The People You're Paying to Be in Shorts (2022)

The latest from Dorktown focuses on the 2011-2012 season of the Charlotte Bobcats, the worst season in NBA basketball history, registering a 7-59 record in a lockout-shortened season for a winning percentage of .106. The story and the telling are complicated by the fact that the Bobcats were owned by superstar Michael Jordan, author of ridiculously high winning percentages and other feats. The Bobcats are now the Hornets—not the original Charlotte Hornets, but that whole story is covered here. Jordan still owns them, and they are still undistinguished, with no championships (or even conference-level play). More often than not they miss the playoffs altogether. It’s a perfect project for Dorktown in many ways, whose principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein may not yet have met an outrageous loser they don’t love (Seattle Mariners, Atlanta Falcons, Dave Stieb, etc.). They are joined by Seth Rosenthal and Kofie Yeboah as the stories unwind. It’s a very rich irony, of course, that this feat of mediocrity happened to Michael Jordan. Anyone who fell victim to Jordan’s domination of NBA basketball in the 1990s is sure to find some gratification and portions of good old schadenfreude here (for example, the best Seattle SuperSonics team I ever knew was entirely overshadowed by him, with one shot at the annual role of patsy for the Bulls). However, Bois is maybe not as good about hiding his gloating here as he could be. He addresses a recurring photo of Jordan as “Mike” and frequently asks mocking questions and takes a few jabs for good measure, which gets distracting in its unseemliness. Given Jordan’s dimming star as the greatest basketball player of all time—LeBron reminding us of Kareem suddenly starts making MJ look more like #3 GOAT around here—along with his embarrassing lack of graciousness about it, it’s an understandable impulse. Jordan may be petty and vindictive and too preoccupied with burnishing his own legend, but that’s on him. And he’s not doing himself any good. That’s obvious now. This longish documentary—two and a half hours, relatively short by Dorktown standards—lands on one of the best examples of Jordan’s various comeuppances since the glory. If they need to pile on further, maybe the next project could be about Jordan’s baseball career. The People You’re Paying really only needs to lay out the humiliations that ownership has brought to Jordan, whose retirement is not a happy one because the only thing that still appears to matter is that 7th championship even 25 years later. As a passion play of futility it is otherwise nearly flawless in the Dorktown mode, with scads of charts, graphs, and statistically based argument. The verdict is in. For losing, I’m not sure those Bobcats can ever be beat.