4/2 v. Orlando; 4/4 at New York; 4/5 v. San Antonio; 4/7 v. Philadelphia; 4/9 v. New York; 4/10 at Indiana; 4/12 at Detroit; 4/15 v. Milwaukee; 4/17 at Miami; 4/19 at Charlotte; 4/21 v. Detroit
WERE THOSE APRIL SHOWERS OR A MAN CRYING OUT FOR discipline?
That’s what Phil Jackson was wondering about Stacey King.
Monday’s workout on April Fool’s Day had been light. The team had a mandatory semiannual league meeting on the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and Jackson had scheduled a workout for only the seven reserves, most of whom had played little or not at all the day before against Boston.
“I’m out of here,” King muttered during the meeting. “I’m not dressing. I’m leaving.”
“Sure, sure, Stacey,” taunted Pippen. “You better be getting taped.”
“I’m leaving, you watch and see,” said King. He looked hard at Pippen. “I’m not staying.”
After the session, true to his word, King walked out of practice. Failure had indeed gone to his head.
Jackson called King at home. His answering machine was on, and later even that would be disconnected. Jackson called King’s girlfriend; she claimed she didn’t know where he was.
“It’s a soldier gone AWOL,” Jackson told reporters.
It seemed to the Bulls staff that the last chance to save King was now gone. The team had tried to move him before the February 21 trading deadline, but Krause had held out for the value of a No. 6 pick in the draft, more than King was worth now. After the season, the Warriors again would try to get King, offering forward Tyrone Hill, their No. 11 pick in 1990, but the Bulls were uncertain about whether they could sign free agent Cartwright, so they decided to keep King, who also could play some center. They felt his upside remained substantial, even if his backside did, too. The players would taunt King about staying under the “calorie cap.” “Calorie cap problems,” someone would invariably say to him during practice.
As his game continued to slide, King became desperate; he finally concluded the problem had to be Al Vermeil, the Bulls’ trainer. King announced that he needed a private trainer, someone who would give him more weight-lifting work and less of the power jumping Vermeil preached.
The Bulls weren’t so sure, but they did bring in a dietitian for King: If he was going to eat, they decided, he should eat right. King sat with the dietitian for almost two hours, taking notes and listening to a lecture on nutrition. He said he would follow the program.
After the lesson, King went to get a rubdown. During the rundown, he ate two bags of Doritos.
But he was trying to retain his sense of humor, even if no one was laughing along.
“I set a screen roll, and these guys,” said King at practice, loudly mocking Jordan and Pippen, “they’re out there dancing around and waving you off.” King went into a maniacal mambo, flailing his feet and arms. “They’re dancing around like this and not even looking at you.” But then he would turn somber. “This is not the place for me,” he’d say, “although I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out—the line at Jerry Krause’s door to get traded after this season is going to be so long.”
If anything was going to put King at the front of that line, it was his walkout. Jackson called Krause, who had just returned from seeing Kukoc. Krause told Jackson to fine King $250 for missing practice and suspend him from the Orlando game on Tuesday, which meant docking his salary about $12,000.
King ducked reporters all day, but he did show up that night at the local TV station where he did a weekly show. He had walked out, he suggested, because Jackson had publicly criticized him with the “King wasn’t into it” comment after the Celtics game. Jackson was a hypocrite, King said, because he had told the players not to take their complaints to the media, and here he was doing it himself and embarrassing a player. The coach didn’t have the guts to face him, King said.
Jackson didn’t hear the comments. Later he said that if he had, the suspension would have been for more than one game.
The next day things would get worse.
King came to practice, but only to meet with Jackson, since he wasn’t going to play. The meeting quickly turned ugly. “Look,” King demanded, “I don’t give a shit if you play me or don’t play me. Just get off my fucking back.”
It takes quite a bit to make Jackson angry. This was quite a bit. Jackson’s jaw muscles tightened, and then he erupted, like a long-dormant volcano.
“I’ve had to sit in this room and watch tapes of seventy games,” he blasted, “and for seventy games I’ve had to watch your fat ass make mistake after mistake and screw up just about everything we’ve tried to do. And I’m sick of it.”
King started cursing Jackson and, as Jackson would say later, “the epithets were flying pretty good after that.” King got up and left, cursing Jackson more as he stormed out.
Everyone who didn’t hear the outburst heard about it fast. Jordan said if it were up to him he would just suspend King for the year, but he wasn’t about to get involved. “Then everyone will go running around saying, ‘Michael Jordan got him traded.’ I’d just sit his ass. He’s of no use to us anyway, and you don’t treat a coach like that no matter what your problem is. I always told them the guy was a problem. But they never want to listen to anything I’ve got to say.”
Paxson shook his head. King’s outburst was the talk of the team.
“We’ve got so many guys on this team going in different directions,” he acknowledged. “That’s the kind of thing that kills you.”
If anything good came out of the King controversy, it was that it was overshadowing a new chapter in the Pippen controversy. There had been a story by Lacy Banks in the Chicago Sun-Times that day saying that Pippen was annoyed that Reinsdorf and Krause had gone to Yugoslavia to woo Kukoc, while Pippen still didn’t have a new contract. The story quoted Pippen as saying he didn’t see why he should play hard the rest of the season if the team was going to treat him that way.
Meanwhile, a process server wandered through the Multiplex to serve Levingston with papers about some credit-card debt.
As Jackson tried to cool down, team photographer Bill Smith stood by anxiously. It was time to take the 1990–91 Chicago Bulls team picture, a task that had been planned for several months and rescheduled several times. This was the final time it could be done.
“Everyone smile,” said Smith.
Reinsdorf sat in the White Sox offices in Sarasota, Florida, feeling pretty good. His baseball team was finally getting some respect. Just a year earlier, most free agents—even bad ones—wouldn’t even consider signing with the team; Reinsdorf couldn’t even overpay for one. Now the team had surprised baseball in 1990 with a second-place finish behind Oakland, the new Comiskey Park was about to open, and season-ticket sales were at an all-time high.
And the team was about to announce it had agreed to terms with Bo Jackson. Jerry Reinsdorf now employed the two most popular athletes in the United States—Jackson and Jordan. What more could an owner ask for?
Then his secretary came in and handed him the newspaper article about Pippen.
Reinsdorf was shocked. Had Pippen gone nuts?
“We’re going to stop giving physicals to these guys,” he thought to himself. “From now on we’re only going to have psychological testing.”
What had happened? he wondered incredulously. The day before he left for Yugoslavia to see Kukoc, he had talked to Pippen and Kyle Rote, Jr., in a three-way conversation. They had essentially agreed upon a new deal for Pippen, a contract extension of five years for almost $18 million. Everyone agreed it was fair, and Reinsdorf even admitted it was his fault the deal hadn’t been negotiated sooner; he had stalled because of the Kukoc situation.
He wanted to make one more strong pitch for Kukoc. If the Bulls could sign him, they’d need the approximately $1.8 million they had left under the salary cap this year; if they couldn’t, part of that would go to Pippen. In either case, Pippen would get the full amount of his extension. But Reinsdorf needed time. So he told Pippen, “I’ll guarantee your deal myself. Even if you get hurt now, we’ll be obligated to pay you. No matter what happens to you, consider that deal done.
“Do you understand, Scottie?” Reinsdorf had repeated. “Is that okay with you? We’ll get this done, probably after the season is over, but you can consider the deal done. Okay?”
Pippen had agreed.
So Reinsdorf took the nineteen-hour trip to Split, Yugoslavia. For months, the consistent report was that Kukoc was about to sign with Benetton, the Italian-league team, for upwards of $4 million per season. The Bulls wouldn’t match that, having offered Kukoc a $15.3 million, six-year package. But every time Reinsdorf asked, Kukoc’s representatives said there was no deal. Was he being suckered? Reports circulated in Europe that the Bulls could not sign Kukoc because of Pippen’s contract status. Finally, Reinsdorf had decided to see Kukoc and his family himself.
Krause had also made the trip to talk with Kukoc about basketball, how he’d be featured in the Bulls’ offense and how it worked. Reinsdorf sat for two days with Kukoc’s worried parents. They knew nothing of the United States but what they’d read in controlled press reports, and Reinsdorf sought to assure them that there was a substantial Yugoslavian community in Chicago with access to the Belgrade newspapers. He told them about his four children, ages twenty-one to twenty-eight, and how he’d treat Toni as one of his own.
Only Kukoc’s girlfriend seemed to be a problem. She didn’t want to go to the United States and was openly hostile toward Reinsdorf. Still, he was feeling better about the Bulls’ chances of getting Kukoc, and he was back in Sarasota three days later. He believed he had done what he could and now it was up to Kukoc to decide. Both Reinsdorf and Krause saw the Yugoslav as the final piece in the Bulls’ championship puzzle; Reinsdorf was also looking at him as the player who could fill Jordan’s shoes—and any empty seats—after Jordan retired.
The reports of Reinsdorf’s trip were all over the newspapers when the Bulls returned to practice Monday after the Boston game. Pippen hadn’t thought much about it until several teammates began taunting him about how much more the team wanted Kukoc than him. And Krause, ever the fingernails on the blackboard, hadn’t helped. The week before, he had told Pippen he wouldn’t even have been a Bull if Krause hadn’t traded up in the draft to get him; Pippen owed everything to him, he said.
And if Pippen had been anxious, he was downright panic-stricken when he now heard that Charles Barkley had hurt a knee; all he could think about was what could happen if he was injured, spoken guarantee or not. Krause and Reinsdorf had shown Cliff Levingston last summer what their assurances were worth, he felt. Pippen called Rote, nearly hysterical. “I want to sign a contract, now. I’ve got to sign something now,” Pippen repeated over and over. Rote understood. He knew that Pippen remained deathly afraid of dying young, as his father had just a year ago, or being crippled like his brother. He played with a constant fear of a crippling injury.
Still, even Rote was astounded by Pippen’s public threat to play at less than his best, as was the furious Reinsdorf, who wasted no time in calling the agent.
“You get this straightened out or we’re through,” Reinsdorf said. “Scottie Pippen has a contract with this organization and he has every legal and moral right to live up to it. We’ve been fair, but we’re not going to be made fools of. I don’t feel the least bit sorry for Scottie Pippen.”
Rote called Pippen and told him there had better be some statements in the newspaper the next day saying that there had been a misunderstanding, that he would always play hard no matter what. It would also be nice, said the agent, if he said he wanted to stay with the Bulls. Pippen agreed.
Krause also had something to say.
“You ain’t going anywhere, Scottie,” he told Pippen as the team got ready to play Orlando on April 2. “We got you and this is where you’re staying. No matter what you do and no matter what you say. So get used to it.”
While the Pippen story would quiet down, the King blowup had everyone talking, analyzing, and deciding how the Bulls should handle the situation. John Bach and his old friend Frank Layden had gone to lunch at Ditka’s restaurant in Chicago one afternoon, shortly after King’s walkout, where they ran into the Bears coach himself. He pulled Bach aside.
“This thing with King really bothers me,” Ditka said, stopping by their table. “Now, here’s a guy who forgot about the team. Sometimes, you have to make that clear. What I would have done is ripped his locker out of the wall and thrown it out in the street and said, ‘There. That’s where you can go.’ Who the hell does that kid think he is?”
The strain of seventeen games in March was beginning to show on the Bulls in April; they seemed to have lost a step. Their shooting eyes were still holding up, but they weren’t executing the harassing defense that so frustrated opponents; teams were getting to the basket more easily. The Orlando Magic shot 55 percent in the April 2 game and even pulled ahead by 3 points with three minutes left. But the Bulls turned up the defense for a few minutes and made the Magic disappear; Orlando went five straight possessions without scoring while Jordan and Grant combined for 6 free throws in the last forty seconds for the 106–102 Bulls’ win.
But Grant would get just 5 shots while even the coaches were screaming for somebody to get him the ball. Worse, Grant had 12 points on those 5 shots, underscoring the Magic’s inability to cover him. “First, I’ve got [6-6, 210-pound] Nick Anderson on me in the post and then [6-8, 195-pound] Jerry Reynolds, and I can’t get the ball. It’s ridiculous,” said Grant, noting that Jordan attempted 26 shots and scored 44 points.
Also unhappy was Armstrong, whom Jackson had pulled with just a few minutes left in the game. The coach was keeping both point guards on a short chain and neither was too happy about it, although Paxson would show his displeasure less. Make a turnover, B.J., and you’re out. Miss a shot, John, and you’re out. Both would invariably come muttering back to the bench.
For Armstrong, it would carry over to practice the next day as the team prepared to go to New York. Jackson watched him for a while, and then finally shouted at him to sit down. “You’re not into it,” he yelled. Later, Jackson made it clear: “Michael is taking the shots,” he said.
Armstrong knew what he had to do. “When I get it,” he told Grant, “I’m shooting it. Jordan doesn’t get it from me.”
“Me, too,” said Grant. “Watch me against New York. I’ll shoot it every time I get it.”
It was a little game the two played. They knew it wouldn’t happen. Like Paxson, who made the threat before almost every game, they were too programmed to pass off. They’d feel too guilty about being that selfish.
When the team pulled into New York Wednesday night, April 3, NBC was waiting. The Bulls would be on national TV Sunday against Philadelphia and the network wanted some interviews. Jackson, Pippen, and Grant showed up to meet with former Lakers coach turned broadcaster Pat Riley, but Jordan refused. He had substantially cut down on his media appearances in the 1990–91 season. The demands on his time were intolerable; he was convinced that he was merely being used by others, and he resented it. Instead, he went to his room to meet up with comedians Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray.
Grant had been carrying a touch of the flu and had tried to get out of the pregame shootaround Thursday, but Jackson told trainer Schaefer to make sure Grant was there. Grant fumed.
“When Michael’s sick, he just calls off practice,” he told Schaefer.
The Bulls all looked sick against the Knicks, who were without Charles Oakley and Gerald Wilkins. If they had heard the line about New York leading the nation in people around whom you shouldn’t make sudden moves, the Bulls had paid close attention. They were in slow motion.
Blitzed by Mark Jackson and Brian Quinnett, they fell behind by 24 late in the first half and would trail by 18 at the end of the second quarter. Phil Jackson kept the coaches out of the Bulls’ locker room at halftime.
“Let them sit and think about it,” he said. “Let them look at the guys responsible.”
Jordan was pretty sure he knew who was responsible: Jackson and the triangle offense. He had 9 points on 4-of-12 shooting, and he was enraged. “No more triangle,” he promised himself.
In the second half, Jordan came out on the attack and Jackson cooperated; he went into the new open offense the team had been working on to isolate Jordan on top of the floor, and within ten minutes the Bulls had tied the game as the Knicks collapsed like the city’s economy. They committed 9 turnovers in the third quarter and were outscored 30–12. It was an impressive display of Bulls strength. The Knicks held on to a tie after three, but the result was as inevitable as death, taxes, and bobbing corpses in the East River: The Bulls won by 10. They still could turn it on, but they knew it was getting hard to keep it on.
“We knew we could be tired by this point,” Jackson said.
The main topic of conversation after the game was Patrick Ewing. He had seemed content to take fallaway jumpers along the baseline, even against Will Perdue, who could have done little to stop Ewing if he’d tried to drive. And Ewing certainly would have gotten the foul call against the young Bulls backup center if he had.
Knicks insiders believed that Ewing, frustrated over the constant swirl of controversy in New York, the collapse of the team, and some failed renegotiations of his own, had pretty much quit for the season, or at least until the playoffs. Thinking about it after the game, John Bach just shook his head. The Bulls had turmoil, too, he knew, but the players always competed hard. It was a tribute to both them and Jackson, he thought.
In the twenty-five-year history of the Bulls, there had been just one division title. It came in the 1974–75 season, in what would signal the end of the great Dick Motta defensive club of those early 1970s. The Bulls were then in the Western Conference, and they had never been able to get past Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Milwaukee Bucks teams in their division—and if the Bucks didn’t take care of them, the Lakers and Wilt Chamberlain did. But Abdul-Jabbar broke his hand in the exhibition season in 1974; Milwaukee would collapse and finish last in the division, and Chamberlain had left the Lakers. The Bulls’ 47–35 record wasn’t their best ever—they’d won fifty-seven games in 1971–72—but they had the second-best record in the conference, one game behind Golden State. It would be thirteen years and nine coaches before the Bulls would win as many games again.
Jackson admired Motta’s Bulls for their team play as much as he disliked the Bucks and their one-man approach to the game. “It seems that [Bucks coach Larry] Costello consistently overcoaches his teams,” Jackson wrote in his 1975 book, Maverick. “Knowing that only Kareem will take the important shot, no matter what number may be called, allows a defense to do a lot of double-teaming and forcing. This can make the Bucks have to go somewhere else for their offense and that disrupts their flow … The fact is that Milwaukee’s predictability makes them lose too many close games. I personally don’t particularly like the kind of games the Bucks play. There’s just a limited number of things the other four players can be doing when Kareem has the ball. Milwaukee can certainly come out and kill you on any given night, but they really can’t function as a team, and a smart club can take advantage of this. I don’t believe that basketball can be anything but a team game.”
At the same time, Jackson revered those Bulls for their defense—they still hold the all-time league record for most games in a season in which opponents scored under 100 points. They controlled the court by forcing opponents to alter their offense, a technique Jackson would later adopt for his own Bulls; it would become their most successful tactic.
Describing Motta’s team, Jackson wrote, “Chicago stops the ball from moving by taking away the passing lanes. They literally isolate the man with the ball and force a team into playing baseline basketball … Norm Van Lier, for example, can pick off a laterally thrown pass just by outrunning the ball. Playing against the Bulls makes a team slow down and make sure of their passes. It’s like playing against an octopus.”
Fifteen years later these words would describe his own team.
If Motta inspired Jackson, he also inspired future NBA coaches Jerry Sloan, Rick Adelman, and Matt Guokas, all of whom played on that 1974–75 team, and Bob Weiss, who was traded by the Bulls before the season. Motta’s 1974–75 division winner lost in the conference finals to eventual champion Golden State, although the Warriors actually trailed the Bulls three games to two at one point. Motta later blamed holdouts Bob Love and Norm Van Lier; he demanded that they not get full playoff shares and created a near mutiny among the players.
When the Bulls won only twenty-four games the following season with their aging cast, Motta left Chicago to coach the Bullets, who had lost to the Warriors in the championship series the previous year. It wasn’t until Jordan arrived in 1984 that the Bulls began to regain any credibility. The Chicago Bulls had come a long way in twenty-five years, from 1966–67, when coach Johnny “Red” Kerr had to call the newspapers after games to report the score and spell the players’ names, to 1990–91, when every kid in America could spell Jordan.
(And how well Jordan knew it. One day, a reporter was baby-sitting his one-year-old son. Jordan, who gravitated toward kids, kept trying to get a response, but the boy ignored Jordan and fiddled with his father’s mini-tape recorder. The reporter joked, “Guess he’s not impressed with the superstar.”
“Give him six months,” Jordan shot back.)
The Bulls were moving inexorably toward that second division title. One more win would clinch it, and they were prepared to get it from San Antonio at the Stadium.
But they would have to wait a little longer. The Spurs pushed them all over the court, outrebounding the Bulls 50–29 and taking a 21-point lead late in the third quarter before Jackson switched to a small, quick lineup and began relying on some three-point bombing from Craig Hodges in a fireman’s drill exercise. The oft-forgotten Hodges hit 3 three-pointers in about two minutes, and within ten minutes the Bulls had sliced a 21-point deficit to 1. They appeared to be on the brink of yet another impossible comeback, but San Antonio beat their pressure and went on to win 110–107. Afterward, Spurs coach Larry Brown said the Bulls could be awesome if they could get the entire bench scoring the way Hodges had.
Dennis Hopson only wished he could get the chance. For the third time in the last four games, he didn’t make it into the game, and he wasn’t happy about it. When the Bulls traded with the Nets for him in June 1990, he was a career 13-point scorer after three NBA seasons. But now he was the eleventh man, ahead of only Scott Williams on the depth chart. And despite his $900,000+-per-season contract, he was actually wishing he were back in New Jersey, which he had hated. Hopson wasn’t playing much, and he’d drawn Jordan’s wrath quickly.
“I know he doesn’t like me, but he never says anything to me,” Hopson was telling a friend one day. “You hear all the things he says behind your back and then he comes up to me the other day and asks if I’d heard from Brad Sellers [Hopson’s teammate at Ohio State], and how was Brad doing. Can you believe it? The guy tries to run him out, and now he wants to know how he’s doing. Like he cares. I just said he was fine.”
Hopson, with his hard, sharp features and tight skin that looked as if it had been stretched over his face and gave him an angry look, had feuded angrily with Nets coach Bill Fitch. “Get off my back,” Hopson had once yelled at Fitch during a game. “If you don’t like the way I play, get me out of here.”
“Dennis,” the usually stormy Fitch said mildly, “I’ll do my best to accommodate you.”
Fitch told Jackson that Hopson merely needed a change of scenery and could blossom with the Bulls. But Hopson chafed at the reduced role; he couldn’t adjust to the idea of coming off the bench. He was the kind of player who needed to get into the flow of a game, and needed more than four- or five-minute intervals to do it. The Bulls were now saying he really was a defensive specialist. Hopson wasn’t buying it.
“When I first came here, they told me I’d be a scorer off the bench,” Hopson recalled about his conversation with Krause after the trade, in which the Bulls gave the Nets their 1990 first-round pick and two future second-round selections. “Defense never came up, which makes it look sometimes like I’m crazy. People look at me and say, ‘Here’s a guy they brought here to score, so what’s the problem? Why isn’t he scoring?’”
So Hopson was actually thinking about being back in New Jersey. “Hey, I averaged nine point six my first year, twelve point seven my second year and then fifteen point eight, and I was learning and getting the shots and the opportunities,” he said. The Nets were a veteran team in the process of disintegrating when he arrived as the No. 3 pick in the 1987 draft, a kid who was supposed to breathe new life into a dying franchise. But Hopson was alone in that role. “I had nobody,” he recalled about that lonely first year. “Here, Horace had Scottie, and Stacey and B.J. were together, but in New Jersey they had guys like Mike Gminski and Buck Williams and Roy Hinson and Mike O’Koren, and I was always alone. And there’s nothing to do in New Jersey.”
Hopson missed home and wanted to play in Cleveland, mostly because he liked Lenny Wilkens’s coaching style and felt the Cavaliers needed a shooting guard. Hopson, a muscular 6-5, 200-pounder who occasionally stunned the Bulls coaches in practice with athletic moves they’d only seen from Jordan and Pippen, told his agent to talk to the Bulls about dealing him to the Cavaliers after the 1990–91 season; he’d already made some inquiries on his own and had found the Cavaliers to be receptive.
Hopson had once looked forward to coming to the Bulls, although he’d been warned that Chicago was a tough place to play. His best friend in college was Sellers, the former Bull who had gone to Greece to play in 1990–91. Sellers told Hopson what it was like to play with Jordan, but Hopson thought it was just a bad match since the fans and Jordan had wanted Johnny Dawkins and Sellers had never had a chance. But then he talked to another friend, Seattle’s Sedale Threatt.
“I feel sorry for you,” Threatt told him. “There’s a reason there have been so many guards through there. You’re not going to get the ball. You play with Jordan, you watch. Sometimes you play more than other times, but mostly you watch.”
Hopson insisted he’d been assured otherwise. The Bulls were looking for him to play twenty to twenty-five minutes and score in double figures off the bench. They’d told him that Paxson, Hodges, and Armstrong were all inadequate because they were small, that teams like the Pistons took advantage of them, and that the Bulls needed a big guard to play with Jordan. He’d get eight to ten minutes behind Jordan and at least another ten beside him and perhaps even more at small forward.
“No way,” his friend Ron Harper, the big guard now with the Clippers, told him. “You’re not going to get any minutes there. Just look how they play. Where are the minutes going to come from? Man, it’s going to be bad for you.”
The same words had come from another Ohio friend and former Bull, Charles Oakley. Oakley said he liked Jordan, but forget it, man, you weren’t going to get to score.
Hopson was starting to get worried, and by training camp he was in a near panic. He and Armstrong had become close friends, and Armstrong told him right away: “You’re going to wish you were back in New Jersey. You’re going to look back and think it was better.”
“No way,” said Hopson. “You’re crazy. You know what it’s like there? People booing you, the few that do come to games. Losing every time. No, I just want to get a chance to win some games again.”
After the Bulls won their NBA title, he was asked jokingly whether he’d rather be in New Jersey. He answered “Yes” without hesitation. And he wasn’t joking.
Despite the loss to San Antonio, the Bulls found themselves division champions when the Pistons lost to New York on Saturday night. There wasn’t much celebrating; Pippen didn’t even know. “I wondered why we had these division-championship T-shirts in the locker room,” he would say later. Jordan hadn’t celebrated, either; he had a 7:00 A.M. tee time. After all, game time Sunday against Philadelphia was 2:30 P.M., and that gave him plenty of time for a round of golf. His golfing mania had become nearly insatiable and he was now playing often during the season.
Jordan had even found a way to use his golf as a psychological ploy against the 76ers. Jordan made a point of telling Sixers assistant coach Fred Carter about his game, knowing Carter would try to use it to motivate Hersey Hawkins, who’d be playing Jordan. The Sixers, Jordan hoped, would be driven to distraction by the notion that he was so confident about playing them that he actually spent the morning on the golf course. A few days later, Barkley would complain about Jordan’s early-morning golf game on his Philadelphia radio show, saying the Bulls hadn’t taken the 76ers seriously. “If I had done that,” observed bad boy Barkley, “I’d have been killed.”
Despite the golf flap, which left Jordan’s teammates predictably annoyed, Jordan managed to score 41 and steal 4. If Jordan had indeed intended to distract Hawkins, he succeeded: Hawkins shot just 3 of 10 in the first half for 6 points. But the 76ers were proving stubborn, even though Barkley wasn’t playing because of a knee injury; he had come to Chicago to watch the nationally televised game, however, and he was clearly enjoying himself.
“Hey, Stacey,” he yelled at King, who was being booed by the fans during a rare game appearance, “what time’s practice tomorrow?
“These guys ain’t winnin’ no title. They’re too soft,” he’d shout occasionally, and when lead referee Jess Kersey would call a foul, Barkley would continue, “Don’t help these guys out, Jess. They’re soft.”
Of course, there was some truth to Barkley’s assertion; many around the league still questioned how long the Bulls could last in the playoffs with guys like Grant and Cartwright as their power players. And the 76ers were whacking the Bulls around on the boards in this game, just as San Antonio had done a few days earlier. The Bulls’ weaknesses were beginning to show. They could be pushed around, as Detroit knew, and sometimes you could get them out of their game that way. Rick Mahorn was doing just that, as he went on to grab 14 rebounds, and even Armon Gilliam, who was being called “Charmin” Gilliam by his teammates because he was so soft, was muscling inside for offensive rebounds.
There was plenty of theater in the game: Pippen dunked over 7-7 center Manute Bol, sending the 76ers’ bench into convulsions of laughter, and Bol entertained them further by dribbling between his legs after a rebound. But the game got serious down the stretch, and the 76ers would force it into overtime. The street-clothed Barkley grabbed Hawkins in the huddle and shouted at him as the overtime period was about to begin, “If you want to be an All-Star [which Hawkins was that season for the first time], now’s the time you’ve got to take over.” And he did, scoring 6 straight 76ers points, including 2 baskets on brilliant drives against Jordan. The 76ers refused to surrender the lead, and won 114–111 when Armstrong came up short on a last-second jumper.
John Paxson watched from the bench, shaking his head. Armstrong had played the last twenty minutes of the game, almost the entire second half. He seemed tired and, predictably, his shots were short at the end. Jackson told the coaches he was leaving Armstrong in to see how he would finish a game; the Bulls would need Armstrong in the playoffs, and Jackson wanted to see how he fared in a pressure situation. It wasn’t the best strategy, given Armstrong’s obvious weariness, and the coaches also knew it, but they understood: It was another experiment out of Jackson’s behavioral laboratory.
But Paxson didn’t understand. He sat on the bench, examining both the game and his life. He thought about the technical foul he’d drawn against Orlando in the Stadium a few days before, and the disapproving look his four-year-old son had given him for it. Ryan Paxson had become a big basketball fan, watching his dad on TV, turning off the lights to introduce himself when the pregame introductions came on, and playing his own game with a small basket set up in front of the TV during Bulls games. Paxson would use the game as a means of communication and discipline. When Ryan was naughty, John would call a time-out, and Ryan would have to go sit down. And when he’d really get out of control, John would call a technical on him, to teach him a lesson. But, he asked himself, what lesson was the father learning? Paxson, though slower than most guards he faced, was a tough competitor. It was one reason he stayed in the starting lineup. Armstrong was quicker, yet he couldn’t pressure the ball as well as Paxson. “He plays defense better than he’s got any right to,” marveled Bach. Paxson did things out of sheer will, and despite chronically aching knees and ankles he had the fourth-best streak of starts in the league. But his fiery desire could bring with it a nasty temper in games. And his ensuing arguments with referees had gotten him labeled a complainer and probably cost him some calls. Paxson vowed to get more control of himself.
But watching Armstrong play the final twenty minutes of the Philadelphia game began to convince Paxson that his Bulls career was at an end. The team hadn’t talked to him at all about a new contract. Paxson figured Armstrong would start in 1991–92, but he didn’t really mind. “I’m the perfect backup point guard for this team,” he would say. “I can run the offense, I can play with Michael, and I can shoot. I can play both guard positions and I wouldn’t mind being a backup. I just want to get paid.” But there were always doubts about guards after they hit thirty, especially white guards. This game, Paxson believed, only showed that his career in Chicago was over, no matter what the Bulls said.
Caroline Paxson was angry about the team’s treatment of her husband. She’s a delicate blonde, quiet, shy, and loyal to John, who always arranges for a friend to drive her to and from the Stadium for games—he doesn’t want her going alone. Krause told associates that she would screw up her face and eye him angrily whenever she saw him. And Bach, whom she liked, said he hated to look at her these days. She would look at him with pleading eyes, as if to say, “Isn’t there anything you can do?”
As Caroline and John drove home in silence after the 76ers game, John finally made a decision. “Let’s sell the house,” he said.
“I’ll call the realtor tomorrow morning,” Caroline said quickly.
Jackson was experimenting again. Jordan had pretty much abandoned the offense, and was scoring in droves. In the last five games, he’d averaged 29 shots per game and 39 points. Pippen, too, was spending considerable time freelancing, and in the 76ers game the two had scored 51 of the starters’ 55 points in the second half. Armstrong was the only reserve to score in the last two quarters. So Jackson was trying to figure out how to restrain Jordan without his knowledge. He tried putting him in the corner of the triangle offense where it would be hard for him to get the ball, but when that failed, Jackson just took him out of the game, twice after he’d hit a pair of jumpers.
“Hey, don’t take me out after I hit a couple of shots,” Jordan complained. “At least let me miss a few.” He was angry after the April 9 Knicks game in the Stadium, and he was offering unusually curt answers to reporters’ questions. The Bulls had managed to survive the Knicks, 108–106, on a Paxson jumper with twenty-two seconds left (the Armstrong experiment had ended) and a Cartwright steal as the Knicks tried to get the tying basket. It truly was one of those games in which victory went to the team making the next-to-last mistake. It wasn’t a particularly good performance, but the Bulls were overconfident against the Knicks. They’d beaten them in the playoffs in six games in 1989, and had only lost once to them since in the regular season, when Trent Tucker took an inbounds pass and hit a three-point basket, all in one tenth of a second; the league later ruled that the shot should have been waved off for lack of time but refused to change the outcome of the game. That disputed field goal had become the source of immediate controversy. “You can’t shoot the ball in a tenth of a second,” Jackson had complained afterward. The incident reminded Bach of a 76ers-Portland game in which Archie Clark dribbled and dribbled with just a few seconds on the clock and finally put up the game winner. Portland officials tried to find the timekeeper later, only to be told they couldn’t talk to him. “I don’t want to talk to him,” said one Trail Blazers executive. “We just want him to time the rest of our lives.”
Bill Cartwright thought the team was tired, both physically and mentally. It was a long season and most of the team’s goals had already been accomplished; the games just seemed to drone on and the Bulls, Cartwright felt, needed the playoffs to revive them. He was worried, too, about players like King, who was still blaming everyone but himself for his problems. Horace Grant had come in and worked hard to earn his position and respect with the team, but King seemed to expect it to be given to him. Cartwright had also listened to Armstrong complain about his lack of opportunity, as had Perdue and Hopson. And he had grown weary of Levingston, who was often late for practice and complained often and loudly about his lack of playing time. Levingston would sit around telling the other players about the big parties he was throwing and purchases he was making, even though everyone knew about his financial problems.
Cartwright felt some of the veterans on the second unit did little to help the younger players, which accounted somewhat for King’s drift. “The kid’s all screwed up now and we’re going to need him,” Cartwright lamented.
Jackson thought the same thing, and despite King’s felonious behavior, he was receiving an amnesty of sorts. Jackson felt he had to try to get King ready for the playoffs, even if King continued to play poorly. Krause had also warned Jackson that the less King played, the lower his value would be and the harder it would be for the Bulls to trade him after the season.
The Bulls moved into Indianapolis for a game the Pacers were treating like a grudge match, after that wild affair in the Stadium a few weeks earlier. This was a possible first-round playoff matchup, and it was a game the Bulls wanted badly to win, having lost six straight in Market Square Arena. The Pacers, a good three-point-shooting team with Reggie Miller, fell behind quickly, but regained the lead and went ahead 57–51 at halftime as they ran and fired long. It appeared that the Pacers had fiddled with the nets: They were shorter than most, which allowed the ball to come through faster for quick outlet passes and fast breaks. The Bulls had to extend their halfcourt defense to the three-point line, which put pressure on their rebounders. The Pacers had a 27–13 rebounding margin at halftime.
The Bulls needed to slow the game down and get it into a halfcourt pace, which they finally did in the third quarter, showing some versatility that would prove useful at playoff time. The Pacers went cold, shooting jumpers from a set offense and falling behind by 7. Indiana started to charge back in the fourth quarter, but Jordan decided to take over, if not in scoring then on the floor. He told Jackson he wanted to play point guard, so Jackson shifted him to the top of the floor. Jordan said Armstrong was pushing the ball too much, and he wanted him out of the game; Jackson obliged. This was a game for pace and patience, and Armstrong wasn’t adept at either quite yet. Paxson dropped into the corner and Jordan started to work on top of the floor.
The Bulls, trailing by 1 with six minutes left, scored 12 of the next 16 points, taking a 7-point lead with two minutes left, and held on the rest of the way to win 101–96. Jordan had scored under 30 for the second straight game, but his leadership on the floor had been crucial.
It was an encouraging victory for the Bulls, since they were out-rebounded but still managed to win. It would be essential for them to be able to control a game like that, particularly because they lacked a shot blocker. Bach felt it was a breakthrough of sorts. “They seem to be coming together as a team again,” he said. And just in time: The Bulls were heading to Auburn Hills to play Detroit and Isiah Thomas was back in the lineup.
Two nights later, Jackson was smoldering, and it wasn’t from the smoke of his postgame cigarette. “I’ve got a stupid team, a stupid team,” he repeated furiously after the Bulls’ loss, as he looked for a place to finish his cigarette and have a beer after talking with reporters. “I don’t know what they were thinking about,” Jackson raged. The staff had never seen him like this.
The Bulls had shot 51 percent in the first half to trail 50–49 behind 24 points from Jordan. But the team shot only 40 percent in the second half, and 29 percent in the fourth quarter, which they entered tied, to lose 95–91. It had been an important game, Jackson felt, because Isiah Thomas was back from his wrist surgery and the Bulls’ only win in the Palace had been when Thomas was out.
But what upset Jackson the most was this: The Bulls had taken the wrong basket. After pregame shooting drills, the players said they wanted to shoot at the basket in front of the Pistons’ bench in the second half. That was the basket, the coaches believed, that had been “adjusted.” Jordan said the team didn’t want to get a complex about that basket, so they would try it in the second half.
But in the fourth quarter, Jordan would be the only Bull to hit even half of his shots, on the way to finishing with 40 points. It was a typical Pistons win. Thomas was brilliant, zipping a nifty pass to John Salley down the lane in the last seconds for a three-point play and the victory. Thomas finished with 26 points and 16 assists—and the Bulls’ wrath. With five minutes left and the Pistons ahead by 1 point, Paxson was cutting across the court with the ball when he tripped over Thomas’s foot, stumbled, and fell into Joe Dumars’s knee. Paxson was dazed with a mild concussion and had to leave the game, and Armstrong would replace him and miss all 4 of his fourth-quarter shots. Paxson would recover in time for Monday’s game against Milwaukee, but the Bulls knew that Paxson’s fall over Thomas was no accident. Bach liked to call Thomas “Assassin”; he had that angelic smile, but he was known as a vicious player who would try anything to rally his team. Like Bill Laimbeer, he was not popular around the league, but they admittedly were the kind of players you’d pick for your team if you were choosing up sides for a game. The Bulls coaches respected Thomas, but Jordan just thought he was a phony. Thomas had recently blistered his teammates and even coach Chuck Daly about the Pistons’ poor play since his return, and Jordan believed it was just an act. “He loves the stage,” Jordan said. “That’s why he’s back now. He’s all ham.”
Maybe, but he was no turkey. Thomas was bred on the ugly West Side streets of Chicago near the Chicago Stadium and learned that those who attack first survive. That lesson had shaped his game, and now it had led to Paxson’s concussion. Thomas was known to move up close to the opposing guard and step on his foot or kick him on the side of the foot—anything to throw off his rhythm. The Bucks’ point guard, Jay Humphries, had become particularly adept at beating Thomas at this game: Before Thomas could try to kick Humphries’s foot or step on it, Humphries would anticipate the move and, even while he was dribbling, kick Thomas in the shin and knock him back. It would allow the Bucks the sort of penetration few teams could get against the Pistons.
The Bulls were only too aware of Thomas’s guerrilla tactics and had warned their guards, but the tactics were hard to monitor. Armstrong was especially bothered by them, and although Paxson was used to them, he wasn’t strong enough to keep them from hurting his timing. So this time, as Paxson tried to cut across the floor, Thomas simply stuck out his foot and tripped him.
It wasn’t the only Bulls casualty. Pippen had left the game mentally in the first few minutes. He wanted so badly to do well here—too badly, really. On the first play of the game, Pippen was called for a foul against Dumars, and midway through the first quarter he drew his second, a questionable offensive foul. The pair of calls so distracted Pippen that he scored just 2 points in the first half, and spent the rest of the time arguing with the referees and cursing at Jackson. “Give me the fuckin’ ball,” he yelled to the bench after a time-out. “Fuck you,” he screamed later at Jackson when the coach yelled at him to “push the ball” after one rebound. After three quarters, Pippen had only 6 points, although he would finish with 13 after a sharper fourth quarter.
The Bulls were again coming apart against the Pistons. Jordan, seeing his teammates crumbling, took it upon himself to do all the scoring, and refused even to look at Grant or Cartwright on screen rolls. Kent McDill of the Daily Herald counted Jordan missing on nine possible open passes to Cartwright. “Well, at least he was under double figures,” Jackson would joke a few days later. Between them, Grant (who had scored 8 of the Bulls’ first 10 points) and Cartwright would get just 1 shot in the fourth quarter. It had been the last test of the regular season, and the Bulls had failed.
Meanwhile, there was euphoria in the Pistons’ locker room. The Pistons had been squabbling much of the season, but only when they weren’t counting their many injuries. Thomas had missed more than two months with his wrist surgery, Dumars had limped around on a bad toe much of the season, and James Edwards, Mark Aguirre, and John Salley had missed sustained periods with various ailments. A third championship had seemed remote; anti-Thomas and anti-Laimbeer cliques had developed and there were arguments over playing time and shots. But with the victory over the Bulls, there was suddenly a feeling that perhaps they could do it one more time, especially if Chicago was to be the main obstacle in their path.
A few days later, Cartwright sat watching a tape of that Pistons game as the Bulls prepared to end the regular season with a game against the Pistons in Chicago. He watched himself spring loose on screen rolls time after time without a pass. “Hey, Bill, you’re open,” Grant would say from his locker stall next to Cartwright’s. “Phil’s got to say something to him. If we’re going to do anything we’ve got to stop playing Michaelball.”
Cartwright’s tiny head was engulfed in his huge hands, the way it always was when he was perplexed. He rarely grew angry like the younger players. He was just sad.
“He’s the greatest athlete I’ve ever seen,” he said of Jordan. “Maybe the greatest athlete ever to play any sport. He can do whatever he wants. It all comes so easy to him. He’s just not a basketball player.”
The Bulls needed two more wins to clinch the best record in the conference, which would mean home-court advantage throughout the Eastern Conference playoffs and the team’s best chance ever at a trip to the Finals. And with a game against Milwaukee coming up in the Stadium on April 15 followed by a trip south to face expansion Miami and Charlotte—the Bulls had not lost to an expansion team all season—home-court advantage seemed guaranteed. In effect, the Bulls would have a week to rest before that closing game against Detroit, and then the playoffs would follow.
The Bucks proved to be as fragile as a house of cards again. They blew out to a big first-quarter lead, but a collapse in the Stadium was inevitable. It came in the third quarter as Jackson sent his team into its fireman’s drill, a risky ploy because it leaves a smaller player under the basket; earlier in April against Philadelphia it had failed miserably as Grant was overwhelmed by the 76ers’ forwards. But the Bucks were caught by surprise. They committed 7 straight turnovers and fell behind by 10 after three quarters. The Bulls held on to chalk up their fifty-eighth win, 103–94, a new team record.
Despite the victory, Pippen was furious. He had taken just 6 shots, and he was blaming both the triangle offense and Jordan’s reversion to a one-man game. Afterward, he was so incensed he threw his shoes in the garbage. And when he left the locker room that night, he promised Grant, “I’m shootin’ against Miami.”
Jordan had scored 46, but the real hero of the game had once again been the pressure defense.
“Earlier in the season, people asked me if I thought the Bulls were better,” said Brendan Malone, the Pistons’ chief advance scout and astute bench assistant. “I really didn’t think so, but they are. Their defensive intensity has picked up. They’re probably now the best pressing team in the league.”
Of course, Jordan was a major part of that, as was Pippen. But they had the best jobs. Cartwright’s role was to stay back and zone the area under the basket while Jordan and Pippen crept into the passing lanes for steals. This strategy leads to breakaways and crowd-pleasing slams, but they’re often made possible by Paxson, whose job it is to turn the guard to one side so Jordan can jump in and force a bad pass, or Grant can come from behind as he’s racing downcourt, bothering the man with the ball.
“He’s the intrepid one,” said Bach of Grant. “He’s the one who has to meet the ball on the double-team and then sometimes a second time as he goes downcourt, and then he has to find a man to guard and rebound. He’s the one who’s really made our press. We always had the ability to trap a ball handler with two guards, but he’s given us the addition of a big man able to do that. So now you’ve got Pippen at about six-eight and Horace at six-ten and Michael at six-six, and they’re roaring around the court in a triangle of defenders and interceptors, anchored by Paxson in the guard position and Cartwright in the back. And it works by the boldness of Phil in his calls.”
But Jackson’s demands were unnerving the intrepid Grant. He had been brilliant against the Bucks, stealing the ball, forcing mistakes, scoring 19 points (despite just 9 shots) and grabbing 11 rebounds. But when Frank Brickowski flashed by for a lay-up, Jackson was all over Grant. Grant was used to it—he knew he was Jackson’s so-called whipping boy—but he still didn’t like it. He complained to Pippen on the bench that he was going to tell Jackson off next time.
“He’s pushed me up to here,” Grant said, putting a hand on top of his head. “I’m working so hard and he’s yelling at me all the time and Michael throws the ball away and he doesn’t say anything. He’s going to push me too far and then that’s it.”
Pippen had heard this from his buddy before. “Oh, ‘G,’ you always say that,” chided Pippen. B. J. Armstrong came by and patted Grant on the rear end, and Hodges told him to “be cool.”
Bach watched it all with bemusement. He had doubted Jackson’s psychological ploys at first, but eventually realized how well they worked. Jackson had identified Grant early as a player who could take the abuse. Jordan and Pippen might pout, but Grant would remain strong and not let it affect his play. And it also served as a rallying point for the team. Jackson knew that the other players would come to Grant’s aid and defense, and this united them as a group. His goal was to develop an all-for-one attitude on the team, and picking on Grant was one way that worked.
The team arrived in Miami early on April 16, leaving about thirty hours to game time. The first two seasons the team had visited Miami, they had stayed at an airport hotel. But then they found a little hideaway in Coconut Grove that Jackson loved. The Mayfair House was a five-star European-style luxury hotel, and the Bulls had managed to get discounted rates. Directly across from the hotel was a three-story outdoor mall with one corner of the upper level devoted to a restaurant-bar called Hooters, sort of a Playboy Club for fraternity guys. The waitresses weren’t allowed to socialize with the patrons, but they wore skimpy outfits and it was a loud, fun place. For the next two days, it drew every Bull but Cartwright, who went to the movies. It was the closest the players had been since Jordan’s first few seasons in the league, when the players gathered nightly in someone’s room for card games, food fights, and all-night movies. But then Jordan became a star in his own constellation and didn’t spend much time with his teammates anymore.
But this time Jordan was just one of the boys. He hooted at Hooters along with everyone else and even joked with Hopson when Hopson bought a Hooters T-shirt. The players never drank much, just a few beers each, but they were enjoying the balmy weather, the light zephyr off the bay and the coming close of the long regular season. This was as far from Chicago and the NBA season as one could get. “No tickets for the Hooters girls,” Jordan announced loudly after seeing one of the single players offer a waitress a pair of tickets. Under their NBA contract, the players received two tickets to every game and would generally trade them back and forth. “Hey, I need thirteen for tonight,” Jordan bubbled. Everyone laughed as the festivities continued Tuesday night and again at lunchtime Wednesday before the game.
The Bulls clinched the best record in the Eastern Conference with a 111–101 victory over the Heat, but John Paxson wasn’t celebrating. In fact, he was smashing soda cans off the wall in the locker room. He had been ejected from the game in the third quarter during a Heat comeback from a 16-point deficit. Miami would take a 3-point lead, but the Bulls pulled away in the fourth quarter behind a stingy defense that allowed Miami just 15 fourth-quarter points, while Pippen, still upset by the Milwaukee game, scored 21 with 11 rebounds, 9 assists, and 6 steals, including a three-pointer to end the third quarter that gave the Bulls a lead they would hold to the end.
Paxson couldn’t believe he had been ejected. The whole thing started when Sherman Douglas held him, and Paxson tried to push his hand away. But it was Paxson who was called for an offensive foul. He slammed the ball down. Bam! Technical foul. He started to argue. Bam! He was gone. It was an unusually quick hook from referee Bernie Fryer, and Paxson still hadn’t cooled down by the time reporters arrived in the locker room after the game.
“It’s a double standard,” Paxson complained. “I can guarantee that if Michael Jordan had done what I did, he never would have gotten tossed. I’m tired of seeing other guys get away with stuff that I get penalized for.”
It was that fiery Paxson temper; his brother had it, too. In his final pro game, Jim Paxson was ejected by referee Ed T. Rush and, walking off the court, yelled, “Hey, Ed,” and pointed to his groin.
“What a way to go,” John marveled.
Tonight, when he got back to his room after the game, Paxson called home.
“Caroline,” he said, “was Ryan up? Was he watching the game?”
The boy wasn’t. Paxson breathed a sigh of relief. At least Ryan didn’t see him getting thrown out of the game.
The team flew into Charlotte late Thursday for the last game of the season. At the shootaround before the game, King hit a three-pointer and was boasting of his long-distance shooting prowess, as if nothing had happened earlier in the month. He had played reasonably well against the Heat with 8 points in sixteen minutes and was feeling loose. “Must have hit forty, maybe fifty, in college,” he was saying. “Always took the trey.”
His teammates were doubtful, but B.J. thought it could have been possible. “The way [coach Billy] Tubbs played that game down there at Oklahoma, who knows?” Armstrong said. “Maybe he did.”
King still wasn’t playing particularly well, and come the last game of the season against Detroit, with nothing at stake and mostly reserves on the floor, Jackson would send Grant back into the game with two minutes left for King. Grant had been on the end of the bench, joking with Jordan and Pippen and certain his day’s work was over. He’d put away his black goggles, which looked like 3-D glasses and had lenses that looked like soda bottles. “Sorry, Horace,” Jackson would say, “but he can’t get a rebound. You’ve got to go back in.” But King was trying to put it all aside. He was sure he’d be traded after the season and now figured he’d joke his way through the last few months.
On the bus ride back to the hotel after the pregame shootaround, Armstrong said to PR director Tim Hallam, “Find out what Stacey shot in college on threes.”
Hallam investigated, and reported that King had been 0 for 2 in his college career. Armstrong wouldn’t leave him alone before the game. “You didn’t even hit one, King,” he shouted in the locker room. “Man, you can’t even dunk. I knew you couldn’t hit no three-pointers.”
The shouting would continue later even though the Bulls picked up their sixtieth win over the Hornets. It was Charlotte’s last game of the season, which they dubbed Teal Night, after their uniform color. They had asked the Bulls to wear their white home uniforms so the Hornets could wear their teal road uniforms. The Bulls declined.
The Bulls led Charlotte by 20 in the first quarter and held a big lead until Charlotte pulled within 4 in the fourth quarter. But the Bulls pulled away for a 115–99 win. Jordan scored more than 40 for the fifth time in ten games. He told reporters it was because some of his teammates were relaxing and it was up to him to take over.
He was particularly angry with Hopson, who had played just four minutes in the game, the fewest on the team. Hopson’s playing time had been decreasing steadily, and by now he’d fallen to twelfth man on the roster. Some of that was due to Hopson, some to Jackson. Hopson had never adjusted to the triangle offense, but Jackson also didn’t care for Hopson’s emotionless look, which looked like arrogance to Jackson. The coach liked emotional, tough players, and Hopson was too much like Brad Sellers. For whatever reason, the Bulls found Ohio State players to be lacking toughness. So Hopson got almost no playing time behind Jordan, who would yell at Jackson during games, “Put me in for Hop.” Jackson usually would.
After a scramble in the fourth quarter in which Hopson lost the ball, Jackson called time-out. Hopson had played his four minutes and figured that was it for him. He was always pulled after a mistake. The Charlotte crowd was the only one in the NBA that was perhaps as loud as Chicago’s, and as the Hornets hovered within 4 points there was chaos. Hopson wandered to the edge of the huddle and stared up in the stands.
“Dennis,” Jackson shouted, but Hopson didn’t hear. Jackson saw it as indifference, as did Jordan. “Your boy doesn’t want to play,” Jordan yelled at assistant Jim Cleamons, an Ohio State graduate who had been assigned to work with Hopson that season. “I’m tired of bailing his ass out.”
Jordan went back into the game for Hopson and the Bulls recovered, but Jackson was angry. He thought Hopson didn’t want to go back in the game. As a result, Hopson would be the only Bull not to make an appearance in Sunday’s finale against Detroit; Jackson explained, “I owed him one.”
Hopson was supposed to be one of the final pieces the Bulls would need to get past Detroit. Levingston was the other piece, an active rebounder to back up both Grant and Pippen and run the court. He played fourteen minutes in the Charlotte game, mostly in the first half, and when he was removed after a short first-half stint, he began cursing Jackson. “Screw him,” he shouted to teammates as he came to the bench. “If he ain’t gonna play me, screw him.” He finally composed himself after the game and admitted he had let his emotions get the best of him, but he was still unhappy that he didn’t have a role, the tenth man at a time when teams rarely go more than nine deep into the bench.
The anger wasn’t limited to those two. Armstrong was disappointed with his l-of-6 shooting. Recent late-game failures against Philadelphia and Detroit seemed to have drained his confidence and demoralized him again. It was the seventh straight game he’d failed to shoot at least 50 percent.
Armstrong was complaining after the game about not getting any opportunities, when Jordan began shouting at him.
“Hey,” Jordan yelled, “we’ve had a great season. I’m tired of this. We won sixty games and you should be happy about that.”
“Screw you,” Armstrong shot back. “You don’t tell me what I can and can’t say.”
As Jackson had said earlier, “Ain’t winning great?”
But by Sunday’s final game, Jordan couldn’t have been nicer to Armstrong. He joked with him endearingly as if nothing had happened, and displayed an interest he’d never shown before, asking him how he was doing and including him in his inside jokes with Pippen. Armstrong was absolutely charmed, for Jordan could radiate like the rings of Saturn when he chose to.
Grant just watched. “That’s the way it is with him,” Grant said. “You’ve got to stand up to him or he’ll never respect you. Brad Sellers never would and he killed him, just killed him. Same with Hop now. We get along a little better now, but that’s only because I told him what he could do with himself. He still pushes me, but he knows when to stop now.”
The final game of the regular season was against Detroit on national TV, but nothing was at stake except pride. Playoff pairings had already been clinched and the Bulls would open against bottom-seed New York. The Bucks had collapsed down the stretch to fall behind the Pistons into fourth place in the East, so the Pistons were in the opposite playoff bracket. The teams wouldn’t meet again until the conference finals, assuming both won their first two playoff rounds.
It was a time of celebration for the Bulls, and on this Fan Appreciation Day the adoring crowd rained bouquets of applause all over the team. The Bulls would win their sixty-first game that day, 108–100. They had the most blowout wins and the biggest margin of victory per game in the league; they tied the franchise record for most road wins and had won twenty-six straight at home to tie for second place in the league’s all-time list. They were the highest-scoring Bulls team in twenty years; at 51 percent on the season, they were the best-shooting Bulls team ever. They also set team records for assists and three-point shooting and were the best Bulls defensive team since the Dick Motta era.
And still Phil Jackson was livid. For a game that was seemingly unimportant, the players were playing rough. Isiah Thomas got smacked on his sore wrist by Armstrong; Thomas slapped Paxson in the face after a hard foul and the two began shoving each other. Late in the game, chief referee Darell Garretson decided he wanted the rough stuff to stop, so he called for both captains. But when cocaptain Cartwright approached along with Thomas, Garretson waved Cartwright back. He wanted Jordan and Thomas.
Jackson started screaming at Garretson, “You dickhead. You dickhead.”
Bach tried to keep Jackson from running to midcourt, and Jordan, having left the game after three quarters, went to meet with Thomas and Garretson. Cartwright, who tagged along anyway, told Paxson when he got back to the bench that he thought the sullen Garretson just wanted to be on national TV with Jordan.
But Jackson remained angry long after the game, saying that Cartwright was a cocaptain, which he was. Garretson had explained that since Jordan had come out as captain with Thomas before the game, Jordan was the only Bulls captain he would accept. Jackson wouldn’t accept the argument, but he never would when it came to Garretson.
Jackson and Garretson had a history dating back to Jackson’s playing days; he had once purposely run over Garretson in a game and been fined. Although generally depicted as an even-tempered intellectual, Jackson was a ferocious competitor and was known as a dirty player in his days. His reputation was somewhat similar to Cartwright’s, actually—he was considered clumsy and dirty, although he lacked Cartwright’s offensive ability. Former Knicks teammate Walt Frazier remembered how the Knicks tried to avoid Jackson and his lethal flying elbows in practice, and how Jackson broke Jerry West’s jaw once, though not in a game. “He was waving to someone after the game and just clocked Jerry,” laughed Frazier. “Broke his jaw and nearly knocked him out. Couldn’t catch him in the game, though.”
When the Bulls—Pistons game—and the regular season—finally ended, Krause was walking around the locker room trying to pump hands. “Jumping on the bandwagon,” someone mumbled.
Krause had just returned from watching the European Final Four, where he had made one last pitch for Kukoc. It was the third European trip for Krause in four months, and to the players that seemed to be all the front office cared about. Jordan was still refusing to call Kukoc, as Krause asked, and was instead swiping at Krause over his failure to deal with Paxson’s contract situation. “I’m surprised by the Bulls’ treatment of him,” Jordan said. “They talk about loyalty all the time here, so this is a good opportunity for them to prove themselves.”
Meanwhile, Pippen remained annoyed that his new deal wasn’t signed yet. Owner Reinsdorf had by now given him a written assurance that he would extend his contract for five years, but Pippen knew he was still on hold because of Kukoc. Paxson had yet to hear anything from the Bulls and Cartwright, too, was being stalled. Scott Williams, the rookie, felt his playing time was being minimized so he would have less bargaining power and the Bulls could re-sign him cheaply. Maybe he’d go to Europe, he thought. Levingston was thinking about Europe, too, having heard talk that the Bulls were not about to pick up his one-year option. Hopson just felt as if he’d been lied to; Krause had told him he would be the sixth or seventh man, and now he was the only one not playing against the Pistons. He was embarrassed and angry.
Jackson watched his unhappy players after the game, and realized that their mutual problems with Krause were actually uniting them as teammates—and just at the right time. It was like a pickup game in the schoolyard, he thought, where you could play hard and play well, even with guys you didn’t like, and then go your separate ways later and rip each other. It didn’t matter, Jackson felt, as long as the group would come together in games and use their talent to win. They just needed to be united.