I'm being completely serious when I say this so full disclosure:
...you have to remember the connotation between a white basketball player in the NBA. Just because Rodman and Thomas may be infamously known for their comments re: Larry (among other things) doesn't mean that there aren't more individuals like them who see Larry as white first, thus unfairly attributing expectations and rationale onto him because of his race, and a basketball player second.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jackson is cut from the same cloth. He's one of those guys who I believe thinks he's an all-timer simply because he played during one of the best basketball eras ever. He could only blame everyone else for his mistakes rather than himself as a coach. He mistook the coaching profession for that of a preacher and thought he deserved absolute autonomy. Like many other popular voices in basketball, his reputation is built off of things that happened many years ago and nothing relevant today.
I value the basketball-related opinions of "The Starters" a million times more than Jackson's.
i really don't get why people consider the 90's to be such a great era for basketball. iwatched it back in the day, and in retrospect i see it as an era with a watered-down league full of expansion teams, where most teams barely had any stars.
look at those "great" knicks and pacers teams of the 90's... who was the second-best player on the pacers after reggie? they were role players. and reggie, while an amazing shooter, wasn't a physically dominant player.
same story with the knicks. ewing was very good but overrated because he was in NY, and the surrounding talent really wasn't that amazing. if they'd won a title, john starks would have been the second-best player on the team - he'd have easily been one of the worst #2 stars on any champion in history.
stockton and malone never had any help.
hakeem won his first championship with a mediocre team with no discernible #2.
the pistons disintegrated in the early 90's after having only one real star in isaiah.
barkeley got kicked around by the loaded celtics in the 80's, then floated around and never got any real help in the watered-down league later on.
the international talent level wasn't that great then, either.
IMO the media's obsession with michael jordan has driven this narrative that the 90's were so great. in reality, it was the perfect era for him to dominate - he had an elite sidekick in pippen, and because of expansion other teams were lucky to have even one legit star. though there were some amazing players in that era, the bulls didn't have any rivals with any real star depth.
