Michael Jordan

He has the highest scoring average in the history of the NBA. He also has the highest scoring average in the history of the playoffs, which is the harder one, because that is where teams build a defence specifically to stop you and have a week to think about it.

30.1 in the regular season. 33.4 in the playoffs. Nobody else is above 30 in either.

He went to six Finals and won six. He was named the best player in all six.

Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born on 17 February 1963 in Brooklyn and grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina.

He went to the University of North Carolina and in his first year, in the national championship game of 1982, he took and made the shot that won it.

In the 1984 draft he went third. Houston took Hakeem Olajuwon first, which was defensible. Portland took Sam Bowie second, which has been discussed ever since.

He averaged 28.2 points as a rookie and was Rookie of the Year.

In his second season he broke a bone in his foot in the third game and missed sixty-four of them. He came back for the playoffs, where Chicago met a Boston side that won sixty-seven games and is on most people's shortlist for the best team ever assembled.

He scored 63 points in Game 2. Boston still won, and they swept the series.

Larry Bird, asked about it afterwards, said: "God disguised as Michael Jordan."

1986–87: 37.1 points a game. He became the second player ever to score 3,000 in a season.

1987–88: 35.0 points a game on 53.5% shooting, with a league-leading 3.2 steals. He was Most Valuable Player and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season, won the All-Star Game MVP, and won the slam dunk contest.

1988–89: 32.5 points, 8.0 rebounds, 8.0 assists. For eleven games in that stretch he played point guard and averaged 33.6 points, 11.4 rebounds and 10.8 assists.

28 March 1990: 69 points against Cleveland, his career high.

Then the titles. Chicago beat the Lakers in 1991, Portland in 1992, Phoenix in 1993. His Finals averages across those three: 31.2, then 35.8, then 41.0.

Forty-one points a game in a Finals series is a figure that does not look real written down.

On 23 July 1993 his father James was murdered. In October, at thirty, Jordan retired from basketball and signed a minor-league baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox organisation.

He spent 1994 playing outfield in Birmingham, Alabama, riding buses.

On 18 March 1995 his agent sent out a two-word statement: "I'm back." He played seventeen games that season. Chicago lost in the second round.

The next season Chicago won seventy-two games, which stood as the record for twenty years. He averaged 30.4, was MVP, and won the title. Then another. Then another.

Game 5 of the 1997 Finals is the one people call the flu game. He was ill enough that he could barely stand between plays and scored 38 points.

Game 6 of the 1998 Finals, in Utah, is the ending anyone would have written. Chicago were one point down with under a minute left. He scored 45 that night, and with about six seconds remaining he took the ball, moved on Bryon Russell, and shot from the top of the key.

It went in. He held the follow-through. Chicago won the championship, and he retired again in January 1999.

He came back once more, at thirty-eight, as a player for the Washington Wizards — a team he was also running.

2001–02: 22.9 points a game, cut short by injury at sixty games. 2002–03: 20.0 points a game, and he played all eighty-two of them at the age of forty.

He was an All-Star in both seasons. Washington made the playoffs in neither.

Both figures are all-time NBA records.

Six appearances, six titles, six Finals MVPs. No series went to a seventh game.

Ten scoring titles is the league record. He is also in the Hall of Fame twice — once as himself in 2009, once as a member of the 1992 Olympic team in 2010 — and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Jerry West, who built the Lakers and has a basketball career of his own to compare against, said he was more impressed by Jordan's defence than his scoring.

Doc Rivers called him the best superstar defender in the history of the game.

Phil Jackson, who coached him through all six titles: "Michael would get fouled on every play and still have to play through it."

The defensive record is the part that gets lost. Nine All-Defensive First Teams, a Defensive Player of the Year award, 2,514 steals, and he did all of it while carrying the entire offensive load of the team — a combination the league has essentially not seen since.

The scoring average is the number that will not move. Averages are unforgiving: one bad season drags them down permanently, and most great careers end with several. His two Washington seasons, at 22.9 and 20.0, are the only ones below 28, and even carrying those he finished at 30.1.

And then there is the shape of it. Six Finals, six wins, six times the best player in the series, no seventh game ever required. Whatever argument anyone wants to have about the greatest player who ever lived, that particular line has no counter-example.