In the months since Tom Haberstroh’s article about Michael Jordan’s spurious statistics that led to his 1987-88 Defensive Player of the Year award, there’s been more noisemaking than a tornado shopping at a wind chime store. And seemingly everyone who’s chimed in appears to have stock options tied to one end or the other of the GOAT debate.

Was MJ an excellent defender at the time? Yes. Are the numbers recklessly inaccurate? Obviously. Did he deserve the award anyway? That’s the question Ethan Strauss obsequiously attempts to explore, and it’s what we’ll be addressing here.

Strauss insists that there was no candidate deserving of DPOY at all that season, so the egregious stat-stuffing that was inarguably perpetrated by coconspiring hometown statistician(s) in Jordan’s favor (a fact he acknowledges as true) that directly led to MJ winning an award he had never previously been the slightest bit close to — but coveted openly (while publicly railing against, in an accompanying denouncement of, the previous year’s winner) in a Sports Illustrated feature by Curry Kirkpatrick published at the start of that very season — does not constitute a “crime” because there is no ostensible victim.

The writer’s argument is essentially that buying day-old bread with counterfeit money isn’t a crime: No one else was going to buy it so it doesn’t matter. And maybe Jordan would’ve ultimately been the lucky dumpster dweller in the metaphor who got the benefit of there being no befitting, legitimate purchaser of the loaf in question while it was on offer anyway. But that isn’t what happened.

Instead, MJ bought the bread with phony currency printed by collusionists at Chicago Stadium. And the victims are all those who continue to come after and all of us who are led to believe that a dollar has value and that stats have meaning.

Statistics are the residue of greatness — a glorious wake of mastery and wonderment for fans to revel in and cherish. But attempting to bask in any afterglow left behind by this meltdown of values and morality has come to be as unsatisfying as an aborted sneeze.

Regardless of who would’ve been most deserving of the bread had it not been stolen, the person who deserves it least is he who cheats to acquire it, leaving a deleterious spoor of lies and unreliability in the form of numbers that can’t be trusted contributing to career totals we as fans know are fallacious — which depresses the economy of basketball fanship via a reduction in the value of, respect for and belief in the statkeeping during that entire epoch of NBA history.

The steroid era of MLB and the illicit paying of college football players of yore have served to cheapen the numbers and dampen any residual excitement that could otherwise exist in looking back on those results. But at least those are, in fact, results; we saw those occurrences take place on the field of play.

The aforementioned, however, are in distinct contrast to the absurd 182% disparity between Jordan’s home/road splits for defensive statistics throughout a time period during which the Bulls, when at home, were habitually credited with more steals than the opposing team even had live-ball turnovers (a requirement for a steal to be possible). And yes, Michael Jordan is the enduring beneficiary of history having unearnedly ascribed an alarmingly inordinate number of phantom steals (and blocks) to a player who needn’t have even been on the court at the time for them to materialize.

Bob Rosenberg — longtime scorekeeper for the Bulls, friend to Michael himself and known collaborator in the unscrupulous tabulation of otherwise unaudited game stats — seems to have been passing out Halloween candy to kids who weren’t even born yet. In fact, this sort of connivance was done with such blatancy and overt disregard that Rosie (as he was known to those with whom he was close) and his flagrant abetment and assistance to his friend Michael’s not-so-hidden agenda triggered a reprimand from the league the following year. And Jordan never won another DPOY.

Statistics should be sacrosanct in representing benchmarks and establishing legacies. Unfortunately, some of those figures we’ve held dear have been vitiated. But unlike artificially achieved home run totals that glare blindingly off the pages of MLB record books, this crooked and honorless ledger is instead a mendacious accounting of steals and blocks which never even happened at all. The numbers have been proven to be bereft of any meaning or connection to reality whatsoever.

But they did result in something tangible. They resulted in an award that is part of a tremendous player’s heroic legend — a legend that not only survives proof to the contrary, but seems impervious even to veracity itself and exists in a world that transcends fact.

It’s tragic when some of the bricks used to construct the foundation for idolatry in image and memory of one of the greatest athletes sport has ever seen, are uncovered to be Jumpman-logoed holograms stacked like beautifully giftwrapped, empty boxes under a mall Christmas tree that were sold to fans with the falseness of a timeshare pitch. And it somehow seems even sadder that supporters of the player don’t care. But in life and in sports, loving the lie can be less painful than living the truth.

—@PoisonPill4