The other thing that I found astonishing, most of the play off games Jordan was involved in seem to be ending with the winning team getting around 80/90 points, and he was still getting 30/40 points a game.
Nowadays to win a game you probably need 120 points, teams get to 80/90 points with a quarter left to play, so players getting 40 points doesn't amount to 50% of the team's scoring like when Jordan was playing, at a time when teams were clearly far better defensively and the league was more physical and you could get away with a lot more. These days any contact is a foul, If he played now then 60 points a game would be his average. That's why hes the best ever.
The eras are really different it's interesting. The teams that really stood out outside of the Bulls were teams that had scoring bigs and famous inside-outside combos (Hardaway-Shaq, Olajuwon-Drexler, Payton-Kemp, Stockton-Malone, etc). What's interesting looking through the stats is that scoring fell a lot from the early 90s to the late 90s and basically held until about 5 years ago when both pace and 3-pt shooting went through the roof. The way games were called and flowed was something else.
In general, been binge watching quite a bit of SB Nation content on YouTube recently.
They have a ton of featured playlists on American sports (and a few footy ones) of videos ranging from 10 minutes to far longer on a variety of topics:
-Collapse (teams that were destined for continued greatness but fell apart)
-The Worst (the worst of a particular type of game/match)
-Untitled (legendary players won never won a championship)
-Beef (players that famous didn't get along)
-Weird rules
-Rewinder (a famous moment and the lead up to them)
-Chart Party/Dorktown (statistics driven videos)
A ton of NBA content spread across these playlists across. "Beef" is basically dominated by the NBA (the usual names you'd suspect). "Chart Party" had one that highlighted just how ridiculous the Rockets' three-point shooting has become. But one of the really interesting ones was a story of Stockton/Malone being "Untitled" and all the hard-fought losses they had to western conference foes before coming so close to beating the Bulls but never getting over the line.
I saw someone post a lineup of players of that era who never won a championship (the size would be out of place in today's NBA but fun to speculate):
-Stockton, Miller, Barkley, Malone, Ewing
If Gary Payton hadn't successfully ring-chased with the Lakers at the end of his career, he could be the second ball handler in that team.
Can throw in Penny Hardaway, players from some of those Cavs' teams etc. A lot of them suffered heartache at the hands of Jordan at some point or another.