One of the things that bugs me about his deification is that nobody likes to talk about how Jordan never even got out of the second round until after all his rivals either aged out and/or were diluted by back-to-back expansion seasons. He never beat the Pistons until after expansion broke them up; he technically never did beat the Celtics, they just got old and faded away. We'll never know if he could have beaten the gd lakers before Cap retired, because he never got that far, but there's no reason to believe he could have.