"When I drafted him, I said, 'OK, we're gonna get a good player here,'" said Rod Thorn, the Nets president who was Chicago's GM when the Bulls had the No. 3 pick in 1984. "I thought, he'll come in and play and help us. But to think that he would be what he turned out to be? No way. No way."
"Back then, the knock on Michael was that he couldn't shoot the ball," Thorn recalled. "For a long time, that first season, he just drove the ball to the basket and he didn't need a shot. But Michael was so smart, he learned from taking some mighty licks. So he said, 'I gotta get a jump shot,' and he got one. But when we looked at him for the draft, he was 195 pounds and 6-6, so he was kind of thin. So the biggest thing about him was, can he make a shot? We wondered what kind of shooter he'd be."
Thorn could only go off of the tapes of Jordan he'd watched in Dean Smith's office in Chapel Hill several months before the draft.
"Back then, you didn't work guys out," he said. "We never worked Michael out. But I was very good friends with Dean, and every year, I'd go down to North Carolina for two or three days and he would let me watch tapes of all the ACC players. That's how I scouted the entire league. Dean thought Michael would be a really good pro - a better pro player than a college player."
"When training camp started, I was not there for our first practice," Thorn said. "After they finished, I got a call from Bill Blair who was an assistant coach, and he said, 'Rod, you didn't screw this draft up. This guy is pretty good.' Well, you know how coaches are. They just don't say that kind of stuff about a rookie. So I felt pretty good. Then the next day, I got a call from Kevin Loughery, our head coach, and he said, 'This guy is pretty good.' So I said, 'Wait a minute, he must be pretty dad-gone good if Kevin is calling me, too.'"
"Pretty dad-gone good" turned into much, much more, not so long after Thorn left Chicago in 1985. As Jordan grew into an iconic figure, known the world over, he took the league to unparalleled heights as the Bulls won six titles in eight seasons.
Thybulle was a 36% shooter from 3PT range for his college career, which is just about average/slightly above average. Plus, his summer league 3-point shooting, from NBA range, has been better than that.
