"That drove Michael crazy' - Charles Barkley on why Michael Jordan made it personal with Clyde Drexler in Dream Team practices

Yahoo

25-05-2025

The 1992 Dream Team had some unfinished rivalries buried beneath gold medals and photo ops. The real battles were layered with resentment, competition, and unspoken scores.
And it happened behind closed doors.
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One of those simmering storylines was Michael Jordan and Clyde Drexler. Both guards entered the Olympic circuit as All-Stars, Hall of Fame-bound, and former NBA Finals foes, but the air between them was never light.
Jordan going to Drexler
According to Charles Barkley, who had a front-row seat to the intensity, Drexler's belief in his own stature struck a nerve with Jordan, who felt he was the ultimate alpha of alphas.
'Clyde wanted two things,' Barkley said. 'Clyde was a hell of a player, but he wanted to think he was as good as Michael, and that drove Michael crazy. It really drove him crazy.'
Few things pushed Jordan harder than the idea of someone believing they stood shoulder to shoulder with him — especially if he didn't see it that way. Barkley's recollection of the inner dynamics during the Dream Team practices reveals that Jordan never let go of what happened just a few weeks earlier in the 1992 NBA Finals.
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Drexler's Portland Trail Blazers had gone toe-to-toe with Jordan's Chicago Bulls in a six-game series that saw Chicago secure its second straight championship. Before the Finals, media narratives swirled around Drexler's skills, with some suggesting he and Jordan belonged in the same sentence. Jordan, always hunting for a reason to dominate, locked in.
In Game 1 of that series, the Bulls superstar torched the Blazers with 35 points in the first half, punctuated by six 3-pointers — and the now-iconic shrug toward the commentary table. The message was that the comparisons were pointless.
But even after the series was over and the championship secured, Jordan wasn't done. That fire trailed into the summer. By the time the Dream Team assembled for Olympic training camp in La Jolla and later Monte Carlo, Jordan had turned practice into a proving ground.
Legendary practice
The practices, often more competitive than the Olympic matches themselves, became a theater of tension. Jordan and Drexler regularly squared off, and Barkley noted that it wasn't casual. It was sharp, physical, and charged with the residue of that Finals clash.
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'Him and Clyde went at it. It was so intense,' Barkley recalled.
They weren't the only ones going at each other. Barkley and Karl Malone were battling to see who was the best power forward. David Robinson and Patrick Ewing were slugging it out for the best center. Jordan used those sessions to reestablish a hierarchy he felt had been momentarily questioned.
Drexler, for his part, didn't back down. He was an elite scorer, a nine-time NBA All-Star, and one of only three players in NBA history at the time to record 20,000 points, 6,000 assists, and 6,000 rebounds.
But Jordan was defending legacy.
The Dream Team dominated international opponents in Spain — winning by an average of 44 points per game. The team cruised to gold, and Jordan had already done his real work.
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That summer, Drexler averaged 10.5 points per game during the Olympics — solid by any measure — but Jordan's presence on the court always loomed larger. The scoring titles, MVP awards, rings — they all cast long shadows.
Related: "Hopefully, by the end of the series, people understood the difference" - MJ made sure Drexler was never compared to him again