George Gervin is one of the NBA’s most underrated legends. In his prime, he won many scoring titles and played incredible basketball. He was even Michael Jordan’s teammate for one season in the 1980s.
George Gervin didn’t think Michael Jordan was the GOAT, at least in 2017. During an interview, he claimed that other legends were in the conversation to be the greatest and that Jordan couldn’t score as Gervin himself could.
“Everybody says he’s the greatest of all time, but I’m not convinced,” Gervin said, as per The Post Game. “What criteria are you using to say that? It’s easy to say that on ESPN. Stephen A. Smith: ‘Greatest of all time.’ What do you mean? He got more championships than Bill Russell? He’s got more points than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? What criteria are you using?
“To be the greatest of all time, you got to be really, really special, man. He is. But we had some special guys before him too.
“He [Michael Jordan] is one of the greatest entertainers, one of the greatest winners. He could flat-out play, his stats proved themselves, but he couldn’t score like Ice. He had his own way of scoring. He didn’t score like me. I didn’t score as many points as he did, but I didn’t shoot as much as he did.”
Ice is short for Iceman, which was George Gervin’s nickname when he was lighting up the NBA in his prime. And upon examination of the statistics, his claim that Jordan couldn’t score like him becomes a bit laughable.
George Gervin vs. Michael Jordan Scoring Comparison
Overall, no NBA fan would argue that George Gervin was better than Michael Jordan. But when it comes to scoring, his resume was pretty credible. George Gervin played in the ABA for the first four years of his career before moving to the NBA. Once he did, he would go on to win four scoring titles while averaging over 32 points per game twice in his career. For his NBA career, he averaged 26.2 points per game, shooting 51.1% from the field.
Michael Jordan still clearly has the upper hand in this scenario, though. In his career with the Chicago Bulls, Jordan unbelievably won the NBA scoring title 10 times. He averaged more than 32 points per game five times and even averaged more than 37 points per game in one season. Jordan’s efficiency was only slightly lower at 49.7%, but he averaged 30.1 points for his career, which means he was quite simply the better scorer, arguably the greatest of all time.
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