Is Michael Jordan the World's Greatest Basketball Player Ever?

Eleven years since his highly-publicized retirement from active play (his second time in the 1990s), Michael Jordan remains a hot item in sports news.

But it isn't really about Jordan returning to court at age 46, rather, it's about his recent induction to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, held in the birth place of the sport in Springfield, Mass.

Obviously, Jordan's game-clinching jump shot over a slipping Bryon Russell of the Utah Jazz in the 1998 NBA Finals, remains as the memorable marker for the Bulls' long-time star/

And since being an NBA follower during the 1980s when Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy were running the "Showtime" with the LA Lakers, I've always wondered why sports scribes, towards the middle of the 1990s, would label Jordan as the Greatest basketball player ever to play the game.

I don't really know.

But Art Thiel, who wrote an article that appeared in the Official NBA encyclopedia, mentioned that "Michael Jordan became the universal measuring device for appraising greatness."

I really wondered what was the basis of the sports scribes, who for decades had been covering the NBA and had more or less seen the countless exploits of legendary basketball figures, before finally seeing Jordan and getting mesmerized by him.

Is it Jordan's scoring year in year out that began in 1985? Or his passionate game face that triggered the Bulls championship stampede in 1991 to 1993, beating Western Conference's best teams-the Lakers, the Portland Trailblazers and the Phoenix Suns in that order?

Then the 1996-1998 seasons, which saw Jordan leading the Bulls anew to the NBA's Mount Olympus? Beating squads like the Seattle Supersonics in 1996 and the Jazz in 1997 and 1998?

If it's scoring, then I think recent Manila visitor and NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has the inside track to the "greatest ever" tag because he owns the all-time NBA scoring title of 38,387 points scored spanning 20 seasons, plus he's in the third all-time rebounding leaders, just behind the late Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell.

Or maybe his intensity each game that earned the nod of people that eventually made the "greatest-ever" tag sink.

Well, the possibilities are endless when we talk of Jordan and his exploits.

But what about you? What do you think made Jordan the "greatest-ever" pro basketball player of all-time?