Michael Jordan is primarily responsible for many of the great players of the 1990s not having an NBA championship to their name, and Kevin Johnson is one of them. Johnson and the Phoenix Suns had gone up against Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the 1993 NBA Finals, and it’s not a series the former looks back on too fondly.
The Suns had the best record in the NBA that season at 62-20, but lost the first two games in Phoenix to find themselves in a terrible position. All hope seemed lost, but head coach Paul Westphal wasn’t throwing in the towel just yet. Westphal decided to tweak the defensive game plan by having Johnson guard Jordan instead of Dan Majerle, and he revealed on the Club 520 Podcast that he didn’t take the news well.
“[Majerle] gets scorched by Michael Jordan, and he was our best defensive player,” Johnson said. “So, we flying from Phoenix to Chicago, and I fall asleep on the plane, and then the head coach wakes me up. He says, ‘Hey, I just want to let you know, Game 3 is going to be your game.’ I said, ‘Cool.’ I believe that. I’m going to have a bounce back. He’s like, ‘And you’re guarding Michael Jordan.’
“And I’m thinking we down 0-2, our best player is getting scorched, like we all did,” Johnson stated. “And now you going to put me, who had a rough two games, on Michael Jordan? So I go back to sleep. Plane land. I wake up. I’m like, ‘Damn, I had a nightmare. I thought the coach came and told me I’m guarding Michael Jordan.’
“We walking off the plane, and the coach was right there,” Johnson continued. “And I’m like, ‘I had this dream that you came and woke me up and told me you guarding Michael Jordan.’ He said, ‘You are.’ God as my witness, I get on the team bus, we take it from the airport, we staying at the hotel downtown in Chicago. I get off the bus. I tell the equipment manager to take my bags.
“I see a church across the street,” Johnson added. “I walk straight in that church, and I sit in the front row, and I’m like, ‘Jesus, I don’t believe in you no more. There’s no way if you loved me and died on the cross and did all the things you would be having me guarding Michael Jordan.'”
Johnson hilariously stated he lost his faith at that point. He was already having a bad series, having scored 15 points combined in the first two games on 28.6% shooting from the field. Johnson now had to rediscover his mojo on offense while also guarding the greatest scorer in the game.
Jordan had scored 31 points in Game 1 and 42 in Game 2. Johnson wouldn’t exactly slow him down the rest of the series, but the Suns’ fortunes did change with this new approach. They would win two of the next three games in Chicago to wrestle back homecourt advantage.
The Suns just needed to win the last two games in Phoenix to clinch their first NBA title, but it wasn’t to be. The Bulls would win Game 6 99-98 to win their third straight championship.
While Johnson, who was mayor of Sacramento from 2008 to 2016, is still understandably disappointed about coming out second-best, he jokes about how well he defended Jordan.
“So when people ask me, ‘How’d you do?’ I’m like, ‘I held him under his average,'” Johnson said. “And then somebody asked me, ‘Well, what was his average?’ I’m like, ‘Well, Dan Majerle, he averaged 44.’… Then they’re like, ‘What he average against you?’ [I said], ’42, but I kept him under his average.'”
Jordan would finish with ridiculous averages of 41.0 points, 8.5 rebounds, 6.3 assists, 1.3 steals, and 0.7 blocks per game against the Suns. That scoring average remains, to this day, the highest in a Finals series.
Jordan famously retired after this series, but would return in 1995. He and the Bulls would three-peat again from 1996 to 1998.
As for Johnson, he would never make it back to the big stage. The three-time All-Star finished his first and only Finals series with averages of 17.2 points, 3.0 rebounds, 6.5 assists, 1.3 steals, and 0.3 blocks per game.
