NBA trash talk is an awesome aspect of the sport. As a player, if you’re good at it, it can also be a tool to get into an opponents’ head.
For Scottie Pippen and the Chicago Bulls of legend, they had some of the best talkers in history and, according to Scottie, delivered a line against Karl “The Mailman” Malone that has not been topped to this day.
On a Sunday playoff game that featured Malone against MJ and Pippen, Karl missed TWICE from the line with the game tied at 82 and Scottie told him “The Mailman doesn’t deliver on Sunday!” Michael then drilled the game-winner as time expired to take Game 1.
Admittedly, that’s a pretty awesome line — and (more importantly) resulted in a Chicago win.
Jordan, Pippen and the rest of that Bulls squad were rough-riders who didn’t take nonsense from anybody. At the time, even despite Malone’s dominance, they were not afraid to step up to the challenge and call him out on the court. Of course, they always backed up all the talk with their play in the end.
While that degree of trash talk doesn’t happen as frequently in the league anymore, there are still some moments that get dicey. Whether or not any line nowadays will top that one, though, is something we’ll just have to wait and see.
