Scottie Pippen didn’t care that Michael Jordan took a limo from New York to Atlantic City and gambled before the Chicago Bulls lost Game 2 of the 1993 NBA Eastern Conference Finals to the New York Knicks.
The New York Times broke the story and Jordan was heavily criticized, but Pippen said his teammate “was a grown man.”
“Michael said the timing was off, that he left Atlantic City around 11:00 p.m. and was in bed by 1:00 a.m. The timing didn’t make a difference to me,” Pippen wrote in his book. “I wouldn’t have cared if Michael was at the tables the whole night. He was a grown man for God’s sake. If taking a limo to Atlantic City to gamble for a few hours was what he felt he needed to blow off some steam, who was I or anyone, the press especially, to find fault with him? No one could begin to understand the pressure he was under, night after night, year after year.”
The Bulls lost Game 2 to the Knicks by a final score of 96-91.
Jordan finished with 36 points and nine rebounds in 39 minutes while shooting 12-of-32 from the field, 1-of-7 from beyond the arc and 11-of-13 from the free-throw line.
“My father said let’s get away from New York City,” Jordan said in The Last Dance documentary. “Let’s you and I go to Atlantic City. We got a limo, we went and gambled for a couple of hours, we came back. Everybody went totally ballistic. Hey, he was in a casino last night. I wasn’t late. We got home by 12:30, one o’clock.”
Jordan stopped talking to the media since reporters kept asking him about his trip to Atlantic City.
The Bulls wound up winning four games in a row to eliminate the Knicks in six games.
Jordan averaged 32.2 points, 6.2 rebounds, 7.0 assists, 2.5 steals and 1.0 blocks in the Bulls-Knicks series.
Although MJ shot only 40.0% overall, he still led his team back to the NBA Finals despite so much noise around him off the court.
During the 1993 playoffs, Richard Esquinas — a one-time general manager of the San Diego Sports Arena — wrote in his book that Jordan owed him more than $1.2 million in gambling debt.
“Richard Esquinas, we met from a third party,” Jordan said in The Last Dance. “I’m actually playing golf with people all the time now. And if they wanna gamble, we gamble. The character of those individuals, I find out later what kind of people I was playing with, I learned that lesson.
“But the act of gambling, I didn’t do anything wrong. … I never bet on games. I only bet on myself and that was golf. Do I like to play blackjack? Yeah, I like playing blackjack. There’s no laws with that. And the league did call me and they asked questions about it and I told them exactly what was happening.”
The Bulls faced the Phoenix Suns in the 1993 NBA Finals and won in six games. Jordan retired before the start of the 1993-94 NBA season to play baseball after his father was tragically killed.
In two stints with the Bulls, Jordan averaged 31.5 points, 6.3 rebounds, 5.4 assists, 2.5 steals and 0.9 blocks. He won five MVPs, 10 scoring titles, three steals titles, one Defensive Player of the Year Award, six championships and six Finals MVPs.
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