Michael Jordan agreed to release The Last Dance doc footage during LeBron James’ 2016 Cavaliers championship parade: ‘The universe has such a funny sense of humor’

NBA icon Michael Jordan agreed to release The Last Dance doc footage during LeBron James‘ 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers championship parade.

The Cavaliers won the 2016 title against the Golden State Warriors, becoming the first team in NBA history to erase a 3-1 series deficit in the NBA Finals. 

LeBron won the 2016 Finals MVP Award. He averaged 29.7 points, 11.3 rebounds, 8.9 assists, 2.6 steals and 2.3 blocks in the series, helping the Cavaliers win the title for the first time in franchise history. 

“The universe has such a funny sense of humor,” Mike Tollin, a producer on The Last Dance, told Ramona Shelburne of ESPN. “Because when I woke up, I put on ESPN while I’m getting dressed, and there’s LeBron and the Cavaliers parading through the streets of Cleveland with the trophy that they’d just won.”

The Last Dance came out in 2020. Jordan had editorial control over the doc. 

“So this isn’t the definitive documentary about one of the greatest players of all time, Michael Jordan,” Shelburne wrote. “It’s a documentary about one of the greatest teams of all time, the 1997-98 Bulls, with Jordan as a leading character. And he was ready to tell it, right after another player (James) and another team (the Warriors) got dangerously close to challenging those legacies.”

Jordan and LeBron are two of the best players in NBA history.

The GOAT debate between Jordan and LeBron is among the most discussed topics in sports discourse. 

Jordan, who played college basketball at UNC, averaged 30.1 points, 6.2 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 2.3 steals and 0.8 blocks with the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards. He won five MVPs, one Defensive Player of the Year Award, six rings, six Finals MVPs, three steals titles and 10 scoring titles with the Bulls. 

Meanwhile, LeBron — who went straight to the NBA from high school — has career averages of 27.1 points, 7.5 rebounds, 7.4 assists, 1.5 steals and 0.7 blocks with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat and Los Angeles Lakers. He’s a four-time MVP, a four-time champion, a four-time Finals MVP, a one-time scoring champion and a one-time assists champion. 

LeBron is the leading scorer in NBA history, while Jordan is first in league history in points per game.