For decades, the public image of Michael Jordan has been defined by competitive fire, personal certainty, and an almost mythic ability to turn slights into fuel. That’s why a new revelation from longtime Bulls chronicler Sam Smith lands with unusual weight: Jordan, Smith says, feels deep remorse about how his relationship with Scottie Pippen collapsed, and his dominant emotion isn’t anger. It’s grief.
In a recent interview with HoopsHype’s Raul Barrigon, Smith described conversations that framed the Jordan–Pippen estrangement less as a feud and more as a relationship that broke without either side knowing how to repair it. Smith said Phil Jackson, who coached both men through six championships, was “very sympathetic toward [Pippen]” and believed Pippen had “had bad advice.”
Smith then delivered the detail that changes the tone of the entire story: when Smith asked how Jordan reacted to Pippen’s more critical public comments, Jackson’s impression was that
“Michael was really hurt by it, and not angry.” Smith added the blunt conclusion: “He regrets losing this relationship.”
That distinction matters. In the Jordan mythology, anger is the familiar emotion; controlled, weaponized, productive. Hurt is different. Hurt suggests the bond was real, and that the separation cost him something that winning could not replace.
Smith’s account also reframes what has long been understood about their dynamic. Even at the peak of the Bulls dynasty, Jordan and Pippen were not presented as sentimental best friends; they were presented as a ruthless partnership, two stars aligned by ambition and sustained by trust. Smith emphasized that Jordan “really appreciated Scottie,” pointing to Jordan’s Hall of Fame speech as a public example of that appreciation.
“In his Hall of Fame speech,” Smith said, Jordan “credited one player,” adding that he “brought up Scottie specifically.”
The estrangement itself has been widely discussed in the years after The Last Dance and Pippen’s subsequent media run and memoir, an era in which Pippen’s critiques of Jordan, the Bulls, and the documentary’s framing became part of the sport’s cultural aftershock. What Smith offers is not a new round of blame, but a different emotional endpoint. He described the revelation as “a tender moment,” one that showed “Michael’s sort of soft side,” and reiterated that Jordan’s response to the situation was “a feeling of loss.”
The NBA loves clean narratives: the alpha, the lieutenant, the rings, the legacy. The Jordan–Pippen story has always been more complicated than that, and Smith’s reporting underscores the most human truth inside it. Championships can make two people inseparable in history. They cannot guarantee they stay close in life.
