, you had the largest inflation of home road for any depoy winner in NBA history.

I had to watch the film and in the five games that I watched, it was pretty clear to me that something was going on.

You can't quite do that now because we got draft kings and all these other different things and we got people who uh are under indictment for, you know, issues like this and that's why guys are banned, not saying that there's anything that varies to that point happening back then.

I'm just saying this is the reason why stats have to be looked at with a lot more scrutiny now and I just think in time everything improves, there's a lot more of a close eye being looked at.

You can probably sure you can go back and look at Russell's rebounds and Chamberlain's rebounds.

I'm not saying that Chamberlain's 100 points wasn't 100 points.

I'm just saying, I, I'm definitely saying that John Stockton got probably 1000 more assists than he should have though.

That is Tom Howard though.

Ladies and gentlemen, go read that article right here on Yahoo Sports.

Appreciate your time.

You got it.