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The Formula Ranks Michael Jordan #6 All Time. His Peak Is #1.
netwins.substack.com
There is a detail about Michael Jordan that gets lost in the mythology. Before he became the most competitive athlete of his generation, before the six championships and the tongue wag and the commercials and the documentary, he was a kid from Wilmington, North Carolina who got cut from his high school varsity basketball team as a sophomore.
He went home, locked himself in his room, and cried. He kept the door shut even though nobody else was home. It was important to him that no one see or hear it. Then he went to work.
The full story of what drove Jordan is worth understanding before you look at the numbers, because the numbers do not exist without it. His father James wanted him to play baseball. He played baseball, learning to swing at his father’s pitches in the backyard, chasing the approval that became the fuel for everything else he did in competition. His older brother Larry used to beat him in one-on-one until Michael grew taller, and Michael said later that Larry would have been the better player if he had gotten the height. He was always measuring himself against someone, always finding a reason the distance between where he was and where he needed to be was not yet closed.
The Pistons knocked him out of the playoffs year after year. He got up every time. The Bad Boys were specifically designed to hurt him and wear him down and he kept coming back until he had figured out how to win through them. That process, the repeated failure followed by the adjustment followed by the return, is what the formula eventually captured as six championships and the highest three-season peak in the database.
What the Formula Finds
Regular season: +79.5 net wins Playoffs: +8.6 net wins Combined: +88.2 Seasons: 15 Avg/season: +5.30 Peak: +13.28 (1995-96) Top-3 season average: +12.28, the highest of any player in the database Composite rank: 6th all time
The composite ranking of sixth comes from the career total. Jordan played 15 seasons but five of them were either abbreviated or below his standard: the injury-shortened 1985-86, the baseball retirement year that cost him 1993-94, the partial return in 1994-95 (17 games), the lockout-shortened 1998-99 that he sat out entirely, and the two Washington seasons in 2001-03 at the end. Those seasons drag the career average down to +5.30, which is below Kareem, Duncan, Bird, and Magic.
But the top-three average tells a completely different story. Jordan’s best three seasons produced an average of +12.28 net wins per year. That is the highest three-year peak of any player in 295-player database. Wilt Chamberlain is second at +11.95. Kareem is third at +11.89. Nobody else is close.
Dean Smith and the 20-Point Ceiling
Before the numbers got large, a famous coach kept them small.
Bobby Knight coached Jordan on the 1984 US Olympic team. Knight was not a man given to easy praise. He said before Jordan played a single NBA game that he was the greatest basketball player he had ever seen. He told reporters: “I’m not sure I’ve ever been around anybody that wanted to win more or worked harder than Michael Jordan.” The 1984 Olympic team defeated NBA All-Star squads in exhibition games before the Games, and Jordan was the dominant force on a roster that included Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, and Charles Barkley. Knight saw something that the public would spend the next decade discovering.
It was said of Dean Smith at North Carolina that he was the only coach who could hold Michael Jordan under 20 points per game. His system required ball movement, patience, and subordination of individual scoring to team execution. Jordan averaged 17.7 points per game as a freshman at Carolina. Smith later said it was the hardest thing he ever did in coaching. Keeping a player that transcendent within a system. Jordan accepted it because Smith had his respect and because he was still learning. When he arrived in the NBA, the learning was done and the system was his.
There is a detail from 1982, days after Jordan led North Carolina to the NCAA championship as a freshman, that captures something about him. He attended a prison ministry event organized by former NFL player Bill Glass. A blindfolded martial arts expert named Mike Crain performed a samurai watermelon-cutting stunt with Jordan lying on stage. Crain cut the watermelon. He also nicked Jordan’s navel. Three stitches. Jordan had volunteered for the stunt. That willingness to put himself in the middle of something nobody else would do, the competitive need to be in the center of whatever was happening, never left him.
It is the same quality that drove the gambling. Jordan’s gambling was not a vice in the way people think of vices. It was the same competitive engine applied to a different surface. He needed to compete at everything, constantly, against whoever was willing. Golf, cards, pool. The stakes had to be real or the competition meant nothing. That need was what made him the greatest basketball player who ever lived. It was also what created the problems that followed him through the 1990s and may have contributed to the first retirement in ways that were never fully explained. The formula sees a genuinely excellent player on a bad team, his contributions partially absorbed by the losing context around him. He scored 2,313 points that year. The team went 38-44. The formula normalizes against the team’s losing rate and finds a modest positive contribution.
The second season he broke his foot and played 18 games. The Bulls went 30-52. The formula records -0.79.
Then the work that had always been there started showing up in the numbers.
But before the championship run, there was April 20, 1986. Jordan had played only 18 regular season games that year after breaking his foot. He returned for the playoffs and faced the 67-win Boston Celtics, the eventual champions, in the first round. He scored 49 points in Game 1. In Game 2 he scored 63 points in 53 minutes of double-overtime basketball, breaking Elgin Baylor’s single-game playoff scoring record, which still stands today.
Bird had 36 points, 12 rebounds, and 8 assists just to survive. The Celtics won. Afterward Bird told reporters: “He is the most exciting, awesome player in the game today. I think it’s just God disguised as Michael Jordan.”
Jordan’s response when he read it: “I really couldn’t believe he would say something like that. Here was a guy who had been in the league seven years and was in a class I was trying to enter.”
That is the full picture of the moment. Bird, the best player on the best team in basketball, stunned into theology. Jordan, who had lost the game, focused only on the class he was trying to enter. The Celtics swept the Bulls in three games. Jordan went home and started preparing for the following season.
The Climb
From 1986-87 onward, watching the season log is like watching someone learn to bend a team’s winning around their own will.
1986-87: +0.74 (40-42 Bulls, Jordan scores 3,041 points, the third-highest single-season total in NBA history) 1987-88: +5.79 (50-32 Bulls, wins the Defensive Player of the Year award) 1988-89: +5.04 (47-35) 1989-90: +7.73 (55-27) 1990-91: +9.38 (61-21, first championship) 1991-92: +11.62 (67-15, second championship)
Six years of consecutive improvement, each year a better number than the last, each year the team winning more games. The Pistons were beaten in 1991. The formula shows the climb clearly: every season from 1987-88 onward is positive and rising, right up until the first retirement.
The Retirements and What They Cost
Jordan retired in October 1993 after his father was murdered that July. He played minor league baseball for the Birmingham Barons and the Scottsdale Scorpions. He returned to the Bulls in March 1995 for 17 games.
The official explanation was grief and a desire to fulfill his father’s dream of watching him play professional baseball. That explanation is true as far as it goes. What surrounds it is more complicated.
Jordan’s gambling had been a known issue for several years. He acknowledged losing significant sums playing golf and cards. A book published in 1993 by a golf partner detailed gambling debts in detail. The NBA under David Stern had been watching. There is a version of events, never officially confirmed and firmly denied by the league, in which Stern gave Jordan a choice: face a formal suspension for gambling violations or retire quietly. Jordan retired quietly. The timing, coming right after a period of intense scrutiny, has always been noted by people who follow the league closely.
Whether that version is true is unknowable from the outside. What is true is that Jordan retired at 30 after three consecutive championships, played minor league baseball for 18 months, and returned. The rumor has never fully gone away because the official explanation has always felt incomplete to people who watched it happen.
The Ted Williams and Muhammad Ali comparison is worth making plainly regardless of cause. Williams lost three seasons to World War II service, returned, lost two more to Korea, and still finished with a .344 career batting average. Ali lost three and a half years at his peak to the draft refusal and legal proceedings. Both are considered among the greatest in their sport’s history despite the missing years. Jordan’s case, whether the reason was grief or external pressure or some combination, is identical in structure: a player at his absolute peak, removed from competition, denied seasons that would have been historically excellent.
The 1993-94 season would have been Jordan’s age-30 season. Based on the seasons surrounding it, +10 to +12 net wins is a conservative estimate. The 1998-99 lockout cost him another full season at 35. The Washington years in 2001-03 produced -1.32 and -1.02 respectively, dragging the career average down significantly.
If you remove the Washington years and add back one conservative estimate for 1993-94, Jordan’s career average moves from +5.30 to somewhere above +6.50 per season. That would vault him from sixth to second or third in the composite rankings. The formula counts what happened. It cannot count what was taken away or what was added at the end when it should not have been.
The Peak
The three seasons from 1990-91 through 1992-93 averaged +9.60 net wins per year and produced three championships. The three seasons from 1995-96 through 1997-98 averaged +11.28 per year and produced three more. Those two runs are separated by the retirement and the baseball years. Together they are the greatest sustained individual performance in the history of professional basketball by this measure.
The 1995-96 season produced +13.28, the second-highest individual season in the database behind only Wilt Chamberlain’s 1966-67. On a 72-win team. At age 32. In his second full season back from baseball.
The tongue wag on the way to the basket. The shrug after the six three-pointers in the first half against Portland. The shot over Bryon Russell. The push-off or the clean move depending on your allegiance. All of it is there in the highlights. What the formula adds is the context: each of those moments was part of a pattern of production that elevated teams from mediocre to dynasty, that turned the Bulls from a first-round exit into a six-championship program, that the formula measures as the highest three-year peak it has ever recorded.
Sixth All Time
The composite ranking of sixth reflects the career arc. The early years on bad teams. The retirements. The Washington years. All of it compressed into a 15-season career average that falls below four players who played longer and more continuously at a high level.
The peak ranking tells the other story. Nobody in the database has a higher three-year average. Nobody in the database has a season above +13.28 except Wilt Chamberlain in a single season sixty years ago. The top ten individual seasons in the database includes Jordan’s name three times.
The kid who cried behind a closed door after getting cut from the varsity team produced the most concentrated peak in the history of the sport. His older brother Larry, who used to beat him in one-on-one, got the ceiling that Michael spent a lifetime trying to reach. He never stopped trying to reach it, and the numbers show exactly how far he got.
The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.
Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #8. Subscribe to get it when it drops.
© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.
Get full access to NET WINS at netwins.substack.com/subscribe
The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.
© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
View all episodes
By Net Winsnetwins.substack.com
There is a detail about Michael Jordan that gets lost in the mythology. Before he became the most competitive athlete of his generation, before the six championships and the tongue wag and the commercials and the documentary, he was a kid from Wilmington, North Carolina who got cut from his high school varsity basketball team as a sophomore.
He went home, locked himself in his room, and cried. He kept the door shut even though nobody else was home. It was important to him that no one see or hear it. Then he went to work.
The full story of what drove Jordan is worth understanding before you look at the numbers, because the numbers do not exist without it. His father James wanted him to play baseball. He played baseball, learning to swing at his father’s pitches in the backyard, chasing the approval that became the fuel for everything else he did in competition. His older brother Larry used to beat him in one-on-one until Michael grew taller, and Michael said later that Larry would have been the better player if he had gotten the height. He was always measuring himself against someone, always finding a reason the distance between where he was and where he needed to be was not yet closed.
The Pistons knocked him out of the playoffs year after year. He got up every time. The Bad Boys were specifically designed to hurt him and wear him down and he kept coming back until he had figured out how to win through them. That process, the repeated failure followed by the adjustment followed by the return, is what the formula eventually captured as six championships and the highest three-season peak in the database.
What the Formula Finds
Regular season: +79.5 net wins Playoffs: +8.6 net wins Combined: +88.2 Seasons: 15 Avg/season: +5.30 Peak: +13.28 (1995-96) Top-3 season average: +12.28, the highest of any player in the database Composite rank: 6th all time
The composite ranking of sixth comes from the career total. Jordan played 15 seasons but five of them were either abbreviated or below his standard: the injury-shortened 1985-86, the baseball retirement year that cost him 1993-94, the partial return in 1994-95 (17 games), the lockout-shortened 1998-99 that he sat out entirely, and the two Washington seasons in 2001-03 at the end. Those seasons drag the career average down to +5.30, which is below Kareem, Duncan, Bird, and Magic.
But the top-three average tells a completely different story. Jordan’s best three seasons produced an average of +12.28 net wins per year. That is the highest three-year peak of any player in 295-player database. Wilt Chamberlain is second at +11.95. Kareem is third at +11.89. Nobody else is close.
Dean Smith and the 20-Point Ceiling
Before the numbers got large, a famous coach kept them small.
Bobby Knight coached Jordan on the 1984 US Olympic team. Knight was not a man given to easy praise. He said before Jordan played a single NBA game that he was the greatest basketball player he had ever seen. He told reporters: “I’m not sure I’ve ever been around anybody that wanted to win more or worked harder than Michael Jordan.” The 1984 Olympic team defeated NBA All-Star squads in exhibition games before the Games, and Jordan was the dominant force on a roster that included Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, and Charles Barkley. Knight saw something that the public would spend the next decade discovering.
It was said of Dean Smith at North Carolina that he was the only coach who could hold Michael Jordan under 20 points per game. His system required ball movement, patience, and subordination of individual scoring to team execution. Jordan averaged 17.7 points per game as a freshman at Carolina. Smith later said it was the hardest thing he ever did in coaching. Keeping a player that transcendent within a system. Jordan accepted it because Smith had his respect and because he was still learning. When he arrived in the NBA, the learning was done and the system was his.
There is a detail from 1982, days after Jordan led North Carolina to the NCAA championship as a freshman, that captures something about him. He attended a prison ministry event organized by former NFL player Bill Glass. A blindfolded martial arts expert named Mike Crain performed a samurai watermelon-cutting stunt with Jordan lying on stage. Crain cut the watermelon. He also nicked Jordan’s navel. Three stitches. Jordan had volunteered for the stunt. That willingness to put himself in the middle of something nobody else would do, the competitive need to be in the center of whatever was happening, never left him.
It is the same quality that drove the gambling. Jordan’s gambling was not a vice in the way people think of vices. It was the same competitive engine applied to a different surface. He needed to compete at everything, constantly, against whoever was willing. Golf, cards, pool. The stakes had to be real or the competition meant nothing. That need was what made him the greatest basketball player who ever lived. It was also what created the problems that followed him through the 1990s and may have contributed to the first retirement in ways that were never fully explained. The formula sees a genuinely excellent player on a bad team, his contributions partially absorbed by the losing context around him. He scored 2,313 points that year. The team went 38-44. The formula normalizes against the team’s losing rate and finds a modest positive contribution.
The second season he broke his foot and played 18 games. The Bulls went 30-52. The formula records -0.79.
Then the work that had always been there started showing up in the numbers.
But before the championship run, there was April 20, 1986. Jordan had played only 18 regular season games that year after breaking his foot. He returned for the playoffs and faced the 67-win Boston Celtics, the eventual champions, in the first round. He scored 49 points in Game 1. In Game 2 he scored 63 points in 53 minutes of double-overtime basketball, breaking Elgin Baylor’s single-game playoff scoring record, which still stands today.
Bird had 36 points, 12 rebounds, and 8 assists just to survive. The Celtics won. Afterward Bird told reporters: “He is the most exciting, awesome player in the game today. I think it’s just God disguised as Michael Jordan.”
Jordan’s response when he read it: “I really couldn’t believe he would say something like that. Here was a guy who had been in the league seven years and was in a class I was trying to enter.”
That is the full picture of the moment. Bird, the best player on the best team in basketball, stunned into theology. Jordan, who had lost the game, focused only on the class he was trying to enter. The Celtics swept the Bulls in three games. Jordan went home and started preparing for the following season.
The Climb
From 1986-87 onward, watching the season log is like watching someone learn to bend a team’s winning around their own will.
1986-87: +0.74 (40-42 Bulls, Jordan scores 3,041 points, the third-highest single-season total in NBA history) 1987-88: +5.79 (50-32 Bulls, wins the Defensive Player of the Year award) 1988-89: +5.04 (47-35) 1989-90: +7.73 (55-27) 1990-91: +9.38 (61-21, first championship) 1991-92: +11.62 (67-15, second championship)
Six years of consecutive improvement, each year a better number than the last, each year the team winning more games. The Pistons were beaten in 1991. The formula shows the climb clearly: every season from 1987-88 onward is positive and rising, right up until the first retirement.
The Retirements and What They Cost
Jordan retired in October 1993 after his father was murdered that July. He played minor league baseball for the Birmingham Barons and the Scottsdale Scorpions. He returned to the Bulls in March 1995 for 17 games.
The official explanation was grief and a desire to fulfill his father’s dream of watching him play professional baseball. That explanation is true as far as it goes. What surrounds it is more complicated.
Jordan’s gambling had been a known issue for several years. He acknowledged losing significant sums playing golf and cards. A book published in 1993 by a golf partner detailed gambling debts in detail. The NBA under David Stern had been watching. There is a version of events, never officially confirmed and firmly denied by the league, in which Stern gave Jordan a choice: face a formal suspension for gambling violations or retire quietly. Jordan retired quietly. The timing, coming right after a period of intense scrutiny, has always been noted by people who follow the league closely.
Whether that version is true is unknowable from the outside. What is true is that Jordan retired at 30 after three consecutive championships, played minor league baseball for 18 months, and returned. The rumor has never fully gone away because the official explanation has always felt incomplete to people who watched it happen.
The Ted Williams and Muhammad Ali comparison is worth making plainly regardless of cause. Williams lost three seasons to World War II service, returned, lost two more to Korea, and still finished with a .344 career batting average. Ali lost three and a half years at his peak to the draft refusal and legal proceedings. Both are considered among the greatest in their sport’s history despite the missing years. Jordan’s case, whether the reason was grief or external pressure or some combination, is identical in structure: a player at his absolute peak, removed from competition, denied seasons that would have been historically excellent.
The 1993-94 season would have been Jordan’s age-30 season. Based on the seasons surrounding it, +10 to +12 net wins is a conservative estimate. The 1998-99 lockout cost him another full season at 35. The Washington years in 2001-03 produced -1.32 and -1.02 respectively, dragging the career average down significantly.
If you remove the Washington years and add back one conservative estimate for 1993-94, Jordan’s career average moves from +5.30 to somewhere above +6.50 per season. That would vault him from sixth to second or third in the composite rankings. The formula counts what happened. It cannot count what was taken away or what was added at the end when it should not have been.
The Peak
The three seasons from 1990-91 through 1992-93 averaged +9.60 net wins per year and produced three championships. The three seasons from 1995-96 through 1997-98 averaged +11.28 per year and produced three more. Those two runs are separated by the retirement and the baseball years. Together they are the greatest sustained individual performance in the history of professional basketball by this measure.
The 1995-96 season produced +13.28, the second-highest individual season in the database behind only Wilt Chamberlain’s 1966-67. On a 72-win team. At age 32. In his second full season back from baseball.
The tongue wag on the way to the basket. The shrug after the six three-pointers in the first half against Portland. The shot over Bryon Russell. The push-off or the clean move depending on your allegiance. All of it is there in the highlights. What the formula adds is the context: each of those moments was part of a pattern of production that elevated teams from mediocre to dynasty, that turned the Bulls from a first-round exit into a six-championship program, that the formula measures as the highest three-year peak it has ever recorded.
Sixth All Time
The composite ranking of sixth reflects the career arc. The early years on bad teams. The retirements. The Washington years. All of it compressed into a 15-season career average that falls below four players who played longer and more continuously at a high level.
The peak ranking tells the other story. Nobody in the database has a higher three-year average. Nobody in the database has a season above +13.28 except Wilt Chamberlain in a single season sixty years ago. The top ten individual seasons in the database includes Jordan’s name three times.
The kid who cried behind a closed door after getting cut from the varsity team produced the most concentrated peak in the history of the sport. His older brother Larry, who used to beat him in one-on-one, got the ceiling that Michael spent a lifetime trying to reach. He never stopped trying to reach it, and the numbers show exactly how far he got.
The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.
Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #8. Subscribe to get it when it drops.
© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.
Get full access to NET WINS at netwins.substack.com/subscribe
The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.
© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.