Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan are no longer the best of friends, but the former still has a lot of respect for the latter. During an appearance on Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich earlier this year, Barkley criticized LeBron James and Kevin Durant for forming superteams and praised Jordan for not going down that route.
“Kevin’s a great player,” Barkley said. “I think that his legacy is complicated. I don’t like any guys who join superteams. I’m biased against LeBron when it comes to comparing him to Michael, joining Dwyane [Wade] and those guys. ‘Cause when we have this debate and LeBron is amazing and spectacular, but I was like, ‘Michael didn’t join anybody.’
“He just kept getting his a** kicked and got bigger and got stronger and finally knocked the wall down,” Barkley continued. “And Kevin, who’s a great player, other than the fact when he joined the Warriors, he hasn’t been successful anywhere else.”
Durant won both of his NBA championships by joining a Golden State Warriors team that already had Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, and Klay Thompson. The Warriors had gone 73-9 before his arrival, and he was widely criticized for teaming up with those stars.
The fact that Durant hasn’t even come close to winning a championship since leaving the Warriors in 2019 has only made matters worse. His stints with the Brooklyn Nets and, most recently, the Phoenix Suns proved to be very disappointing.
That said, Barkley was being a bit unfair when he claimed that Durant hasn’t been successful anywhere else. He led the Oklahoma City Thunder to the 2011 NBA Finals and made a fair few deep playoff runs with the team.
Durant did not win a title with the Thunder, but he can still be proud of what he achieved during his time there. It will now be interesting to see what he can accomplish with the Houston Rockets.
As for James, he infamously left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010 to form a superteam with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh on the Miami Heat. He had failed to get over the line with the Cavaliers and felt the need to create a Big 3 in Miami. The trio would win two titles together, but James, like Durant, was still criticized for forming a superteam.
Unlike Durant, though, James has managed to win titles after leaving the Heat. He returned to the Cavaliers in 2014 and led them to a championship in 2016. James then joined the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018 and won his fourth championship in 2020.
Jordan, on the other hand, didn’t jump ship like Durant and James. The Chicago Bulls selected him with the third pick in the 1984 NBA Draft, and he’d spend more than a decade with the franchise.
Jordan faced plenty of hardships during his early years with the Bulls and was eliminated by the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons in the playoffs three years in a row from 1988 to 1990. He was determined to break through that Pistons barrier with the Bulls, though, and eventually did it in 1991 en route to winning his first title.
Jordan would win six titles, six Finals MVPs, five MVPs, one DPOY, and 10 scoring titles with the Bulls. He did later join the Washington Wizards in 2001, but that was after he had retired for the second time and had become part-owner of that franchise.
Speaking of Jordan’s multiple retirements, Durant recently took a bit of a shot at him for that while praising James. That was actually what led to these comments by Barkley resurfacing. Durant did later state that Jordan is the GOAT, but made it clear he saw nothing wrong in bringing up the fact that he retired three times.
