John Kim 
Michael Jordan was a nightmare for pretty much every other team that wasn’t in Chicago – particularly the teams that were aligned in the Central Division. The Cleveland Cavaliers probably got the worst of Jordan’s wrath, particularly during the late 80’s and early 90’s; it’s not that the Cavs were a bad team – in fact, they were one of the better teams in the league – but Jordan just had their number in every which way possible. With that said, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Michael’s career high for scoring in a single game came against the Cavs, so enjoy tonight’s Sneaker News: Was It The Shoes? piece and find out more about this memorable moment in Jordan’s career.
Cleveland isn’t a basketball town. The go-to sport is football, which sorta reflects the blue-collar and hard-working nature of the city; kids were brought up to play football with the Buckeyes and Browns dominating sports headlines, and even the city’s Indians baseball team with a century-long history in Major League Basketball stood in the way of basketball becoming a really popular sport. The Cavs were a perennial second or third-rate sports franchise in the city, but that hardly reflected the true competitive nature of the team; they had a pretty good squad in the mid-late 80’s with Brad Daugherty, Mark Price, Ron Harper, and Larry Nance, but that simply was not enough to keep Ohioans interested – not was it enough to compete with Jordan and the Bulls.
The Cavaliers reached the Playoffs six out of seven seasons between 1988 and 1994. Five of those trips were cut short bythe Bulls, and with each season coming to an end at the hands of Michael Jordan, it became clear that Jordan had the Cavs in the palm of his hand. So while Jordan was responsible for making basketball popular in that region of the United States, the city of Cleveland began to despise Jordan – certainly an odd way to unify a city. Jordan’s dominance of Cleveland began with ‘The Shot’, which Jordan Brand retold through the Air Jordan IV ‘Cavs’, but another major moment in Jordan’s career happened in Cleveland – his career high in scoring for a single game.
On March 28th, 1990, Jordan and the Bulls visited the Cavs and battled it out through four quarters and one over-time period. In that stretch, Michael scored a career-high 69 points, which at that point was the ninth-highest single-game scoring total in NBA history; he made 23 of 37 field goal attempts, hit 21 of 23 free-throw shots, grabbed 18 rebounds (another single-game career high for MJ), dished 6 assists, and nabbed 4 steals. It was certainly one of Michael’s greatest games of his career, and in doing so, Jordan, with the Bulls victory, clinched a playoff berth for the Bulls.
Since scoring 69 points, Michael’s mark has been beaten just twice – 71 points by David Robinson in ’94 on the last game of the season, earning him a scoring title, and 81 points by Kobe in 2006, establishing him as the most dominant scorer of our generation. Wilt Chamberlain had surpassed 69 points several times in his career, but given the complete lack of competition at his position, many consider Jordan to be the greatest scorer of all-time.
So…to be the greatest scorer in NBA history, do you need the right shoes? For this famed game on March 28th, 1990, Jordan wore the Air Jordan V in the White/Black-Fire Red colorway; you might recognize these as the upcoming 2013 Retro, which is currently scheduled for a release this coming January. These don’t nearly get enough credit, especially considering all the other great Air Jordan V releases and the fact that these were re-issued in 1999 and again in 2008, but be careful not to sleep on these!
