Almost everything that can be written about Michael Jordan has, at one time or another, been written, and usually more than once, but here’s something you might not know: My sister used to control him with her thoughts. At least she said she did, and I had a hard time disproving her. She didn’t control him off the court. It was only his game she took credit for. No one, including my sister, could explain how or why this power had chosen her. “Michael Jordan and I just have a kind of … connection,” she’d say. She was maybe 14. She’d never manifested telekinetic abilities, to my knowledge. I don’t think she’d even been a basketball fan before. Nevertheless she had come into this heavy responsibility. You had to admit she carried it well. We’d be sitting around our living room in Oklahoma, watching Bulls games with our dad, and the whole time she’d have to keep beaming brainwaves into him through the TV. MJ would pull off some incredible shot, one of those floating, six-phase layups where he seemed to be skywriting the word “Oglala” with his shoulder, and my dad and I would go: “Great move, Emily!”

“I’d better get some rest,” she’d say on a summer evening. “Michael and I have a big playoff game tomorrow.”

The first thing to say about The Last Dance, ESPN’s much-hyped new 10-part Jordan docuseries, is that—like every other Jordan documentary before it, and indeed all other Jordan coverage to date—it fails to explore in any substantive way the role played by my teenage sibling in constructing the greatest NBA career of all time. At least not in the installments that have aired so far. It’s possible that there’s a really big twist coming late in the series. Episode 8 might well open with an awestruck Phil Jackson shaking his head and saying, “If I’d known back then that our sport could be played at such a high level by an adolescent couch-warg with no pro experience … wow. I guess I might have hung up that third dream catcher.”

[Read Brian Phillips's column on the Michael Jordan Last Dance documentary series.]