"Experimental" feels like a strange word choice for an $80 million production based on a wildly successful series of shoe commercials that employed a couple hundred animators. It wasn't doing anything terribly new; mixing softly-rendered cartoon characters with live action was bold and risky in 1988 when "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" came out, but by 1996 it was a pretty normal thing to see a hyper-real Tony the Tiger hanging out with live action kids in ads. It was still kinda cool but it was also getting normal.

There'd been multiple Nike Air Jordan commercials mixing the Looney Tunes characters with Jordan since 1992; it was a well-understood technology by 1996. The high end of the animation industry was starting to move into digital ink & paint around then, which made a lot of the effects much easier than when stuff had to be airbrushed by hand to create soft shadows!

Uncited, expecting deletion soon, my sources are nothing you can't find by googling "space jam commercial" and being a passionate follower of animation news at the time. I have no idea why Jordan did it; my speculation as to why boils down to two things: 1. Being a movie star sounds like a fun thing to try after retiring from basketball (though apparently he was bored out of his mind for much of the shooting) and 2. I bet he got a meaningful percentage of that $80mil budget and the ~$240mil it grossed worldwide.