The Last Dance episodes 5 and 6: Plot summary and reactions

In Episodes 5-6, “The Last Dance” continues its run through Michael Jordan’s early championships with the Chicago Bulls and deliver some long-awaited Toni Kukoc.

With the groundwork laid out for Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Phil Jackson in Episodes 1-4 of The Last Dance, Episodes 5-6 continued the narrative structure of the first four chapters, going back through the Chicago Bulls‘ early seasons when MJ first came to town while slowly building up to their final campaign in 1997-98.

This means viewers have been treated to insight on Jordan’s college career, his early years in Chicago, his difficulties in getting past the Bad Boys Detroit Pistons and finally breaking through with his first championship in 1991. Episodes 5-6 pick up from there, expanding on Chicago’s next two championship seasons, Toni Kukoc, the public pressure of being Michael Jordan, the gambling controversy and much, much more.

We’ve already covered the best quotes from this week, as well as five new things we learned, but in case you missed any of this must-see TV event, or in case you just feel like reliving two hours of an NBA documentary littered with “blink and you missed it” moments, here’s the recap and reactions for Episodes 5 and 6 of The Last Dance.

Episode 5

Dedicated “in loving memory of Kobe Bryant,” Episode 5 begins with the 1998 NBA All-Star Game, MJ’s All-Star appearance and Kobe Bryant’s first ever appearance. Kobe relished the opportunity to compete with and learn from the man he wanted to be like.

“That little Lakers boy is gonna take everybody one-on-one,” Jordan said in the locker room. “He don’t let the game come to him, he just go out there and take it. ‘I’m gonna make this s**t happen. I’m gonna make this a one-on-one game.'”

Jordan won All-Star MVP honors with 23 points, but his message to a teenage Kobe after the game, “I’ll see you down the road,” proved to be true.

“I truly hate having discussions about who would win one-on-one,” Bryant said. “You heard fans saying, ‘Hey Kobe, you’d beat Michael one-on-one’ and I feel like, yo, what you get from me is from him. I don’t get five championships here without him. ‘Cause he guided me so much and gave me so much great advice.”

Jordan’s performance that season and in that All-Star Game proved he was still the star among stars, and people couldn’t understand why he was considering walking away from the game of basketball when he still had something left in the tank.

In MJ’s final appearance at Madison Square Garden, his favorite place to play, he donned Jordan 1s — the shoe he began his NBA career with back in 1984 — as a tribute to his career coming full circle. Despite his feet bleeding, Jordan finished the game with 42 points.

“Had to go all the way back to ’84 to whip y’all ass,” he joked with Patrick Ewing after the game.

The episode then flashes back to 1984 to tell the tale of how MJ was marketed, how he wound up joining Nike despite being more of an Adidas guy, how his Air Jordans became mixed with urban youth culture and how his shoes became a symbol of status and fashion.

Flashing forward to the 1991-92 season, after winning their first title, Jordan and the Bulls tapped into a whole different brand of greatness.

“Starting with that season, I felt Michael Jordan never played basketball anymore; he just figured out how to win the game,” B.J. Armstrong explained. “He knew how to steer momentum, he knew how to get guys going, and not only was he that good on the offensive end, he was just as good on the defensive end. So he was just playing a different game than the rest of us.”

The Bulls won 67 games that season and Jordan won third MVP award, but leading into the 1992 NBA Finals, the narrative became: “MJ or Clyde Drexler?”. As always, Jordan used it as fuel.

“Clyde was a threat,” Jordan said. “I’m not saying he wasn’t a threat, but me being compared to him, I took offense to that.”

Before Game 1, Jordan played cards with Magic Johnson, who was covering the series with NBC Sports. Magic recounted what Jordan told him: “‘You know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. I’m gonna give it to this dude.'”

That next day, he drained six 3-pointers and scored 35 points in the first half of Game 1, giving Magic “The Shrug” after he knocked down his sixth. The Bulls won the game in a blowout and eventually won their second straight title. The turnaround from the Finals to the 1992 Summer Olympics wasn’t very long.

“It’s a week from Sunday, isn’t it?” a grinning Jordan said while celebrating his second championship. “Yeah, but I got a lot of partyin’ to do from now until then!”

Those Olympics featured the Dream Team, the greatest collection of basketball talent ever assembled, but it could’ve been even better if Isiah Thomas had been included. Jordan addressed the longstanding rumors that he kept Thomas off the team because of their bitter history as competitors, noting that Pippen, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had all had their on-court feuds with Thomas too.

“I respect Isiah Thomas’ talent,” Jordan said. “To me, the best point guard of all time is Magic Johnson, and right behind him is Isiah Thomas. No matter how much I hate him, I respect his game. Now it was insinuated that I was asking about him, but I never threw his name in there.

“If you wanna attribute it to me, go ahead, be my guest. But it wasn’t me.”

Even without Thomas, the Dream Team featured such incredible talent that the practices were some of the best basketball those All-NBA players ever experienced. Once it came time to take on other competitors, like Croatia’s Toni Kukoc, Team USA — Jordan and Pippen in particular — showed no mercy.

In their first game against Croatia, the two Bulls made it their mission to hound Kukoc all over the coach and prove to their general manager, Jerry Krause, that this draft selection he had called “the future of the Chicago Bulls” wasn’t all that.

“Jerry paved the way for a lot of hell for Toni Kukoc,” Pippen said. “Not only was it just me and Michael, but every guy on that Olympic team looked at that kid and felt like he may not even think about coming to the NBA after he played against us. It wasn’t anything personally about Toni, but we were gonna do everything that we could to make Jerry look bad.”

“They didn’t know me,” an exasperated Kukoc explained. “I don’t see a reason why they would try to take it out on me, they don’t know me at all. That’s the first time we meet!”

Kukoc redeemed himself with a better performance in the gold medal game to prove to everyone that he wasn’t “soft,” but it wasn’t enough to stop Team USA from cruising to victory. At that point, Gatorade’s “Be Like Mike” campaign took off, and with all that pressure to be someone everyone wanted to be like, scrutiny over Jordan’s every decision followed.

“Any African-American in this society that sees significant success has an added burden, and a lot of times, America is very quick to embrace a Michael Jordan or an Oprah Winfrey or a Barack Obama, so long as it’s understood that you don’t get too controversial around broader issues of social justice,” Barack Obama explained.

At the time, Jordan was criticized for not supporting Democrat Harvey Gantt, an African-American, in his race for the senate against a deplorable Republican, Jesse Helms. He made a financial contribution, but by refusing to publicly support him with a commercial, and because of his off-the-cuff comment, “Republicans buy Nikes too,” he caught a lot of flak for not taking a stronger stance.

“I do commend Muhammad Ali for standing up for what he believed in, but I never thought of myself as an activist,” Jordan explained. “I thought of myself as a basketball player. I wasn’t a politician when I was playing my sport, I was focused on my craft. Was that selfish? Probably, but that was where my energy was.”

The episode ends with Jordan reflecting on getting to the top, and how staying focused on the ultimate goal — winning another title — was the only way he could tune out the noise and focus on the task at hand.

Episode 6

Building on the theme of trying to meet everyone’s sky-high expectations, Episode 6 dives into MJ’s public image taking a few hits before and during the Bulls’ 1992-93 season, when they were looking to complete the three-peat.

“I think what people don’t realize is that from the moment Michael Jordan leaves his hotel room, the spotlight is on him,” said Tim Hallam, the Bulls’ director of PR. “I wouldn’t want to be like Mike. It’s an impossible task.”

Sam Smith‘s book, “The Jordan Rules,” created a stir at that time, shedding light on Jordan’s insanely competitive nature, how he threatened not to pass certain teammates and how he allegedly punched Will Perdue in practice. With Krause and the rest of the organization wondering who had leaked all this information, Horace Grant became the scapegoat — even though Grant denied it and B.J. Armstrong said it couldn’t have just been him anyway.

Amidst this division, the Bulls found themselves in a 2-0 hole in the 1993 Eastern Conference Finals against the brutally physical New York Knicks, and Jordan’s trip to Atlantic City to gamble with his father during that series caused a media uproar. Jordan’s “gambling problem” had already become a national story that season.

That eventually prompted Jordan to stop speaking with the media for awhile.

“People build you up to tear you down, and it happens in sports all the time,” reporter Ahmad Rashad said. “If a team wins too much, you want ’em to lose.”

Jordan responded as only he could, leading the Bulls to a 20-point win in Game 3, dropping 54 points in a Game 4 win and taking the next two games to close out the series and lead the Bulls to their third straight Finals appearance. League MVP Charles Barkley and a 62-win Phoenix Suns squad awaited them.

“I was a little bit upset that I didn’t get the MVP that year and they gave it to Charles, but with that I said, ‘Okay fine, you can have that. I’mma get this,'” Jordan said.

After taking a 1-0 lead against the nervous Suns, the Bulls extended it to 2-0 in Phoenix.

“We lost Game 1 because we were so nervous,” Barkley recalled. “But in Game 2, I played as well as I could play…and Michael just outplayed me. That was probably the first time in my life that I felt there was a better basketball player in the world than me, to be honest with you.”

The Suns finally got a victory in triple-overtime in Game 3, but Jordan’s 55-point masterpiece in Game 4 gave Chicago a 3-1 lead. The Suns won Game 5 to shift the series back to Phoenix, but Jordan felt confident.

“Everybody’s dreading getting back on the plane and going back to Phoenix,” Jordan said. “So I just said, ‘Look man, I don’t know about you guys, I’m only packing one suit. We’re going back to win one game, I’m not going there to play two games.”

The Bulls closed it out in Game 6 on the road, with John Paxson‘s 3-pointer providing the final dagger. His shot was the only Bulls score by anyone other than Jordan in the entire fourth quarter. Completing the three-peat brought joy, but mostly just relief for a physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted MJ.

Episode 6 ends by flashing forward to the start of the 1998 NBA Playoffs, where the Bulls had tied the Utah Jazz for the best record in the league at 62-20 and faced the New Jersey Nets in the first round.

Episodes 7 and 8 of The Last Dance will premiere on ESPN next Sunday.