Isn't all that training designed to determine if you are Captain material?
So he saves the Federation captaining the Enterprise and they make him... what.. Lutienant?
If you find a Michael Jordan do you keep him in the lower leagues until he has served his apprenticeship?
Bad analogy. Jordan was playing basketball his whole life. Played in high school. Played in college. Then was drafted. He worked his ass off, proved himself day after day, in game after game, year after year,
then he got to go to the big times.
Not at all.. captaincy equates to the big league
Exactly, and that's why the analogy fails. In order to be as good as Micheal Jordan was in the NBA, he had to have worked, hard, at basketball all through college, and all through high school, and probably all through middle school as well. That's the kind of sheer dedication to his craft that made him Air Jordan.
Kirk, on the other hand, possesses raw talen in spades, but has done almost nothing to harness it. He's attended three years of Starfleet Academy, and he hasn't even finished his third year when this movie takes place. There's no indication he's actually worked, and I mean seriously, nose-to-the-grindstone worked, during his time there; admittedly we don't see much, but what we do see consists of him bedding an Orion girl and him flagrantly, and unimaginatively, cheating at the Kobiyashi Maru test. There's no mention of time spent out in space or on ships, and frankly, from the way Kirk acts once he's on Enterprise I don't get any sense of his having learned anything at all about effectively leading people or respecting the chain of command.
So, to sum up. The difference between Jordan and Kirk? Jordan worked his ass off to get where he was, Kirk just fell into a position of undeserved influence based on who his dad was (the only reason anyone tried to get him into Starfleet) and that he was nominally in command when Spock and Sulu saved the day.
