Jerry Krause: Michael Jordan ‘Never Asked Me To Sign, Trade For or Draft A Player’
Last week, the talk of the basketball world was the war of words between Charles Barkley and and LeBron James. Chuck went on Inside the NBA butting heads with the front office over the team’s roster and criticized LeBron for and saying that they needed another playmaker. LeBron didn’t take Barkley’s assessment sitting down and struck back, calling Charles a “hater” and saying that he would not allow Barkley to “disrespect my legacy like that.”
Former Bulls General Manager Jerry Krause joined Adrian Worjanowski on The Vertical Podcast and explained to Woj that he and Michael Jordan never had issues when it came to decisions about personnel and that MJ “never came to me to ask me to trade for a player.”
From The Vertical:
“I’ll say this about him, he never came to me and asked for other players. He never came to me and asked me to draft a player. He never came to me to ask me to trade for a player. Never once did that happen. Part of it was he thought he was so darn good he thought he could win without them, I’m sure of that…Michael was smart enough to understand the organization and he understood what we had to do as an organization…He never complained to me.”
The quote shows a generational gap, but it’s important to remember how different the League was, both from a business and on-court production standpoint, during Jordan’s prime compared to now.
