11/2 v. Philadelphia; 11/3 at Washington; 11/6 v. Boston; 11/7 at Minnesota; 11/9 at Boston; 11/10 v. Charlotte; 11/13 at Utah; 11/15 at Golden State; 11/17 at Seattle; 11/18 at Portland; 11/21 at Phoenix; 11/23 at L.A. Clippers; 11/24 at Denver; 11/28 v. Washington; 11/30 v. Indiana
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR THE BULLS TO DISCOVER THEY WEREN’T as good as they thought they’d be.
Before the opening game against Philadelphia, Jordan sent a diamond ear stud over to Charles Barkley with Barkley’s number 34 on it, just like the number 23 Jordan was now wearing in his ear. Rick Mahorn had told Jordan that Barkley had seen a picture of Jordan with his ear stud during training camp and liked it, so Jordan picked one up for Barkley. “Maybe it will keep him from hitting me,” Jordan joked.
Actually, the two had become good friends. After the 1989–90 season, Jordan played in a celebrity golf tournament in Philadelphia with Barkley caddying for him. “Charles is a nice guy, a fun guy to be with; he makes me laugh,” Jordan would explain about how Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger had come together, how the league’s Goody Two-Shoes and Peck’s Bad Boy could coexist. “We’re friends,” added Barkley, “because most of the guys in this league are jerks and you wouldn’t want to spend any time with them.”
As the season went on, the two would engage in a personal race for the league scoring title, and one would often call the other to taunt him about how many points behind he was. In December, Jordan would take over the scoring lead for the first time all season, after a slow start; he’d been playing by Jackson’s rules. But Perdue remembers Jordan sitting in the locker room before a game, saying that Barkley needed to score 45 that night to pass him. “No way he’ll do that,” Jordan said. But sure enough, Barkley did, and Jordan would go for a season-high 42 in his next game to keep pace.
Jordan, like most players in the league, studied his statistics, for that was, in the end, how players were paid. Play as a team, they were told; but in negotiating sessions, statistics were always held up as the barometer of value. It was hard to find an NBA player who did not know his current statistics, and those of most of the players in the league. During the 1988–89 season, when Collins switched Jordan to point guard, he started picking up triple doubles, and it became something of a contest to see how many he could get and whether he could pass Magic Johnson, who usually led the league in that category. For several games, Jordan would check with the official scorer during the game to see how many more rebounds or assists he needed for another triple double; it only stopped when the league got word and ordered the scorer to refrain from giving out the information during the game. But Jordan has always kept his point totals in his head as he’s played: Late in the 1989–90 season, during a time-out in a close game, the overhead scoreboard in Chicago Stadium listed Jordan’s point total as 38. “Go tell them it’s got to be thirty-nine,” Jordan told trainer Mark Pfeil. “I know I shot an odd number of free throws, so it’s got to be an odd number.”
Jordan liked Barkley’s brashness and respected his ability, which some said made him the most unstoppable player in the game, although their personalities were different. Jordan could be razor-sharp of tongue with an implicit, cutting message, like when he saw struggling rookie Stacey King walking into the locker room carrying a box: “I hope there’s a jump shot in there,” Jordan cracked. Or when then-reserve Charles Davis was sorting through tickets for friends and family when the team was playing a game in Atlanta: “They don’t need a ticket to watch you sitting on the bench. They can go to your house for that.”
Barkley, who doesn’t own an unexpressed thought, rarely worries about whether outsiders hear his taunts. Everything about him is on public display, as in the 1990 playoffs, when he signaled with his thumb for coach Jim Lynam to yank Mike Gminski during a game. He’s annually the most fined player in the league, once saying he’d considered donating his annual total to the homeless, “but then they’d have better homes than I do.” In the 1989–90 season, he and New York’s Mark Jackson were fined for saying they had bet on which of them would make the winning shot in a close Knicks-76ers game. Barkley would be called in by the commissioner for a slap on the wrist and lecture, only to say, when asked if he were going to be fined, “Wanna bet?”
Barkley angered women’s groups for saying, after a loss, that it was the kind of game after which you go home and beat your wife. “Screw the women’s groups,” he said when asked if he’d actually like to see that in print. He slammed New York: “It’s my kind of town … because I’ve got a gun.” He said of Larry Bird, “As long as he’s around, I’ll only be the second-worst defensive player in basketball.” He talks throughout games to anyone who’ll listen, and he once told lead referee Tommy Nunez to make a call because “you know Moe and Larry won’t.”
“Charles says what’s on his mind,” says Jordan. “I like him because it’s like I’m the good brother and he’s the bad brother. He says a lot of good things the good brother wants to say, but doesn’t. And I like that. I know I’m always laughing when we’re together.”
But Barkley’s play is no joke, and despite his developing friendship with Jordan, Barkley said he was going to show all the preseason prognosticators that the Eastern Conference race wasn’t just between Detroit and Chicago. In the season opener in Chicago, he went out and outscored Jordan 37–34 and added 10 rebounds as the 76ers won rather easily, 124–116, after building a 19-point halftime lead.
The Bulls went into Washington the next night to play a Bullets team they’d defeated easily in the preseason. With Chicago trailing by 1, Jordan had a last-second shot attempt blocked, and the Bulls were now 0–2.
The Bulls had come to expect last-second heroics from Jordan. After all, who could forget that stunning fifth and final game of the 1989 opening-round playoff series in Cleveland? With Jordan promising a victory and Collins fearing for his job, there were half a dozen lead changes in the fourth quarter when Cleveland ran a brilliant screen play from Larry Nance to Craig Ehlo and scored to take a 1-point lead with three seconds left.
Collins called time-out, gathered everyone in a tight circle, and began to draw a play for Dave Corzine. “Everyone started to look around,” recalled backup forward Jack Haley, who would call the moment the most thrilling of his life. “Doug could see everyone sort of frowning, and he started to explain that they wouldn’t be expecting Corzine to get the ball. Michael just slammed his fist down on the clipboard and said, ‘Give me the fuckin’ ball.’
“Doug looked at him, drew up the play Jordan wanted, and he hit that amazing hanging jumper to win the game. Now that’s what I call taking charge,” said Haley, who would later go to the Nets.
Taking charge: It was what Jordan was there for. But Jackson had been drilling his team—including Jordan—about moving the ball and hitting the open man. And on the final, decisive play in the Washington game, no one was near Craig Hodges in his favorite spot in the comer, yet four Bullets jumped at Jordan and blocked his shot. It happens, but some began to wonder when it happened again the next game: Boston squeezed out a 110–108 victory in Chicago when Jordan missed an eighteen-foot jumper with about twenty seconds left, and then Brian Shaw, whom Jordan was supposed to be guarding, rebounded a missed Robert Parish jumper over Jordan and put the ball in at the buzzer to win the game.
A week before at the Bulls’ kickoff luncheon, player after player had talked about winning a title; management was saying this was the year, national publications were picking the Bulls as one of four or five teams with the best chance to win a championship.
The Bulls were 0–3.
After this start, Jordan told reporters he’d talked it over and decided to become more assertive on offense. And just whom had he talked that over with? “I talked it over with myself,” Jordan explained.
The Bulls ended the first nine days of the season 3–3, but two of those wins were over expansion teams—Minnesota and Charlotte—and some were worried. But not Jackson. He’s a patient man, well suited for coaching the modem athlete. From his experience in the game he can relate to players, particularly big men, which is rare for a coach. Many eventually fail because they lose the respect of the bigger players, who doubt that a smaller man who never played the game can understand what they do. It’s one reason Golden State’s Don Nelson remains so successful But Jackson is successful for another reason: He refuses to blame his players for the team’s failures, which is something that eventually doomed Collins. “It would be either that he won or we lost,” recalls Will Perdue. “It was always ‘The coaching staff did all they could.’ It was ‘you guys’ who let down when we lost, and then when we won it was ‘What a great job of preparation the coaches did and how hard they worked watching those films.’”
Collins had been a great player, a three-time All-Star with the Philadelphia 76ers, because of his hustle, enthusiasm, and impassioned, almost insane desire. His own personal demons drove him to be a standout while also keeping him on a highly emotional edge. But that same intensity eventually took him down as a coach.
When Stan Albeck was fired in 1986, Krause felt that Collins, then an analyst for televised NBA games, would relate better to the current generation of players because he had been one so recently.
“You mean the TV guy?” said Reinsdorf incredulously. “As our coach?”
But Krause was adamant, and he was right—at first. Collins was enthusiastic and let Jordan loose to average 37 points per game. But as time passed and the Bulls failed to join the NBA’s elite, Collins became desperately controlling, calling every play and privately blaming Jordan for his inability to get the team to play a fast-breaking transition offense.
And in 1988 when the team traded for Cartwright and drafted center Will Perdue from Vanderbilt and Krause proclaimed the team set at center for the 1990s, Collins found himself under great pressure to develop a low-post game at a time when he didn’t know how, never having studied the position or played it. In the 1988 exhibition season, by which time the team was fully expected to win—they had crashed the fifty-win barrier, they had Jordan, and they now had the center everyone always said the team lacked—Collins was near a breakdown, strung tighter than piano wire. He was breaking out in a rash that the players noticed whenever he was nervous, he wasn’t sleeping or eating much, and his permed Little Orphan Annie hair sat on top of an ever-shrinking face that was a mask of rage one day, tears the next.
Once at a charity exhibition, Jordan sat with players from around the league, swapping stories, when the subject turned to coaches. Everyone had something to add, from Dominique Wilkins telling about Mike Fratello’s demonic rages to Isiah Thomas telling about his willful exchanges with Chuck Daly. So everyone had a good laugh, but there was silence after Jordan said, “You may think you’ve got problems with your coaches, but, well, mine cries every day.”
Finally, Krause and Collins became bitter enemies, with Krause compiling indiscretions by Collins, and Collins calling Reinsdorf and demanding Krause be sent home from a road trip or remain out of the locker room. Collins’s mania had become too draining on everyone around. He had to go.
Jackson was never predictable, though in a different way than Collins; he still mystified his players, although they liked and respected him. He was a guy who could wear his hat sideways during practice, but then confront them in the harshest terms about their play. To some, Jackson was a master of psychology, using a variety of ploys to produce results. “I think it’s important to do anything you can to make them play hard,” he’d say.
“Phil’s always playing with your head,” said Craig Hodges.
In his first season, Jackson started giving books to players at the start of the team’s annual two-week November road trip. This season he would give the novel Glitz to high-priced, fast-talking Stacey King, Tar Baby to rookie Scott Williams, and The Great Santini to Will Perdue. Michael Jordan received Song of Solomon and the aging Bill Cartwright got Things Fall Apart. Jackson considers himself a guide for these young men as well as a coach, and given the long duration of the NBA year, he tries to break up the routine. That’s why the team took a bus trip from Seattle to Portland, instead of flying, because Jackson thought they’d enjoy the scenery. Instead, they all slept. He’d occasionally administer psychological tests during bus and plane trips, although most of the players would invariably scribble aimlessly while listening to their headphones. Jackson sometimes wondered if he could reach a generation that didn’t understand how Thoreau could live by a pond but not own water skis or snorkeling equipment. The players often considered Jackson too didactic.
“I have to spend a lot of time thinking about people,” says Jackson. “I remember my dad thinking in terms of the congregation, and it was the pastor’s responsibility to remember everyone, sort of like a shepherd with his flock, and I believe that about a team. You can’t think of them as just players for a coach, but you have to think of them as a group and relate to them that way, even without words. Sometimes just a wink or a pat on the shoulder will do it.
“Basketball is a very fragile thing because as coaches we can do everything and prepare everybody and have everyone physically ready and still if there’s not the group reflex and reaction at the right moment, if you don’t have that oneness of the group, it starts to be five starters on the floor. That bond, that unity, is a very fragile thing. It’s really almost something holy, which is where the word whole comes from in a sense. So you’ve always got to try to do things to break down the routine.”
But Jackson wasn’t a goofy innocent. He could make backs straighten and stiffen with his messages.
Like his game films. After the Bulls had fallen behind two games to none in the 1990 playoffs against Detroit, Jackson decided he’d edit the game film himself for the next day’s meeting. First there was Joe Dumars slashing by Jordan for a basket. Then came a snippet from the movie The Wizard of Oz, with the Tin Man talking about not having a heart. The players laughed loudly. Then Bill Laimbeer was drifting off a screen for an easy lay-up past Scottie Pippen, followed by the Scarecrow pining for a brain. More laughing, but not as much, and finally Isiah Thomas drove down the lane untouched past John Paxson, Bill Cartwright, and Horace Grant, and the Cowardly Lion was wishing for courage. There were still some giggles.
“He’s telling us we’ve got no heart, no courage, and no brains,” snapped Paxson to a suddenly deathly quiet room.
“One of my functions, as I see it, is to try to enlarge their lives in an intellectual-athletic combination,” says Jackson. “This is a human behavioral laboratory, but not like white rats and lab research. You know, ideas lead to buildings and bridges. I like to think about these people and visualize their being better players through schemes, and how to encourage and motivate them through bringing them to look at film and game critiques. If you spend time wishing you had other players and scheming to get rid of them or not being loyal, either you end up hating them or they end up hating you, and that cannot be productive.
“I love the action of the game, the stimulation of a competitive event and being thrust into a situation where a person has to survive by making inituitive decisions, sort of riding on the edge like a surfer,” says Jackson. “To make the right decisions at the right time and respond to competitive pressures and needs is a tremendous feeling. I always looked at basketball as a temporary thing, but that macho man-to-man aspect and the group interaction almost makes it a form of a higher plane. It takes you out of the mundane space of life, and sometimes I wish that we could play in a gym without any people and try to play the perfect game where you don’t make any mistakes and maybe if there’s a mistake it’s of omission, not commission, and everything is done at the right moment, at the right time, and each decision is the right one and everyone can ride that decision-making wave.”
As the team headed out west for a seven-game trip, Reinsdorf was questioning everyone’s decisions. He had been sure that with the team’s off-season pickups, the Bulls had a chance to win a title this year, yet they were playing miserably. So he called Jackson on the road to ask what was wrong.
“My teams always are slow-starting teams,” Jackson explained to Reinsdorf. “Even in the CBA. I like to put guys out there and let them find their roles, let them find out how they’ll react in times of stress, leave them on the floor sometimes to see what they’ll do in situations. I like them to be able to find their space out there.”
Jackson had told the players as much in meetings. He suggested he might even experiment with them, in a sense, leaving them out on the floor and in jeopardy in tough situations. He might not throw them a lifeline time-out to see how they could get through. It would build the kind of bond he sought. His assistant coaches weren’t so sure. Bach, at times, thought Jackson a little strange, and Winter had his doubts, too.
Despite his assurances, even Jackson was getting a little concerned; not only was the team feeling the weight of great expectations, but there were outside factors as well. Both Paxson and Cartwright would be free agents after the season, and the Bulls had seen fit to offer neither a secure deal. They’d offered Cartwright a one-year extension at $1.5 million, his 1990–91 salary, which he’d rejected. Two years before, when the Bulls had acquired Cartwright, the coaches had agreed he’d be good for two solid seasons, and then perhaps one more, before, as Bach likes to put it, “he’d be an elephant looking for a graveyard.” But Cartwright had surprised them all. The surgery on both knees in the off-season had gone well, and he was moving better than at any time in the past two seasons. And Perdue looked as if he would never be able to provide more than a few backup minutes.
As for Paxson, the Bulls didn’t plan to ask him back. It was agreed that now that he was thirty his skills would soon start slipping, and Krause wanted Armstrong to be the starter by the end of the 1990–91 season. Also, the team needed the money that they might have given Paxson to pay Kukoc. And should they get Kukoc, Paxson would easily be expendable. Reinsdorf had given Paxson a $200,000 bonus the previous season, recognizing that at $320,000 he was vastly underpaid for a starting point guard. He liked Paxson and was willing to go for a new deal, but his basketball people, especially Krause, insisted against it. Reinsdorf would let them decide. And then there was Pippen, searching for a new contract and upset at being the sixth-highest-paid player on the team.
The biggest issue, though, remained Jackson’s attempt to weave Jordan into a coordinated, egalitarian team game and still win. He needed the team to win a game that Jordan didn’t dominate.
The Bulls opened the trip in Salt Lake City against a backdrop of natural splendor and spiritual reminders, the Mormon church and the spectacular Wasatch range dominating the area. Winter always was on the doorstep here, and the craggy mountains showed a carpet of snow. The two-week November trip, the longest of the season, often began here and branded on the team a reminder that it was just the beginning of a long, dreary season. But the Bulls would be getting a break. The Jazz had been to Japan for a two-game opening set with the Phoenix Suns that had left coach Jerry Sloan feeling as if they were on their fiftieth game of the season instead of the fifth. His team was slumping badly already and he’d thrown the owner out of the locker room in a fit of rage not long after the team’s return. He lamented to the Bulls coaches before the game that he was certain to be fired soon. Sloan no longer delighted in defeating the Bulls as he once did, having been fired by them during the 1981–82 season after a reasonably successful run as coach. He was, perhaps, the franchise’s biggest star before Jordan, and the only player ever to have his number retired. His ferocious approach to the game had made him a success as a player, but it seemed to doom him as a coach: He had once thrown a chair at one of his players, Larry Kenon, for being too lethargic on the court. He’d hooked on as an assistant with the Jazz and eventually became head coach when Frank Layden stepped down. His teams had great success against the Bulls with their halfcourt power game behind Karl Malone.
It was an excruciating game. Both were good shooting teams—Utah had led the league the previous season at 50.5 percent to the Bulls’ 49.8 percent—but neither team would shoot even 40 percent on this night as the game slowed and became a wrestling match. Utah was one of the toughest teams in the league, as befitted Sloan’s rugged image. Early in the game, Horace Grant, who’d started wearing prescription goggles in the preseason to correct a vision problem, tossed the goggles away; Karl Malone kept pushing them off and then going up for a rebound while Grant fumbled helplessly to get them back on straight. “If he killed someone on the court I wonder whether they’d call a foul,” Grant moaned afterward.
But it was a happy locker room after Jordan hit a long fallaway jumper at the buzzer to give the Bulls an 84–82 win, once again bailing the Bulls out on a night when the team was faltering. Pippen and Grant combined to shoot 5 for 25, but Paxson was solid as usual, if not spectacular, and had come through with a late jumper that had tied the score and set up Jordan’s heroics. Jazz owner Larry Miller also remembered a game a year earlier in which Paxson had scored 27, although the Jazz scored 7 points in the last 40 seconds to win by 1.
“You shot the ball well,” said Miller, who was bouncing around the Bulls’ locker room to the surprise of the players.
“You know, I’m a free agent,” Paxson responded quickly.
The exchange left Paxson in a gregarious mood, and later in the hotel lounge he was explaining how he was going to change his uniform number.
“I’m getting number ninety-nine,” he cried. “Then maybe I won’t get called for so many fouls because the refs won’t be able to figure out how to flash nine-nine.”
Paxson laughed, but his reputation with the referees was no laughing matter to him. He is slower than many of the guards he faces, so he often gets beaten and ends up fouling. His reputation for being a slow player who doesn’t jump well had created an attitude among many referees that if there is contact, it was initiated by Paxson. And it doesn’t help that Paxson has been considered a marginal player throughout most of his career.
Because there is so much improper contact in the NBA, referees tend to make their calls on the fouls that have some impact on the game. But as in every other aspect of the NBA, a star system exists. Players like Jordan are called for violations less often than players like Paxson, who are called for fouls less often than rookies. Understandably, Paxson resents being considered just a step up from rookies.
During one game, referee Hue Hollins tooted his whistle and Jordan, thinking it was on him, spun around. “Don’t worry,” Hollins said, “I’m not going to make the call on you, Michael.” Whereupon he turned around and shouted: “Five [Paxson], hold.”
“You get tired of all this star stuff,” says Paxson. “I know I can play pretty good defense, and then if I’m a step to the side it’s a call. I know I ought to keep my mouth shut, but when you’re out there those things bother you.” And more often than not, Paxson complicates the situation by loudly pleading his case.
“He’s got a reputation for challenging the referees,” notes Jackson, “and they don’t like it. So he probably needs to take the calls and live with it.”
But were Paxson to do that, he likely wouldn’t survive in the NBA. In fact, had he ever done that in his life, he wouldn’t even be in the NBA.
Even John Paxson doesn’t really know where his toughness comes from. But it’s there, a hard shell that allows him to bounce off the floor and play with injuries that would put other players out for a week. His stubbornness has defined his career; it made him an NBA player. Paxson’s father, Jim senior, played in the NBA for a few seasons back in the 1950s; he was 6-6, pretty big in those days, and did reasonably well, averaging almost 10 points per game for the Cincinnati Royals, the fourth-best scorer on the team behind Clyde Lovellette, Jack Twyman, and Maurice Stokes, all three All-Stars.
But playing in the NBA didn’t mean much money or fame then. Al Bianchi, then playing for Syracuse, remembers trips to Fort Wayne in which the train didn’t go through downtown, so they’d have to get off thirty miles north of the city. Someone would arrange for teenagers to pick them up in four or five cars, and the team would ride into town with the kids and reward them with a few bucks and some tickets. There were eight teams in the league and nobody counted on the future.
And so when Jim junior was bom, Jim senior had decisions to make. He didn’t know then that his oldest son would go on to break his basketball records at the University of Dayton and become a star NBA player at Portland, the first player in team history to score more than 10,000 points, before finishing his career with the Boston Celtics. At the time, his wife was having medical problems and he didn’t want to be on the road, so he quit after two seasons and became an insurance agent.
While many NBA players grew up with just one parent and others struggled mightily, Paxson lived a simple middle-class suburban life in Ohio: neat house with a fence around it, kids, church, and a basketball hoop. The players often refer to Paxson as “the nine-to-five pro” because of his businesslike life-style. While many of the players go to nightclubs, even when the team’s at home, Paxson can more often be found wheeling his son around a mall. On the road, if he can’t find some old friend from Notre Dame, he delights in room service and a TV movie. Even his groupies are wholesome: When Paxson is trailing along in Jordan’s wake, it’s the eleven- and twelve-year-olds who are usually screaming for his autograph. “At least someone notices,” he says.
His thin, fine brown hair flops down Prince Valiant style and his blue eyes are soft and inviting. He shaved his mustache a few years back, and now his upper lip forms a slight snarl when he smiles. But he is all-American all the way, from his reliable backyard jumper to his high school sweetheart of a wife, whom he used to take on hayrides, to two sons for whom the word moppets was practically invented.
Growing up, John was the runt of the family, three years younger and smaller than his brother Jim. Because his birthday fell just before his school’s enrollment, he was always one of the youngest and smallest kids in class, so he didn’t make the teams. But his parents decided to let him repeat the eighth grade. He went to a small military school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, and when he returned to the Dayton school system he found himself playing against kids his size. He became a top player at Archbishop Alter High School in Kettering, Ohio. “I never would have become a pro player if I hadn’t done that,” he insists.
Paxson played his college ball at Notre Dame, where he averaged 17.7 points per game as a senior and made some second-unit all-American teams (he was a first-team academic all-American) and was chosen in the first round of the NBA draft by the San Antonio Spurs. But he never got much of a chance to play; George Gervin and Johnny Moore were already there, and John Lucas and Alvin Robertson were brought in during his first two seasons. The Bulls picked him up as a free agent before the start of the 1985–86 season, but he would remain haunted by the team’s own doubts about his abilities.
First he would back up Kyle Macy, and then Steve Colter, before finishing the 1986–87 season as a starter with an 11.3 scoring average, his career best. But then the Bulls brought in Sedale Threatt and he started, then Rory Sparrow and he started, then Sam Vincent and he started, then Craig Hodges and he started. But when the 1989–90 season opened, Paxson was starting, and he would continue to do so throughout the season. By the start of the 1990–91 season, the team was privately talking about starting B.J. Armstrong, but they stuck with Paxson. Hodges was now down to fifth guard, and all the others were long gone.
“It is satisfying to know,” Paxson was saying early in the 1990–91 season, “that after all these years and all these guards I’m still starting.”
Paxson is a realist; he knows that you can have a long career in the NBA by accepting your limitations and finding a role. More important, he learned better than anyone else that the only way to remain a starting point guard with the Bulls is to satisfy Jordan. The Bulls always say that to play the point opposite Jordan you have to be a great shooter; since Jordan always draws double or triple coverage, the tandem guard has to be able to hit the jumper. Paxson can do that. But so could Threatt, Macy, Vincent, Hodges, and Armstrong, and yet Jordan regularly said he most preferred playing with Paxson. The difference was that Paxson was the one who most deferred to Jordan on the court. Many wondered whether Jordan would be able to play with a great, penetrating point guard like Kevin Johnson, whom Krause always said he was trying to obtain. But Johnson needs the ball to be effective; Jordan demands to have the ball in his hands, and his corrosive glare has worn down those who have tried to ignore him. And Paxson knows that. His first pass upcourt is usually to Jordan, and then he drops off into a spot-up shooting position, ready if called upon.
Paxson’s son, Ryan, once said to his father after watching a game on TV, “Daddy, you don’t shoot the ball too many times.”
“Get used to it, son,” Paxson answered.
But if Paxson learned how to deal with the Bulls on the court, he never did off the court, particularly during the 1989–90 and 1990–91 seasons, when he remained among the lowest-paid starting guards in the league. “I guess my big problem was I was always too realistic and dwelled on what I couldn’t do rather than how important I was,” said Paxson. “Other guys would say how they couldn’t be replaced. I knew I could. But so could they.” Paxson had settled for a three-year deal ending in 1991 that paid him about $330,000 per year. He negotiated it without an agent, but the Bulls proved a little too shrewd for him. They held out a carrot, saying that after he retired they’d make him a TV announcer, a possibility that seemed more and more remote as the 1990–91 season went on. And Paxson had already decided he’d like to return and work at Notre Dame in some capacity.
So Paxson finally hired Jordan’s agent, Falk. And Paxson began to see conspiracies abounding. After informing the Bulls that he’d hired an agent, and not just any agent but the nettlesome Falk, whom Krause detested, Paxson noticed his playing time shrinking and began to wonder whether the change had been ordered by management. Bulls players always wondered if the front office was controlling their playing time. Sam Vincent felt it was when he negotiated a major incentive based on minutes played and suddenly found himself being lifted repeatedly in the fourth quarter. And Paxson remembers Charles Davis telling him during the 1989–90 season that when Davis asked Jackson why he wasn’t playing, Jackson said he was ordered not to play him.
Paxson was now certain he wouldn’t be offered a new contract by the Bulls. Moreover, Paxson suspected that his next contract would be his last, and he needed to start putting up some numbers. He began coming to every game determined to shoot every time he got the ball to build up his statistics. Pippen, who had given him the idea, was planning to do the same since he was about to begin negotiations on a new deal.
But Paxson couldn’t bring himself to follow through on the plan. “I say I’m going to do it, I’m going to shoot, and then when I get out there I just can’t if it’s not the right situation for me,” Paxson lamented one day. “I’ll never change.” He was, in a way, too good a basketball player for his own good.
***
Phil Jackson’s problem, meanwhile, was with the player who was too good for his team’s good. Jordan showed no signs of changing his game, and for the team’s sake Jackson was hoping that a game Jordan couldn’t dominate would come soon. Fortunately, a game against the Golden State Warriors, in Oakland, was coming up on the schedule.
It was in Oakland that Jordan broke his foot in 1985, and for seasons to come he despised and feared the Oakland Coliseum. The following year Jordan admitted he was afraid to play there and shot 11 of 30. The next year he would record a season-low 16 points there. It’s the arena in which he’s averaged by far his fewest points since he’s been in the NBA.
Jordan has tried to overcome the Oakland jinx, and in the 1989–90 season he felt he succeeded, leading the Bulls to an easy win with 29 points and 14 rebounds. This night, though, would not start out well for Jordan. Upon arriving at the arena, he’d heard the word that was sweeping both locker rooms: Lakers star James Worthy, a North Carolina teammate of Jordan’s and one of the more respected gentlemen around the league, had been arrested for soliciting prostitutes. Worthy had contacted an escort service and requested sex of two women who turned out to be undercover police officers, it was alleged; they arrested him when they came to his hotel room in Houston before that night’s game.
Jordan was stunned and kept asking reporters whether it was true. “What are they going to say back home?” was Jordan’s principal concern. Several players began to offer weak jokes about the situation. “You’d think he’d have been tired of being double-teamed by now,” said one, while another offered, “This gives new meaning to the concept of the pregame meal.”
The life of any professional athlete is filled with temptation, which is one reason Horace Grant likes to bring his wife, Donna, on road trips, although the Bulls would order Grant not to. There’s an old joke around the NBA:
Question: What’s the hardest thing about going on the road?
Answer: Not smiling when you kiss your wife good-bye at the door.
All of this reminded one of the Bulls coaches of an incident that occurred a few years ago involving a professional baseball player who was with his wife in the delivery room for the birth of their child. When the baby was delivered, everyone was shocked: The baby was black; the player and his wife were white. She had been having an affair with one of his teammates. Shortly thereafter, the teammate was traded; the team said it had an excess of players at the teammate’s position and was making room for a promising minor leaguer.
Jordan felt badly for Worthy and his family, for he knew Worthy’s life would never be the same.
“It’s the biggest fear you have,” said Jordan. “I know it’s my greatest fear. I’ve spent a life building something positive, and I know any mistake I make could damage that for the rest of my life. People look to their role models to be almost flawless and I guess I’m the closest thing to being viewed positively, very little being flawed in my life. It’s hard to live up to something like that, really harder than basketball. It’s really the biggest job I have.”
But that night, Jordan’s job was just to play basketball. Golden State would take a 7-point lead after three quarters and hold on to win by 10, although the Bulls pulled within 6 midway through the final quarter. The ball was moving around, but not always to Jordan, and by the time he got back into the game in the fourth quarter he was cold and angry. He protested a foul call, and when Chris Mullin missed both free throws he told referee Jack Madden, “See, cheaters lose.” The referees had become accustomed to Jordan’s kidding and usually dismissed it with a smile, but this season he seemed testier. Was it the offense? The drive to finally win? Or, as Jackson and Jordan would suggest later in the season, lack of protection for the Bulls star from the referees? Jordan then missed his only 2 shots of the quarter and the Bulls fell to 4–4 on the season. Game line for Jordan: 14 points on a season-low 12 shots, as every starter had at least 10 shots, a rarity in Jordan’s seven seasons with the team.
Jordan was furious after the game. He kicked a chair when he came into the locker room, and in his comments to the media he came just short of losing his temper: “He’s the coach. I have to abide by his decisions. He chose to play me that way, so that’s the way I’ll play. I guess they figured in my first six years we didn’t have the success they wanted, so they figure the success will come from everyone being involved.” Jordan was, by now, seeming to count the letters in each word, as they came out slow and measured. His voice was almost quivering.
“But then I see Mullin on me,” he went on, “and I’m licking my chops, and I still didn’t see the ball. But I have to accept his explanations.”
Jackson had seen immediately how angry Jordan was and went to him after the game to ask him to “say the right thing” when the media were allowed in after ten minutes. It was a tense scene. Krause usually went into the locker room a minute or two after the players went in. This time, Jackson kicked him out. He wanted to talk to Jordan alone.
Warriors coach Don Nelson walked by long after the game and smirked to Jordan, “I hope they keep playing you that way.”
Jordan went out to a local club with his old friend Rod Higgins, now with the Warriors, and bashed the new system long into the night.
“I just hate it,” he said, “and now in the newspapers tomorrow they’re going to be saying I didn’t perform, that they shut me down. I hate when I have to read that in the papers the next day, that I couldn’t do something. It wasn’t my fault.”
Jordan’s anger simmered as the team moved on to Seattle the next day. And at practice late in the afternoon, his mood hadn’t changed any. He was still burning.
“He just passed the ball, even at times when he was supposed to shoot,” Grant would say afterward, somewhat delighted because he was beginning to think that he might get some shots in the next game. The Bulls’ offense, like most around the NBA, denied shots to the power forward, whose job it was to rebound. But Grant felt he could become an active part of the offense. He’d worked hard on a post-up move in the summer and had an accurate jump shot, but usually didn’t get more than 7 or 8 shots in a game, most off offensive rebounds. He liked the new offense. But it was clear Jordan didn’t. “Michael wouldn’t say a word to anyone. He just passed the ball and took maybe one or two shots and that was it for two hours,” said Grant.
The Bulls had played Seattle three times during the exhibition season, winning two. In the one loss, brash SuperSonics rookie guard Gary Payton had played well, and told USA Today’s Peter Vecsey that he could defend anyone, including Jordan. Later that night the two met by chance at a Seattle nightclub and Payton began to taunt Jordan: “I’ve got my millions and I’m buying my Ferraris and Testarossas, too.”
“No problem,” said Jordan. “I get them for free.”
Jordan liked his little comeback, but he wasn’t through. A challenge always invigorates Jordan, and if it’s on the basketball court, all the better. Before the Bulls were about to go out and play Seattle that night, Jordan reached into his bag and pulled out that USA Today story with Payton’s quotes from the preseason. B.J. Armstrong watched. He’s a thoughtful kid and he enjoys studying others, particularly Jordan. “You watch what the best do and then you learn from it,” says Armstrong. But Armstrong wondered to himself as he watched Jordan, “This guy’s the best there is. Why is he so worried about what a rookie says?”
Just before Jordan walked out of the locker room he promised, “I’m going to show that little sucker.”
The first time Payton had the ball, Jordan stole it, drove for a lay-up, and was fouled. The next time Payton had the ball, Jordan stole it again and drove all the way down court and slammed for a 6–0 Bulls lead. The third time Payton had the ball, Jordan destroyed his dribble; Scottie Pippen came in to steal the ball and hit Bill Cartwright for a lay-up, and Seattle coach K. C. Jones took the rookie out of the game. It would be an easy Bulls win, 116–95, as Jordan had 33 points and 7 steals before the end of the third quarter. It was the kind of game he loved, when nobody who ever played the game was better than he was, the kind of game that would carry him for a few days. He was headed for a 50-point game, at least the high 40s, with easily a few more fan-pleasing cradle dunks, but Jackson took him out early. And as Jordan sat on the bench during the fourth quarter after having played just 27 minutes, less than every starter but Paxson, he finally came to a realization, something he’d considered but never really believed. He turned to Armstrong on the bench: “He’s not going to let me win the scoring title.” The reality was finally sinking in.
The Bulls moved on to Portland, where the perpetually gloomy November skies wouldn’t begin to clear over the city, and then would start to follow the Bulls. They were unable to pierce either the curtain of rain draped over the city or the storming Trail Blazers. The Bulls would absorb a 125–112 drubbing that would open some old wounds. Portland had become the team the Bulls should have been, acquiring Buck Williams and Danny Ainge, whom Jordan had tried to persuade management to chase. But they hadn’t, and the Blazers had been to the Finals; no one seemed to care anymore that Portland had passed on Jordan in the 1984 draft. Now the Blazers were walloping the Bulls.
And Horace Grant was ready to wallop Stacey King. Grant was feeling pressure from King, although not because of his playing ability—the second-year power forward had come to training camp grotesquely overweight at almost 280 pounds. But King had been talking among friends about how he should be starting, and Grant believed it was management’s plan to replace him in the starting lineup anyway. Earlier, Grant had been taken out of a game with the starters but not put back in, and when Grant asked why, Jackson said, “I want to run the fat kid’s butt into shape.” But Grant remained unconvinced that was the only reason.
King, meanwhile, also doubted team management. Despite coming to camp thirty pounds overweight and apparently having done little to improve his game after an indifferent rookie season, King felt he deserved to be starting. He was 7 for 19 so far on the West Coast trip, and would go 1 for 5 against Portland.
Grant had heard the rumors about King. His twin, Harvey, had told him when the Bulls drafted King that he wouldn’t play hard and was lazy. And he had been right. Rookies often come in overweight, as Miami’s Glen Rice and San Antonio’s Sean Elliott did in their rookie years, but a year of pounding and disappointment usually persuades them to get into shape by their second seasons. But not King. Yet King was blaming his problems on a lack of playing time, and had told Armstrong he was going to quit the Bulls after the 1990–91 season to play in Europe. Once again, King wasn’t paying attention: He didn’t know that he could not break his NBA contract to play in Europe.
Grant’s friend Pippen had taken to snarling openly at King, letting loose some of Grant’s irritation and some of his own. “How can that piece of shit be making more money than me?” he’d ask.
Like Grant, Paxson believed his time as a starter was coming to an end. His off-season ankle surgery didn’t appear to have worked well and he was worried. He still had pain and soreness in the ankle and he wasn’t moving well. Great contract I’ll be able to command, he thought.
Cartwright, too, was frustrated. “We just don’t seem to have any purpose,” he said. He had come to a decision: He was going to leave Chicago after the season unless the Bulls’ offer substantially topped that of any other team. He would be an unrestricted free agent, meaning he could sign with any team, and he always liked the idea of finishing his career in California. His wife had talked at times of returning there and his family and closest friends were there. He thought about Golden State and playing for Don Nelson, whom he admired and who had tried to get him to turn pro after his junior season when Nelson had a top choice in Milwaukee and promised to take him.
Cartwright had grown tired of Jordan’s approach to the game. He was getting fewer shot opportunities than almost any of the starting centers in the league, despite the fact that Jackson constantly urged players during the games to “get the ball inside.” He liked Jackson’s offensive concept, but couldn’t stand the way Jordan ignored it. So he thought perhaps the right opportunity might come along in the off-season and he’d get a chance at a title somewhere else. He thought the Bulls had the talent to make a run, but wasn’t sure the tension between Jordan and his teammates regarding the offense would allow it.
Jordan rarely stopped griping about the offense. “If I had come up under Phil,” Jordan said to friends, “I’d never have become the player I did. He’d have had me all screwed up and doubting what I could do with that system like these other rookies. And what’s Tex Winter ever won, anyway?”
Jerry Krause almost couldn’t speak when he heard what Jordan had said. Krause viewed Winter as something of a holy man and often promoted him for the Basketball Hall of Fame. Months later, when the Bulls would win the NBA title, Krause would run directly to Winter and yell, “You did it. You did it.”
Winter was a student of the game’s legendary scholars, Sam Barry at USC and Purdue’s Piggy Lambert. This was before the NBA even existed, when college basketball was king of the sport, the era of two-hand set shooters and patterned play. Winter earned great success at Kansas State in the 1950s and national Coach of the Year honors, but did little on the pro level except for a brief stint as head coach of the San Diego/Houston Rockets. Krause had become something of a disciple of Winter’s, treating him as a great basketball guru, and to many around the Bulls it seemed as if Winter had a Svengalilike hold over Krause. The kindly, grandfatherly Winter had befriended Krause some years before and would spend time with him whenever he was in town, lecturing him on the game and his precepts. Krause had sworn a lifetime oath: “Tex Winter will never be unemployed as long as I’m running a team.” Winter was Krause’s first hire when he replaced Rod Thom as Bulls general manager in March 1985.
He is a character, but an endearing one, and a favorite of Jackson’s; the head coach chides him for his idiosyncrasies as one does an eccentric but lovable uncle. He behaves as if he’s still a poor Texas kid, often rushing into the media room before games to eat and shoveling in the food as if someone were about to take it away. He can also be found scouring around an arena for an abandoned newspaper. A friend remembers when Winter was coaching the Houston Rockets in the early 1970s, just after the team moved from San Diego. The Rockets were trying to persuade Jimmy Walker, the tough, streetwise New York playground great, that Houston was a great place to play. “Jimmy, you’re gonna love it here,” said Winter. “They’ve got the best cafeterias in the world.”
Jordan’s game clashed head-on with Winter’s. It was Jordan’s Testarossa, which could only seat one or two, against Winter’s lumbering station wagon, which would accommodate everyone. Jordan liked to hold the ball, survey the defense, and make his move as defenders edged nearer to him. No one had ever seen anyone split defenses the way he did, twisting his way through two or three players and then popping up and Boom! slamming the ball through the basket. But he didn’t always make room for his teammates, and Jackson was trying hard to change that, although he wasn’t getting much help from the players; they were resigned to the fact that Jordan would never change.
A few days before their November 21 game in Phoenix, the players had moved lethargically through the drills, seemingly bored with the offense, which required movement based on who had the ball and where it was.
Suddenly, Winter slammed a ball against the wall and shouted, “It’s not the offense; it’s you guys. You’re not working hard or playing hard. You’re not trying to get it to work.”
The players just sort of shrugged. They knew that their going with the system wouldn’t matter much if Jordan didn’t.
And he wasn’t. He scored 34 points but attempted a whopping 32 shots as the Bulls lost at the buzzer on Thanksgiving Eve in Phoenix. Everyone saw turkeys, and not on the dinner table.
Being a member of the Chicago Bulls meant many things: fame, usually; fortune, mostly; and never having to carve a Thanksgiving turkey. The NBA schedule is one of the most virulent in sports with its back-to-back games in different cities, its stretches of four games in five nights in four different places. Thoreau once mused that it wasn’t worth going around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Traveling the United States to try the room service wasn’t much better, yet that was the biggest part of an NBA player’s life. In many ways, it was a dull routine. Other than the travel, which had improved dramatically with the charter flights, days on the road went like this: practice from 11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., lunch, and then a nap—most NBA players had long worked naps into their routines as a means of being close to their best for their serious work, which came from 7:30 P.M. to 9:30 P.M. Many lifted weights in the afternoon to stay in condition, and the Bulls usually had one of their strength coaches, Al Vermeil or Erik Helland, on their road trips.
The Bulls were in Phoenix almost three full days before playing that Thanksgiving Eve game. That rare situation was because the Stadium was always leased to the circus the last part of November, so the NBA sent the Bulls on a long Western Conference road trip at that time. It’s why the players were never home for Thanksgiving. For a few years, the team met for a meal together, but that custom was discontinued in 1988; the players preferred not to eat together anymore. Grateful Pilgrims they were not. The Bulls had become a disparate group. Jordan rarely socialized with any of the players, although it was hard for him to go out in any case because of his celebrity. He liked to have friends in for long card games or to sneak out to a golf course. In some cities, like Oakland, where he had friends like Higgins, he could try out a nightclub they’d know. Jordan just didn’t socialize much with his teammates, and he even skipped mandatory events like the team’s preseason promotional bowling night or the Christmas party, preferring to pay a fine instead. Grant and Pippen were close, but Grant had become a TV junkie and liked to stay in his room these days. When many of the players went out to celebrate later in the season after the win over the Pistons in the playoffs, Grant went home to watch the game again with his father-in-law. He always went straight to his room after games to watch the half-hour national sportscast, and he might have dinner with Pippen. Paxson was a loner, though he had friends from his NBA days and Notre Dame connections in many cities. Cartwright, too, was a loner. He enjoyed movies and would go out to one when he’d exhausted those in his room. He also had to bathe his knees in ice, which he did several hours each day. In Phoenix, he went to a movie each night and then a quiet dinner. Hodges often would try to find a mosque to visit and he, too, went to the movies, but he and Cartwright, though friendly, could rarely agree on films to see and usually went separately. Armstrong and Hopson had become friendly and started to spend time together, and occasionally might join King. Williams tended to stay by himself and walk the malls; it was a favorite pastime of many of the players, and the team always tried to arrange for hotels within walking distance of shopping. Perdue and Helland had become close and they’d often take off somewhere for dinner after a workout, while Levingston, who liked the company of groups of people, drifted in and out of Jordan’s circle, having developed contacts throughout the league.
Those few days in Phoenix were warm, so several of the players hung around the pool, which is a favorite location for Jackson and the coaches. They’d usually meet in the mornings, then run practice, watch films afterward, and then break up for dinner and perhaps a movie. It was a relaxing if unexciting few days, unusual only for the length of time the team went without playing a game. It wasn’t what one might consider a holiday with first-class travel, but it wasn’t with kids, either.
The only thing that could have improved things was a win; the Bulls lost to the Suns by 109–107 when Kevin Johnson scooted around like a water bug and hit a running shot at the buzzer. Jackson still thought it was a good game for the team, a close loss against a championship-quality team on the road. But Krause was apoplectic afterward outside the team locker room, complaining about an illegal-defense call. He was flapping his arms like a drowning man and convulsing with anger. He was raging at reporters to question the referees about the call and demanding that the assistant coach get league operations director Rod Thom on the phone.
“Jerry,” said Suns president Jerry Colangelo, “relax, you’re going to have a heart attack.”
Colangelo wasn’t joking, as Krause’s face had turned completely red.
“Hey, you didn’t have a game stolen from you like we just had,” Krause screamed at him. “Out of my way.”
It would be the third time already, this season that Krause had called the league to complain about an official’s call.
Expectations were taking a heavy toll.
Jackson tried to lighten the mood as the Bulls flew into Los Angeles to play the Clippers. “If we don’t win a road game,” he warned, “Mr. Reinsdorf is going to take away our plane.” While his tone may have been light, he could not have hit upon a more important improvement in the Bulls’ life on the road than the team’s charter aircraft.
Jackson himself had called the plane “our flying limousine.” It was specially equipped with captain’s chairs for lounging and sleeper compartments. It made for more rested players, especially on quick trips in which they would have had to catch the first flight out of town to get to a game the next night.
The presence of the plane was one of the more puzzling contradictions of a Bulls management that seemed so determined to nickel-and-dime players in other ways. While management was doubling or tripling travel costs to ensure the players’ comfort, it was direct-depositing some paychecks a week or more after payday. On matters of money owed, like retroactive per diem money, the Bulls were one of the slowest teams in the league to make payments. These practices irritated the players, and there seemed to be little reason for them.
There would be more than a game going on in Los Angeles. There were rumors flying that the Clippers were going to make a deal for Isiah Thomas. The rumors turned out to be false, but one thing was true: The Clippers’ owner, Don Sterling, desperately sought a headline star to compete with the crosstown Lakers’ Magic Johnson. One he’d tried to acquire was wearing Bulls jersey number 23.
Sterling had called Reinsdorf during the 1987–88 season. The Bulls were about to be eliminated by the Pistons four games to one after losing nine of ten playoff games the previous three seasons with Jordan. It was already a popular theory that the Bulls would never win a title because Jordan’s style of one-on-one play eliminated the other players as contributors. But the fans loved it, and to Reinsdorf, that meant money. Reinsdorf believed he could never trade Jordan: As unpopular as he already was because of his threats to move the White Sox out of Chicago, he knew such a trade would force him right out of town. Still, there was the looming prospect of moving the White Sox to Florida, so maybe he’d have to move anyway. Collins had always told him the Bulls couldn’t win with Jordan, and Reinsdorf had always told friends he knew only two things about basketball: “You win with defense and team play.” He could have one, he knew, but perhaps not the other as long as Jordan dominated the scoring.
Sterling offered any combination of five players or draft choices. The Clippers didn’t have many players the Bulls desired, but they had two of the first six picks in the upcoming draft, and Krause loved 7-4 Rik Smits, a top prospect that year. And with another high pick, the Bulls could select Kansas State guard Mitch Richmond, whom Jordan later would compare favorably with himself. That would give the Bulls Smits and Oakley, Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, and still allow them to select a point guard, perhaps De Paul’s Rod Strickland, or trade for a point guard now that they had depth and draft choices. Krause had always wanted Kevin Johnson, and he thought he might get Johnson (then with Cleveland) for Oakley or Grant, leaving the Bulls a starting five of Johnson, Richmond, Pippen, Grant or Oakley, and Smits.
The Bulls thought about it long and hard; they were almost sure the deal could get them to a title faster than staying with Jordan. But in the end, Reinsdorf held firm: Michael Jordan was untradable. Period.
The Bulls beat the Clippers easily with perhaps their best effort of the season. Paxson hit for 26 and Pippen scored a triple double. Six players were in double figures, including Jordan with 14 points on 12 shots. Jackson was feeling pretty good. Perhaps it was finally working. Perhaps Jordan was going to go along. Several players said it was the best game the team had played in years.
But the next night, before the Bulls played the Denver Nuggets in the final game of the trip, Jackson noted something unusual. Jordan was on the floor long before the game, shooting. Jordan never engaged in pregame shooting drills. He liked to relax before the game, sorting out tickets for friends, chatting with out-of-town reporters. But since the other players were required to shoot before games, the Bulls offered a flimsy excuse, saying that the crowds around Jordan would be too disruptive. That didn’t fool the other players, for they knew fans weren’t even allowed in the arena during pregame shooting drills. And it wasn’t long before Pippen, whom assistant coach Winter called “the imitator,” had taken to skipping pregame shooting drills too.
But because he didn’t shoot before the games, Jordan never felt comfortable shooting when games opened, so he usually surveyed the defense, examining where the double-team was coming from and how the overall defense was reacting, and passed the ball at the start, which is what Jackson wanted anyhow.
As he watched Jordan warming up on the court, Jackson thought about the predictions that Jordan would perhaps score 100 points against the Nuggets’ new style, which employed little defense and was creating talk of 200-point games. Jordan knew Jackson would never allow it to happen; Jackson was almost insulted by the thought. “That’s not basketball,” he’d say.
Jordan had 18 by halftime on the way to 38 points, and the Bulls won, 151–145.
But when the team returned home, Jackson noticed that Jordan had continued his pregame shooting routine. Suddenly he was taking shots early in the game as never before, scoring 15 in the first quarter of an easy win over the Bullets, then 20 in the first quarter in another easy win over the Pacers to end November. Jordan would score 13 in the first quarter the next night in Cleveland, then 15 and 16 in the first quarter the next week in games against the Knicks and Trail Blazers. Jordan was averaging more points in the first quarter than anyone else on the team was averaging the entire game. Jackson thought he’d come up with the rules the team needed to go all the way; Jordan was rewriting the rules.
His rebellion was becoming clear to his teammates and coaches. Jordan realized he wasn’t going to get as many minutes as before, and in the current offense he was not going to get as many opportunities. He was desperately unhappy, and completely at odds with the rest of the team. Several players felt Jordan cared only about winning the scoring title, while Jordan believed he was uniquely responsible for the team’s success: If he didn’t do it, who would? It remained the Bulls’ classic chicken-and-egg problem.
“I can’t go out and win games at the end if I’m not in the flow,” Jordan had told assistant coach Bach in explaining his opening offensive assaults. “I can’t just take twelve shots a game and then hit the winning shot.”
Bach, usually a loyal soldier to Jackson, had somehow come between the coach and the player, encouraging Jordan to be aggressive with his shots early in games, which was contrary to Jackson’s game plan. This was fine with Jordan, who called Bach his personal coach. “When I’m having trouble, I go to coach Bach and ask him if he has any suggestions,” Jordan once said.
Jordan, meanwhile, told reporters it was a new team strategy to come out more aggressively, although he did belie his motives in accompanying statements.
“I always could count on playing forty minutes before, but I can’t anymore,” he explained. “So in the past I could start out slow and then come on strong, but now I’m not out there as much. I found my minutes and opportunities going down, so I decided I needed to get more production out of the minutes I was playing.”
Jackson had long studied philosophy and he knew you get the chicken by hatching the egg, not smashing it. So when he was asked about Jordan’s theory, Jackson offered a narrow smile. “I find as I get older I become more patient,” he said.