NBA legend Magic Johnson joined fellow basketball great Michael Jordan in claiming he wouldn’t have made the choice LeBron James made by linking up with superstars to win a championship.
“We didn’t think about it ’cause that’s not what we were about,” Johnson told the media at Baruch College in New York, as first reported by Bloomberg News. “From college, I was trying to figure out how to beat Larry Bird.”
His comments follow Jordan’s claim that he wouldn’t done so either. “There’s no way, with hindsight, I would’ve ever called up Larry , called up Magic and said, ‘Hey, look, let’s get together and play on one team,'” Jordan said during a short NBC interview after playing in a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada. “But… things are different. I can’t say that’s a bad thing. It’s an opportunity these kids have today. In all honesty, I was trying to beat those guys.”
But according to a 1991 Los Angeles Times article dug up by ESPN’s research advisors, Magic made a choice very similar to LeBron’s controversial decision. Magic told the {Times}’s Mike Downey nearly 20 years ago that if the Los Angeles Lakers didn’t win a coin toss for the No. 1 overall draft pick, he would have foregone the draft and returned to Michigan State.
“I’d have stayed in school,” Johnson told the newspaper a day before Game 2 of the NBA Championship against the Bulls in 1991. “A coin toss changed the course of my whole life.”
Los Angeles had to do a coin toss with Chicago in 1979 for rights to the No. 1 overall draft pick. Chicago, who was one of the worst teams in the league at the time, picked heads and lost. LA went on to draft Magic, allowing him to team up with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, already a MVP award winner and NBA champion. Together, they went on to win five NBA titles.
But imagine if Chicago did win that coin toss…
“I wouldn’t have played in ,” Johnson said in the vintage Times article. “The only reason I came out was to play with Kareem and the Lakers.”