Michael Jordan's Wizards Could've Been As Intense As Bulls In 'The Last Dance'

The backstories from Michael Jordan’s Washington Wizards might have deserved an own version of “The Last Dance.”

ESPN’s “The Last Dance” highlighted Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls. But technically, his last dance was with the Wizards from 2001 to early 2003.

Unlike the Bulls, the Wizards never won a single NBA championship and didn’t even make the playoffs with Jordan on their side.

According to former Wizards stars Larry Hughes and Jerry Stackhouse, the team never managed to have on-court chemistry as the offense was all about Jordan.

“We knew that MJ brought [Wizards’ former Head Coach] Doug Collins in there so he could play for Doug Collins and Doug Collins knew that MJ brought him there so he could coach how MJ wanted to coach,” Hughes recently said on “The Rematch with Ethan Thomas." “That was a problem, I think with [Stackhouse] Stack and MJ.”

“Stack is from the same area as MJ’s from,” he continued. “So it was always a constant butting of heads because Stack respected MJ so much, but he couldn’t talk through Doug because MJ brought Doug. So basically Doug was going to shut everything to Stack. Stack wanted the ball on mid post or Stack wanted to like he was shutting all of that down.”

Stackhouse, at the time, had just been traded to the Wizards following a successful season with the Detroit Pistons.

From averaging almost 30 points per outing, Stackhouse’s scoring dropped down to 21 a game with Jordan and the Wizards.

Evidently, the two-time NBA All-Star didn’t like it at all. To this day, Stackhouse regrets having played alongside his “idol.”

"Honestly, I wish I never played in Washington and for a number of reasons," Stackhouse said in “The Woj Pod” earlier this year. “It was really challenging to be able to be in a situation with an idol who at this particular point, I felt like I was a better player.”

"Things were still being run through Michael Jordan," he added. “ He wanted to get a little more isolations for him on the post, of course, so we had more isolations for him on the post. And it just kind of spiraled in a way that I didn't enjoy that season at all. The kind of picture I had in my mind of Michael Jordan and the reverence I had for him, I lost a little bit of it during the course of that year."

Aside from on-court issues, the 2002 Wizards also had drama outside basketball. In "The Last Dance," Jordan was seen often making fun of Scott Burrell.

With the Wizards, it was Kwame Brown whom the six-time NBA champ bullied a lot, and on one occasion, "His Airness" allegedly insulted his teammate with homophobic slurs, something the Charleston, South Carolina native denied a few years ago.

"There was a report that Michael Jordan would make me cry in the front of the team (laughs),” Brown told NBC Sports in 2017. “A guy who grew up like I grew up don’t really cry much. The report about him calling me a homophobic slur isn’t true.”

Former Wizards center Etan Thomas also denied the rumors and insisted that Jordan seldom paid attention to Brown.

But when things go bad, Thomas bared that Collins would “protect MJ” and put the blame on the 2001 NBA first-round draft pick.

"MJ didn’t ride Kwame [Brown] that much,” Thomas told Syracuse.com in May. “It was more Doug Collins riding Kwame and Doug rode Kwame to protect MJ. Everything's good, it was because of MJ. And anything that went wrong, it was Kwame’s fault.”

While most of the Wizards veterans didn’t enjoy having Jordan as their teammate, then-rookie Jared Jeffries has nothing but good memories with the man touted as the greatest player to ever set foot on a basketball court.

“I felt comftable because it was Michael Jordan. I was more scared at Charles Oakley,” Jeffries said in “Fair Game” last year. “It was amazing. He was always the first guy at the gym. He did such an amazing job of kind of directing and leading all of us that year just with his dedication as a 40-year-old player.”

The early 2000’s Wizards were never serious contenders in the NBA. Despite being underdogs, Jordan gave them a fair chance to compete. However, the squad just never had the same competitive drive as him.

“I've never been this frustrated,” Jordan famously said of Wizards. “Instead of playing to win, these guys play not to lose. They are totally scared, and it's embarrassing to sit there and watch the game.”