Like any other NBA team, the Chicago Bulls also didn’t have perfect management to player relationships. In fact, Michael Jordan and longtime Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf had their fair share of passive-aggressive moments back in the day.
According to Reinsdorf, Jordan only realized how difficult it is to be a team owner and executive when he had the chance to be one with the Charlotte Bobcats. At one point, Reinsdorf revealed that MJ himself spoke to him and came clean about experiencing hardships as a team owner.
“We were at an NBA (owners) meeting and Michael came over to me and said, ‘I owe you a lot of apologies. It’s a lot harder to run a team than I thought,'” Reinsdorf once revealed.
What Jordan was like as a team boss
Knowing Jordan and his competitive nature, it’s quite easy to understand why he found it challenging to run a team from the front office. As a player who got used to winning and dominating his competition, Jordan had to grapple with his emotions and accept the fact that his players didn’t have the same attributes and set of skills that he had when he was playing.
That’s exactly how Charlotte assistant general manager Buzz Peterson described Jordan as an owner. According to Buzz, Jordan carried that same winning mentality during his tenure as a team boss.
Understandably, Peterson said MJ often got frustrated as he wondered how his team found it hard to compete and win.
“The guy wants to win, and no matter what. And he is such a competitor,” Peterson told The Athletic of Jordan as an owner. “To say we are trying to work with these young guys, get them better and work and develop these guys — at the same time, Michael says, ‘I hear ya. But let’s win. I want to win.'”
“And he wants to win in the worst way,” he added. “It just drives him crazy when we don’t, and so when we don’t and when he thinks we should’ve, that’s when the cell phone rings and he wants a lot of questions answered right away. And sometimes that doesn’t help, either. He don’t want to listen… He may be tough, the way he’s driven, the way he sees things, because he sees it through a different lens sometimes.”
MJ succeeded in both playing and managing a team
Jordan’s NBA team ownership stint lasted 13 years. During his time as the Bobcats/Hornets boss, the team didn’t achieve a lot as far as winning goes. That fact was one of the reasons why people were quick to judge MJ’s team management skills.
Throughout that stretch, Jordan was heavily criticized for not having the qualities of a good talent evaluator. He was often blamed for his team’s poor performances as some believed he didn’t surround himself with the people who could really help him build a winning team. Instead, they accused Jordan of hiring “yes men” even if they weren’t really qualified for the job.
While most of that was true, from a financial perspective Jordan came out on top. Regardless of how the Hornets performed as a team, Jordan still won in the end because he purchased the team for $275 million in 2010 and sold it for approximately $3 billion in 2023.