Sold for 10.1 million a Michael Jordan jersey from his last NBA final, in the season of the "last dance"

Michael Jordan is probably the best player in the history of basketball.

He has just added a new one to his list of records.

The jersey he wore with the Chicago Bulls in the first game of the 1998 NBA Finals, the last he won, has been sold at auction by Sotheby's for $10.1 million (a similar figure in euros), much above the estimate of 3 to 5 million that was handled at the beginning of the bids.

That, even though the Bulls lost that game.

That season is known as the "last dance," the title of the ESPN documentary that portrayed that campaign, both stormy and successful for the Bulls.

The overall feeling was that of the end of an era.

It was the coach, Phil Jackson, who was leaving the team at the end of the season, the one who baptized it that way, but it was expected that at the end of it Michael Jordan and part of the players who had accompanied him to make the Bulls the best team of the nineties of the last century.

From the hand of Jordan, those from Chicago had already won five champion rings.

It was the only chance to win the sixth.

The Last Dance

was a series produced by ESPN and broadcast on Netflix, which became the most watched documentary in the history of the platform.

Its launch was brought forward to spring 2020 due to the pandemic.

It tells in two time lines that overlap and join at the end, the story of Michael Jordan and that of that last triumphant season.

A defeat

Michael Jordan guided the team to the 1998 finals for yet another year.

In them, the Bulls faced the Utah Jazz.

Both had been the best in the regular season in their respective conferences, with the same balance of 62 wins and 20 losses.

Those of Utah, in addition, had been intractable in the eliminatory ones.

They beat the Lakers 4-0 in the NBA semifinal West final.

The first game was played on June 3 in Salt Lake City, before some 20,000 spectators and with a particularly hostile reception.

Jordan arrived calm.

He was dancing on the bus sitting in his seat with headphones, in one of the scenes of The Last Dance that has generated the most memes.

Michael Jordan 45 minutes in the first game and had 33 points in the iconic red away jersey with number 23. Although the game went into overtime, the Bulls lost 88-85.

They won the next three games, lost the fifth and became champions in the sixth, also in Salt Lake City.

Jordan was proclaimed the best player in the finals, with which he and his team won their sixth title.

In the final game, Jordan hit the game-winning basket with just five seconds remaining, giving the Chicago team its second hat-trick in eight years.

That tiresome was also immortalized in an iconic photograph,

The basketball player retired after that game, before returning in 2001 as a player for the Washington Wizards, a team with which he played for two seasons.

The shirt from the first game is the one that has now gone up for auction.

The price of 10.1 million dollars exceeds the 9.3 million dollars (at the exchange rate at the time) in which Maradona's hand of God shirt was auctioned in May, with which he played the unforgettable World Cup match against England football match in 1986 in which he scored two goals, one of them with his hand.

It remains below, yes, the 12.6 million dollars in which a Mickey Mantle card, the New York Yankees baseball player, was awarded last month.

According to Sotheby's, the previous record for a basketball jersey was Kobe Bryant with an autograph from the player of the year on his Los Angeles Lakers debut.

It is also the most expensive Michael Jordan-related item ever auctioned.

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