The Chicago Bulls’ second NBA championship came in 1992, when they beat the Portland Trail Blazers in six games, as Michael Jordan further asserted himself as the most dominant force in basketball.
In that series, Jordan squared off with Clyde Drexler, who was coming off a sensational season of his own, but the comparisons between the two irked Jordan, as he and Magic Johnson explained in Episode 5 of The Last Dance. As Jordan put it, “Clyde was a threat. I’m not saying he wasn’t a threat, but me being compared to him, I took offense to that.” The result was a legendary Finals performance in Game 1, now known as The Shrug Game, as Jordan went ballistic for 35 first half points, including six three pointers in a blowout win for the Bulls.
Magic was on color commentary for those Finals for NBC, and he recalled Jordan predicting the night before Game 1 — while the two played cards at Jordan’s house — that he was going to go off in the opener.
“I’m working for NBC, I’m covering the Finals, so the night before Game 1 we’re at Michael’s house playing cards and he says, ‘You know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I’m gonna give it to this dude,’” Johnson recalled. “So he hit that first three, and then here comes the second one. The third one. Michael didn’t want anybody to have nothing. And every time he’d hit a three, he’d glance over at me at the NBC table. And he was like [imitates the shrug], ‘I’m killin this dude.’”
There may not be a better, more entertaining story-teller in the NBA than Magic Johnson, and he is, happily, prominently featured in episode five doing just that about the ’92 Finals and the Dream Team. It’s also extremely on brand for Jordan to be having a card game the night before Game 1 of the NBA Finals in which he confidently predicts that he’s going to destroy poor Clyde Drexler, and then proceeds to set Finals records for points and threes in a half, making good on that promise.
