EXCLUSIVE: Michael Jordan’s Biographer Roland Lazenby Explains What Ended MJ and Kobe Bryant’s Brand of Basketball

The recently concluded NBA All-Star Game racked up 397 points but failed to impress almost anybody in the NBA community. Fans across the board expressed their discontent with the lack of competition and defensive output in what seemed like a ‘free buckets’ scoring gala. A few days before the All-Star festivities started in Indianapolis, renowned basketball author Roland Lazenby predicted a very similar outcome in the highly commercialized event, during an exclusive interview with The SportRush‘s Adit Pujari. The veteran author also detailed how the evolution of the NBA has ushered in a new brand of basketball, that is diametrically opposite to the kind popularized by Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.

Lazenby’s 2014 book Michael Jordan: The Life is probably the most riveting account of the Chicago Bulls legend’s eventful NBA career. The 72-year-old author revealed during the course of the interview how he had fostered close relationships with some of the biggest names in NBA history, which made him privy to the untold stories in their lives. On the other hand, Lazenby has also been an eye-witness to the rapid changes that the NBA has underwent since 2000, that has fueled its commercial growth.

However, the rapid financial growth in the NBA has come at the expense of the traditional brand of basketball that made so many of us fall in love with the game. “…Before the NBA got rid of defense, a lot of the old style defense. They allowed the rules to be changed in 2001 and those changes were gradual but they totally re-made the game. The gameplay today is nothing like the gameplay just 30 years ago-the game that Magic [Johnson] and Larry [Bird] and Michael [Jordan] and Kobe [Bryant] and Shaq [O’Neal] played,” Lazenby told Adit.

The veteran Sportswriter credited these ‘dramatic’ changes to the rapid globalization of the league. While Lazenby lauded the growth of basketball in America as a commercial product, he warned that the financial rewards have come at the cost of the sanctity of basketball. The modern NBA has made the game more scorer-friendly to make their product more appealing to a wider spectrum of fans. But Lazenby believes that that is not a very wise decision.

He provided the example of the game of soccer to illustrate his point. The celebrated biographer explained that soccer fans are always at the edge of their seats despite the average soccer game producing only a few goals. However, if the guys in ‘suits’ behind the scenes decide to eliminate goalkeepers from the game to make the sport more entertaining for fans, the move will definitely backfire.

While scoring and scorers are celebrated in every sport, the act of scoring has to be made difficult for it to be fun. Only then will the audience appreciate its value. If scoring is made more accessible, then it would actually lose its value. The appeal of a good scorer is that he overcomes the resistance of the opposition’s defense to reach his goal, like Michael Jordan overcame ‘The Jordan Rules’ of the ‘Bad Boy’ Detroit Pistons in 1991. Now if there is no resistance from the opposition, then a scorer’s efforts also mean nothing.

Lazenby wanted to reiterate the common adage that every hero needs a competent villain to display his true greatness. However, the hero has no way to stand out if there is no villain to defeat and hence, he is no longer respected by the masses. That’s exactly what has been the fate of NBA All-Star games for the past few years.

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• Kobe Bryant
• Michael Jordan
• Roland Lazenby