GOAT? He Shrugs.

Earlier this month Michael Jordan’s 23XI NASCAR team won their third race thanks to Tyler Reddick and, one of my favorite writers, Jay Mariotti wrote a piece discussing Jordan’s comments about being the GOAT. As a result, today’s Binary Response is about Jordan’s humble demeanor. Please visit Binary News where regular opinion pieces cover business, politics, sports, technology, and more.

Michael Jordan has never needed to tell you he’s the GOAT. He just keeps living like it, which is exactly why Jay Mariotti’s piece hits so hard and why Jordan’s own words about paving the way land with more authority than any talking head screaming into a camera.

Jordan’s humility has always been the most underreported part about his mantra. We obsess over the shrug, the flu game, the six rings, but you can hear in his recent comments that he refuses to play the crown me game that defines so much of modern sports discourse. He flat‑out shrugs off the label. He says that the GOAT term is something he won’t get high or low about, that it doesn’t exist for him. That’s not false modesty from a guy with his resume. That’s a subtle flex. When you’ve done what he’s done, you don’t have to argue your place on Mount Rushmore. You know the mountain has already been carved.

What really stands out is how Jordan immediately steers the conversation away from himself and toward lineage. He emphasizes that his generation paved the way for Kobe and LeBron and talks about the beauty of the game being in how each generation evolves it, not erases the one before. He invokes Kareem, Russell, Wilt and the greats whose names somehow get pushed off the stage when the graphics department needs a neat Jordan‑vs‑LeBron headline. You can hear the frustration. It’s not that someone might think LeBron is better, but that the sport has become a zero‑sum ranking exercise where honoring the future means disrespecting the past.

That’s the irony here. The one guy who actually has the resume to pound the table for himself is the guy telling everyone to calm down. He’s not begging you to recognize his greatness. Instead, he’s reminding you that greatness is accumulative. Meanwhile, the media ecosystem — including some ex‑players who should know better — keeps discussinbg the GOAT machine because outrage equals engagement equals clicks. Jordan, in typical Jordan fashion, just opts out. That’s probably the most Jordan thing of all. Dominate the sport, then refuse to dignify the debate that exists because of that domination.

And while that noise blares, he’s busy doing something else. Quietly becoming a double GOAT. Mariotti’s not wrong to lean into that phrase when you look at what 23XI Racing is doing. Three wins to open a NASCAR season isn’t a cute side project. Nope, it’s an organizational statement. Jordan, the basketball guy who bought a race team, is suddenly the owner people chase around the garage area, crowds gathering the way they did outside the United Center in the ‘90s. He admits he just put up the money and credits Denny Hamlin for the day‑to‑day, but that’s classic Jordan humility again — defer credit, absorb the pressure, set the standard.

You hear him after Daytona, struggling to even put the feeling into words, saying it feels like he won a big championship. That’s not a billionaire dabbling in a hobby. That’s a competitor addicted to the grind in a totally different world. It took 28 years after his sixth ring to get his seventh, as an owner. What’s best is, he treated that Daytona 500 win like a validation of everything he’s poured into this second life. NASCAR didn’t just get a celebrity investor. It got the most demanding winner in basketball history applying that same standard to a garage full of mechanics and drivers. You can see it in Bubba Wallace’s evolution, Tyler Reddick’s surge, and the way Hamlin talks about the responsibility of bringing joy to Michael Jordan. That’s not normal owner talk. That’s culture.

Now, about that paving the way line and what it really says about LeBron and the late Kobe Bryant. Jordan is generous in his praise — he calls LeBron’s career unbelievable, says he admires what Kobe did, then lumps Kobe and Durant into that same category of players who have elevated the game. But let’s be honest, fans didn’t hear that as a kumbaya moment. Insterad, they heard it as a subtle reset of the hierarchy. Jordan is saying, I helped build this road. They drove on it. That’s not a shot. It’s context a lot of fans cling to when they insist LeBron simply isn’t in the same GOAT conversation.

Because for many of those fans, the argument never really changed. Six rings in six tries, two three‑peats, never needing a super‑team migration to reboot his legacy, never presiding over Finals flameouts where the excuses pile up faster than the banners. LeBron’s longevity is unmatched, his numbers absurd, his impact undeniable. But the ring math is what it is, and no one really believes he was every six championships, not at this stage. The more harshly critical corners of the fanbase see him as a historically great player whose playoff scars keep him a step below Jordan. That gap isn’t closing, it’s calcified.

Then there’s the way he engages with the media. Jordan in his playing days could be cutting, icy, even cruel behind the scenes, but he rarely turned every microphone into a state of the union. LeBron leans into narrative. He curates it, challenges it, and at times weaponizes it. That’s his right, and in this era, it’s almost expected. But for a lot of fans, the constant commentary — the passive‑aggressive quotes, the live‑tweeting of other players, the subtext about teammates and coaches — feels less like the killer they associate with GOAT and more like a modern hybrid of star and content creator.

And then you have Charles Barkley, an unfiltered megaphone during his playing days, still taking shots at everyone from players to owners on television, Jordan included. Barkley has turned mouthing off into a second career. LeBron’s media strategy isn’t the same as Barkley’s, but the through‑line is that both are always in the conversation even when they’re not on the floor. For some fans, that’s entertaining. For others, it’s exactly why Jordan’s quieter, colder, more controlled approach — both then and now — feels like a higher level of greatness. He doesn’t need the last word on the set. The last word is the scoreboard.

Here’s the thing, folks: When Jordan says he doesn’t care about GOAT talk, I believe him on one level and absolutely don’t on another. You don’t become Michael Jordan without caring deeply about where you stand. But the beauty is that he doesn’t have to fight the fight anymore. His rings argue for him. His NASCAR wins now argue for him. His insistence on honoring the past while nodding to the future argues for him. The more he downplays it, the worse it sounds when others have to build elaborate cases for themselves.

With that... LeBron is still working on his closing argument; Jordan finished his years ago and moved on to winning somewhere else entirely.

If you can not play with them, then root for them!