I lost ‘respect’ for Michael Jordan while playing with him and was better player

For years Jerry Stackhouse was compared to Michael Jordan.

Both were North Carolina natives who excelled as shooting guards at the collegiate and professional levels.

Like MJ, Stackhouse also went to college at North Carolina, one of the leading basketball programs in the country.

Over a decade earlier, Jordan was the jewel in the Tar Heels’ crown, lifting them to a national title after hitting the game-winning shot in the 1982 NCAA Championship game against Patrick Ewing’s Georgetown.

Stackhouse didn’t quite hit the same heights as Jordan in college, but did still lead UNC to a Final Four appearance while being named Sports Illustrated’s National Player of the Year.

The Philadelphia 76ers subsequently selected Stackhouse with the third overall pick in the 1995 NBA Draft.

By that time, three-time champion Jordan had returned from his brief baseball hiatus and was about to embark on his second three-peat with the Bulls between 1996-1998.

The Stackhouse/MJ comparisons soon fell away though as the 76ers chose to move in a different direction, handing Allen Iverson the keys to the franchise.

Stackhouse was traded to the Detroit Pistons in ’97 and finally started getting the recognition he deserved.

He became a two-time All-Star (2000, 2001) and was the second-best scorer in the league in the 2000/01 NBA season after averaging 29.8 points per game.

It was also in 2001 when he had his career-high against Jordan’s old team and broke the United Center single-game scoring record with 57 points.

Jordan, meanwhile, had been out of the league for several seasons after retiring following Chicago’s 1998 world championship.

But by 2001, the six-time Finals MVP was itching to make a comeback and eventually signed for the Washington Wizards.

As fate would have it, Stackhouse was traded to the Wizards a year later as part of a deal that saw future Pistons champion Richard Hamilton land in Detroit.

Stackhouse arrived in Washington as a 28-year-old during Jordan’s final season in the NBA.

That season, Stackhouse averaged 21.5 per game while a 40-year-old MJ put up a respectable 20 points per game.

Jordan retired for good soon after, meaning Stackhouse had the distinction of being the only teammate of Jordan’s to finish a single season with a higher scoring average than the basketball GOAT.

While the prospect of teaming up with MJ might seem like the stuff of dreams, Stackhouse later explained that it left him feeling frustrated.

He even said he wished he’d never played for Washington.

“Honestly, I wish I never played in Washington and for a number of reasons,” he said.

“It was really challenging to be able to be in a situation with an idol who at this particular point, I felt like I was a better player.

“And things were still being run through Michael Jordan.”

“I mean we got off to a pretty good start, but I don’t think he [MJ] liked the way the offense was running because it was running a little bit more through me. He wanted to get more isolations on the post, so we had more isolations for him on the post.”

Stackhouse added that he didn’t enjoy the season playing alongside his idol and even lost some of the ‘reverence’ he had for him

“And it just kind of spiraled in a way where I didn’t enjoy that season at all,” Stackhouse went on.

“The kind of picture I had in my mind of Michael Jordan and the reverence I had for him, I lost a little bit of it during the course of that year.”

That season, the Wizards finished with a 37-45 record and were the 10th seed in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Jordan decided to retire for the third and final time having failed to get the Wizards to the postseason in both his seasons with the organization.

An increasingly injured Stackhouse, meanwhile, hung around in Washington for another season before being traded to the Dallas Mavericks in 2004 for Antawn Jamison.

He was part of the Mavericks team who made it all the way to the 2006 NBA Finals before losing to Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O’Neal‘s Miami Heat.

Stackhouse played in the NBA until 2013.

Since then, he’s served as an assistant coach for the Toronto Raptors and Memphis Grizzlies and is currently head coach of the Vanderbilt Commodores men’s team – an NCAA Division 1 college basketball program in the Southeastern Conference (SEC).