Michael Jordan’s Teammates Are Unhappy with ‘The Last Dance’

The final two episodes of The Last Dance aired on ESPN over the weekend to much fanfare. But while most have been celebrating the docuseries for chronicling the career of Michael Jordan, some of his teammates are less than pleased with how The Last Dance turned out.

Horace Grant, who was a forward for the Chicago Bulls during their first three championships, has been the most outspoken again The Last Dance, saying that it was “a downright, outright, completely lie” that he was the one who leaked information about the Bulls’ locker room that ended up in Sam Smith’s Jordan Rules.

In The Last Dance, Jordan says that it was Grant who revealed his less-than-friendly tactics as a teammate to Smith, citing their close friendship. During a radio interview with Kap and Co. on ESPN 1000 in Chicago, Grant acknowledged his friendship with Smith but said he would never violate “the sanctity of the locker room.”

Grant also called out Jordan as a teammate, implying that he was more of a bully than the docuseries let on. He recalled the time that Jordan tried to keep a flight attendant from serving Grant food on a team flight after a bad game but said that he pushed back against Jordan.

“You come back and try to take my food?” Grant explained. “I would have whipped his ass. [There] wouldn’t be no Air Jordans right now. It wouldn’t be no six championships, I guarantee you that.”

Grant isn’t the only former teammate who has issues with the way they were portrayed in The Last Dance, as ESPN’s Jackie MacMullan reported that Scottie Pippen is “wounded and disappointed” by the series. Jordan’s top teammate has not spoken to the media since The Last Dance began airing and it is reportedly because he feels that his mistakes have been highlighted while his accomplishments have been downplayed.

And it’s not just teammates who have come out against The Last Dance. In the final two episodes, Jordan revealed that he believes the infamous ‘flu game’ was actually a result of food poisoning from pizza he ordered the night before. However, the employee who delivered the pizza says he is ‘100 percent certain’ that it was not poisoned.

Will any of this be enough for public sentiment to turn on Jordan? Probably not, as any criticism of His Airness tends to pale in comparison to his six rings. But it may force people to question the quality of the so-called ‘documentary,’ as Ken Burns noted that it was “the opposite direction of where we need to be going.”