Michael Jordan Week: An Introduction

This October will mark the 10-year anniversary of the final season of Michael Jordan's brief tenure with the Washington Wizards. Seven months after that, we'll have reached the 10th anniversary of Jordan's unceremonious departure. On that night, there was a brief meeting with Abe Pollin, a drunken excursion where Jordan wallowed in his own sorrow, and then a rapid departure from the city. It was like a visitor dropped in for an extended vacation that didn't end the way he anticipated.

It would be very easy to let the Jordan era fade into the sunset, but it's not quite so simple. To this day, there are processes that were set in motion thanks to those few years at the beginning of the century. There are also mistakes that were made, lessons to be learned and alternate timelines that never came to fruition.

Most importantly, though, those two years were ones where the normally-forgotten Wizards mattered. Looking back, they mattered for all the wrong reasons, but it wasn't always so easy to admit that at the time. On the one hand, the Wizards were on national television, and briefly, they reached heights they hadn't reached in decades. On the other hand, there was always a lingering concern that this wasn't meant to last. A star player that old, a shallow roster and a retread coach that had failed to guide the star when he was younger was hardly a conventional winning formula. Also, was Jordan really invested with the team and the city, or were the Wizards simply the only franchise that was willing to enable his insatiable need for action?

And so, as we come up on the 10-year anniversary of the end of this weird time in this franchise's history, we at Bullets Forever have decided to take a look back at the Jordan era throughout this week. We'll remember the highs, observe the lows and discuss some of the ways the aftershocks of those couple years reverberate today. Hopefully, we'll have covered as many bases as possible throughout our coverage.