How ‘The Last Dance’ started with a simple idea in 1997
The year was 1997. Andy Thompson had an idea. Adam Silver liked his plan.
Neither had any clue what they concocted.
The ESPN and Netflix documentary “The Last Dance” — the story based around Michael Jordan and the 199798 Chicago Bulls — premieres Sunday night with the first two episodes of the 10-part series. And the images from that season exist because of the notion that Thompson had and Silver, now the NBA commissioner but then the person in charge of NBA Entertainment, helped arrange.
Thompson, who already had been working at NBA Entertainment for about a decade, suggested embedding a crew with the Bulls. Silver made some phone calls. They were off and running.
“It’s almost hard to understate how famous Michael was and how popular this Bulls team was,” Silver told The Associated Press. “And so, Andy’s view was, ‘We need to find a way to capture this team in its glory.’ And there were no such things as multi-part documentaries on sports on television back then.”
But there had been some examples of the storytelling that Thompson — the brother of former NBA player Mychal Thompson, the uncle of Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson — was pitching to Silver. Specifically, Thompson was moved by the tale of the 1986-87 Edmonton Oilers, a video called “The Boys On The Bus,” which chronicled a season with Wayne Gretzky and the eventual Stanley Cup champions.
“No one in the NBA had ever done this,” Andy Thompson said. “And you’re not just doing this with a run of the mill NBA team. You’re doing this with the greatest player in the history of the game in Michael Jordan, who was very protective of his image and his privacy.”
He got to know Jordan a bit while working at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. He had worked closely with Ahmad Rashad, a Jordan confidant, through “NBA Inside Stuff,” a show Rashad hosted. And Andy Thompson knew Jordan once idolized his brother, so much so that he wore puka shell necklaces and once scribbled his name on a notebook as “Mychal Jordan” until his mother saw it and wasn’t pleased.
“Because of his respect and admiration for my brother, obviously, Michael and I connected,” Andy Thompson said.
Silver approached Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf first, then had to convince thencoach Phil Jackson — who also agreed, albeit with some conditions that if he didn’t want the crew around at cer