"He'd try to put Scottie in his place" - Will Perdue says Michael Jordan torched Scottie Pippen in practice

Every member of the Chicago Bulls organization was well aware of how committed Michael Jordan was to winning. In fact, he was so determined to win that he wanted to be tested during team practice sessions.

To do so, Jordan would deliberately choose to match up with Scottie Pippen in scrimmages. According to former Bulls center Will Perdue, everybody in the gym could tell that it wasn’t just a lazy and nonchalant practice game for MJ whenever he took on Pippen.

“He always wanted to win,” Perdue said of Jordan. “He would ask Phil Jackson to put Scottie on the other team so that when we scrimmaged, he and Scottie would go at it and he’d try to put Scottie in his place.”

It didn’t look good for Pippen

Jordan’s idea was very clever to face the team’s best defender in scrimmages. Apart from being an elite defender, Pippen, out of all the Bulls players, knew how MJ played.

By taking on Pip, Jordan was honing his game and his competitiveness. Perhaps MJ felt that matching up with Pippen was helping him improve. However, that wasn’t how Perdue viewed it from his standpoint.

For Perdue, it was the other way around. Pippen was improving because Jordan wasn’t taking it easy on him every game.

“I don’t think Scottie recognized how beneficial that was at the time because it wasn’t pretty,” Perdue further described. “But it helped him.”

Pip opened up about his intense practice duels with Jordan in a separate discussion. According to Scottie, those matchups indeed contributed to his development as a player, especially as a defender.

For Pippen, there was no better way to fine-tune his defensive skills than trying to stop the best player in the world.

“A lot of my instincts came from guarding Michael all the time in practice,” Pippen told Bulls.com in 2009. “I had four other guys on my team, but I had schemes that I would throw out there depending on what he did. I’d say, ‘If I make Michael do this, then you go trap him.’ There were things I tried to do on defense to trigger him into a mistake.”

“He was a great player, and if you couldn’t try it on him in practice, there was nowhere else to try it,” he continued.

A showdown was a sight to behold

In retrospect, it’s too bad camera phones and social media weren’t a thing at the time. Needless to say, many are now dying to see footage of the intense scrimmage battles between Jordan and Pippen.

Judging by how MJ and Scottie performed all those years they played together in Chicago, it’s safe to say that their scrimmages against each other paid off. Not only did they push each other to go beyond their capabilities, but they also made each other respect one another even more as teammates and competitors.

All told, Jordan and Pippen’s head-to-head matches during practice games prove that to be the most dominant and cohesive basketball team in the NBA, sometimes you have to go out of your way and test yourself against your own teammates.

This story was originally reported by Basketball Network on Sep 8, 2025, where it first appeared in the Old School section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

“He’d try to put Scottie in his place” – Will Perdue says Michael Jordan torched Scottie Pippen in practice

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