Hard as it is to believe, we are now at the 40th anniversary of the highest scoring playoff game in NBA history: Michael Jordan’s 63-point masterpiece against the Celtics. The story of the game is well known. Boston would prevail in double-overtime and Larry Bird famously remarked that the performance was “God disguised as Michael Jordan.”
A lot of good stuff has been written and broadcast about this game but I thought there was a little bit of meat on the bone to gnaw at. With that in mind, let’s do a moderate dive into 63-point game, and the context in which it came, and see what more we can find….
The Bulls didn’t want MJ to play: The Broken Foot Controversy
It is well-remembered that after a magical rookie season in 1984-85, MJ broke his foot three games into the 1985-86 season. He was ready to play by March 1986, but the Bulls wanted him to sit out the full season because the team was bad. Management figured the risk of reinjury and the ability to tank for a pick made sitting Jordan a no-brainer. Jordan was not having it. The details of the dispute are quite interesting.
In Peter May’s “The Last Banner,” Jordan said “I wanted to test it then because if something was wrong, I’d have the summer to correct it.” May further wrote that “the bone was healing properly but that there was still a 10 to 20 percent chance he would reinjure himself if he returned at this point.” MJ met with management to advocate for a return “[w]earing nonprescription eyeglasses to make himself appear serious.”
Management pushed back. GM Jerry Krause told May that in the meeting with Jordan, “[owner] Jerry Reinsdorf asked Michael, ‘If I gave you a ten-chamber gun and it had only one bullet in it, would you spin that around and pull the trigger?’ Michael said he would not. Reinsdorf asked him if he would take any Tylenol if he knew the bottle was 10 percent cyanide. Michael said he didn’t have a headache. It was wild. I did not want to go down in history as the guy who ruined his career. I’m thinking of my career, too. I’m a young general manager. But he talked us into it.”
Management relented to the extent of letting Jordan play on a tight minutes limit. The Bulls played Jordan only about 15 minutes per night for the first six games of his return. They lost all six of those games, and MJ played poorly (relatively speaking) as well. He shot a .348 FG% but still managed 13.8 ppg on 13.2 attempts. The Bulls unshackled Jordan for the final 10 games of the season, and he scored 26.5 ppg in 27.9 mpg, and shot .495 FG%. The Bulls went 6-4 over that span to eke into the playoffs.
In an execrable bottom half of the Eastern Conference, the Bulls made the playoffs with a 30-52 record and a -3.12 SRS and had the worst defensive rating in the NBA. On paper, this was one of the worst playoff teams ever. (As a side note, the worst modern playoff team appears to be the 1987-88 Spurs, who went 31-51 and had a -5.02 SRS). But most of that losing came without MJ. The Bulls were 9-4 in games where Jordan played 18 or more minutes, which corresponds to an SRS of 0.62 over that span. In other words, with full-strength Jordan, the Bulls were a legitimate 40–45-win playoff team.
Game 1: MJ had 49
MJ’s 63-point game was the second game of the series, and MJ was pretty good in the first game. In Game 1, Jordan had 30 points in the first half, and Chicago only trailed by two points. In the second half, MJ was “held” to 19 points, but Boston controlled the game and won 123-104. Overall, Jordan had 49 points on 18-36 shooting and was 13-15 from the line. Orlando Woolridge, a pretty good scorer, had 25 points, but no other Bull had more than 13. The well-balanced Celtics had four players score between 23 and 30 points.
The Celtics largely did not double MJ, figuring that Dennis Johnson or Danny Ainge would make him work hard enough that Jordan, alone, couldn’t beat them. In Roland Lazenby’s “Michael Jordan: The Life,” Kevin McHale said “[w]e really didn’t have anything set up to double-team him. We didn’t do anything. We just said let him score.” After Jordan had 49, McHale said they discussed changing strategy but decided against it: “[a]fter that first game we said we should probably double-team him or do some stuff, and [coach] K.C. Jones said, ‘We’ll think about it.’ I mean they won 30 games. We won 67. There was no chance they were going to beat us.”
Robert Parish told Sean Deveney in “Facing Michael Jordan,” really, our strategy was to let him score…the way [Jones] approached it was that we were going to score a lot of points…Our feeling was that, if we score 120 points, there is no way Michael Jordan is going to score 121.”
Game 2: 63 points
MJ started out hot in this game, scoring 13 points in the first quarter and staking the Bulls an 8-point lead. The Celtics outscored the Bulls by 5 points over the next two quarters, (Jordan scored 10 and 8 points respectively, in those quarters). Jordan went really crazy in the fourth quarter, putting up 23 points, but Boston hung tough and forced overtime. MJ had 5 points in the first OT but missed an open jumper to win the game. Boston won in the second overtime, and Jordan added 4 more points to set the playoff record of 63 points.
Bill Walton told Lazenby that “[i]n the locker room after that second game, we said ‘This guy’s pretty good. Why don’t we just double-team him and let’s see if Dave Corzine and the rest of the Bulls can do anything out there.”
63-point game stat stuff
Getting into the numbers, here are some fun facts about the game:
-According to this 2016 ESPN article by John McTigue and Michael Schwartz, MJ’s scoring was almost exclusively jumpers: “He was 12-of-22 on pull-up jumpers, 8-of-14 on drives to the basket and 2-of-5 on other shots.” (Jordan had only one dunk all game).
-Per the same article, of Jordan’s 41 shots, 38 were contested.
-Bill Walton had 15 boards in 25 minutes but fouled out. Four of his six fouls came when he got switched on to Jordan.
-Bird had 36 points, 12 rebounds, and 8 assists in 56 minutes. According to May, Bird played the last three quarters with a hyperextended right pinkie finger and had only one bucket in the final 16 minutes.
-The Bulls minutes leader for the game was not Jordan but Woolridge, who played 54 minutes to MJ’s 53. Woolridge had a really rough game. Bird lit him up, and it appeared to affect Woolridge on offense. He shot 9-27 (.333%) from the field.
-Jerry Sichting helped a lot. In addition to hitting a late dagger double overtime, he was 4-5 off the bench in each of the first two games of the series.
Game 3: MJ runs out of gas
Jordan seemed cued up to have another incredible game in Game 3. The Celtics finally sent hard double-teams to get the ball out of his hands. Jordan still scored 14 points in the first quarter, but the superior Celtics were up ten points anyway. The lead was 14 at the half and 28 after three quarters. Jordan scored only five more points after the first quarter and seemed more of a passer.
Jordan had 19 points, 10 boards, and 9 assists and took only 18 shots, just one more than Corzine. Jordan drew a frustration technical and fouled out of the game with about six minutes left. For the series, Jordan had 43.7 ppg, .584 TS%, 6.3 rpg, and 5.7 apg. Boston outscored the Bulls by 13.7 ppg.
Postscript: 1986-87 rematch
The Celtics and Bulls met again in the first round of the 1986-87 playoffs. Jordan didn’t have to score as much as the previous year but still had 35.7 ppg. The outcome was another sweep. This time the Celtics outscored Chicago by 8 ppg, an incremental improvement.
In a social media world, Jordan would’ve been unfairly roasted for his 1-9 playoff record and seven-game postseason losing streak. Back then, the shade was more subtle but still present. Case in point: Lazenby quoted Ainge as saying that “[h]e’s a guy whose highlight films you most want to watch, but I don’t know how much fun he’d be to play with.”
Jordan didn’t totally disagree with the criticism he was getting about losing. In 1996, MJ talked to May about the 63-point game and observed that “[t]he points didn’t mean a thing to me. I would have rather gotten the victory. But that was one of my better games in that building.” In Lazenby’s book, Jordan was more reflective, stating that what he took from the game was that “I earned Larry Bird’s respect—to me that showed me I was on the right track. Not the points I scored, because at the end of the day we lost the game.”
Stat Miscellany
Some random stat reflections to end on:
-Regarding Jordan’s statement that the 63-point game was one of his better games at the Boston Garden: his Game Score was 47.2, his highest ever at Boston against the Bird Celtics. His next best game against Bird in Boston was a Bulls win on November 9, 1988. MJ had 52 points on 18-33 shooting and 9 steals for a 44.4 Game Score.
-MJ’s scoring record in the playoffs remains intact, even though we are in a high scoring environment.
-Elgin Baylor is the non-overtime playoff scoring leader with his 61 points in the 1961-62 Finals against the Celtics.
-Since the shot clock was adopted, there have been 51 50-point playoff games. Here are the players who have done it more than once:
Jerry West, 2 times
Jayson Tatum, 2 times
Jamal Murray, 2 times
Damian Lillard, 2 times
Donovan Mitchell, 3 times
Allen Iverson, 3 times
Wilt Chamberlain, 4 times
Michael Jordan, 8 times
-The most playoff points scored in a regulation playoff game since Elgin? It’s a three-way tie at 56 points between Charles Barkley (5/4/94 v Golden State), Jordan (4/29/92 v Miami), and Jimmy Butler (4/24/23 v Milwaukee). Wilt also had 56 against Syracuse (a few weeks before Elgin (3/22/62)).
-The record for the second round/semifinals is a tie at 54 points between John Havlicek (4/1/73 v Atlanta) and Iverson (5/9/01 v Toronto).
-The record for points in a Conference Finals is 54 by MJ against the Knicks (5/31/93) in a game that was even more impressive, in my opinion, than his 63-point game.
-As noted, Baylor has the Finals record at 61 points. Rick Barry (4/18/67 v Philadelphia) and MJ (6/16/93 v Phoenix) are tied for second with 55 points. LeBron has the record for points in a Finals game this century with 51 points (5/31/18 v Golden State).
-The only retired non-Hall of Famers to score 50-points in a playoff game: Isaiah Thomas (5/2/17 v Washington) and Sleepy Floyd (5/10/87 v Lakers).
-Active players who are not slam dunk Hall of Famers on the list: Donovan Mitchell and Jamal Murray. Basketball-Reference.com has Mitchell at 59% probability of making the HOF and Murray below 1% (I think Tatum, who is at 60%, and Embiid, at 66%, are probably HOFers already). Obviously, Murray’s chances are much more remote than Mitchell’s and involves Denver winning another title.