Jordan, Brady were 30 years of NY pain
Michael and Tom made life miserable for Jets & Knicks
It was worse with Michael Jordan and the Knicks than it was with Tom Brady and the Jets. Michael was worse than Brady, just because when he hurt the Knicks, he always hurt them in the playoffs, five different times, 5-0 record. And in the regular season? He came back out of minor league baseball and a few weeks later he came into Madison Square Garden and dropped what Spike Lee would call the “double nickel” on the home team, 55 points and then an assist to Bill Wennington for the winning basket, one of the most theatrical performances of his career, in a basketball theater that still mattered then.
In New York City sports, Michael was Public Enemy No. 1. But only in New York.
Michael didn’t just hurt the Knicks in his prime. He tortured them. There was the time in the playoff spring of 1993 when it came out that Jordan had taken a trip to Atlantic City for some gambling between Games 1 and 2 of another Knicks-Bulls playoff series. People acted as if he’d robbed the casino and not just take some legal money away from it.
The Knicks went up 2-0. And in Game 4, Michael he took out all that bad coverage against the Knicks, dropped 54 on them in old Chicago Stadium. Then he was one of the Bulls stopping Charles Smith from ever getting the ball to the rim at the end of Game 5. The only time the Knicks beat the Bulls in that era was when Michael had gone off to play for the Birmingham Barons (managed at the time by Terry Francona), in 1994. And that time they needed a whole lot of help from a ref named Hue Hollins and a phantom call with 2.1 seconds left in Game 5 that sent Hubert Davis to the line, where he turned a Bulls defeat into a victory.
If not? The Knicks lose in six.
Because of the stakes, nobody ever took more from one New York sports team than
Michael did. But Tom Brady? Brady was Public Enemy No. 2, the GOAT who did it to the Jets longer, even if the Jets did get him the one time the two teams met in the playoffs, in Foxboro, January of 2011, after a regular season when Brady and the Patriots were 14-2. Brady would call it one of the worst losses of his career. Only time they really laid a glove on him.
After that, the Patriots just finishing first in the AFC East.
The Jets disappeared from the playoffs. For now, with Brady off to become No. 12 of the Tampa Bay Bucs – TB12 in all ways – leaves the AFC East with a 29-7 lifetime record against the Jets. From the time Brady took over for Drew Bledsoe as the Patriots starting quarterback, the Jets finished at the top of the East exactly one time. They finished second seven times.
Brady leaves New England with six Super Bowl titles and nine Super Bowl appearances in all. The Jets have played one Super Bowl in their history, a half-century ago, Super Bowl III.
If Brady had played pro football for someone other than Bill Belichick and somewhere other than the Jets’ division, if some of those second-place seasons had become first-place seasons, could they have maybe won one Super Bowl across the last two decades? The answer is that we will never know. All we know is that Brady and the Patriots owned a division the way nobody has ever owned a division in NFL history.
Other than that one season, 2002, the Jets have always been looking up at Brady. Or at his back. It is why they are singing no sad songs now that he takes his talents to Tampa Bay. Even 2008, the season when Brady’s knee exploded and he was out for the year after his team’s first game, the Jets still couldn’t pass the Patriots. They ended up 11-5 that season, and only missed the playoffs because of a tiebreaker. The Jets were 9-7.
Michael was worse to the Knicks. But Brady did what he did to the Jets for twice as long. And in all that time, they did just get him that one time with the money on the table, 21-14 that day in Foxboro, when Mark Sanchez and Rex Ryan’s Jets made the plays – the biggest was a throw down the field from Sanchez to Braylon Edwards – and Brady did not.
One truly big win. Nineteen seasons. Other than when Matt Cassel stepped in for
him, the Patriots had one quarterback and one coach in all that time. The Jets have had five coaches and 18 different starting quarterbacks.
Jordan and Brady. Brady and Jordan. The Knicks and Jets each ran into a GOAT. What are the odds? Who knows how many titles the Knicks might have won if they didn’t keep running into Jordan? Who knows how things might have played out in the AFC East if Brady had played his entire career with the Bucs? Maybe the Jets would have been the Same Old Jets throughout. Something else we’ll never know.
What we know is that Michael, even after another retirement, ended up with the Washington Wizards, which is where he was when the Knicks made it back to the NBA Finals in 1999. We know that ever since the Jets did win that playoff game in January of 2011, all the years when they’ve been out of the playoffs, Brady and the Patriots finished first nine straight times and won three more Super Bowls and played in two others.
One time Michael and Brady were setting up a golf match with Keegan Bradley and Luke Donald, Jordan simply informed the PGA pros that “the two GOATs will play together.”
Public Enemy No. 1 and No. 2 in New York sports. Michael left. Brady came along. Over 30 years of this. There have been other great opponents over time. The Knicks and Jets just happened to run into the two of the greatest winners of all time. Six titles for Michael. Six for Brady. Twelve in all. Brady’s number. Tell him not to let the door hit him on his way out of the division.