“Free will, it’s like butterfly wings.”
—The Devil’s Advocate
For every season of their 32 years of existence, the Chicago Bulls had packed up in November and headed west for an extended road trip. In the old days, their disappearance usually cleared the Chicago Stadium schedule for a visit from the circus.
On the other hand, it could be argued that just about every year, the Bulls seemed to take the circus with them. As writer Kent McDill of the Daily Herald once pointed out, there was always something going on. Either one of the team’s stars was making the gossip columns of the local West Coast papers after being seen in a strip bar, or something truly strange would come up. Such as the November 1996 trip, when center Luc Longley severely injured his shoulder while body surfing.
“It’s always a tough haul,” Jackson said of the long ride out west.
Even in the Bulls’ earliest days, the excursions were marked by weirdness and bad luck. Take, for example, the sad case of Reggie Harding, who joined the Bulls in the fall of 1967 when they had lost 11 of their first 12 games. Desperate to shore up their weakness at center that season, the coaching staff had pulled in the 6-foot-11 Harding from the Detroit Pistons. One of the first players to move directly from high school to the pros, Harding had struggled with the adjustment and had even been suspended for the 1965-66 season. Sadly, time would show that Harding, who had been raised on Detroit’s mean streets, could never overcome his gangster background. (He would be shot to death in 1972.) He was known for finishing practice and leaving without showering, pausing only to towel off and spin the cylinder on his revolver. Once while playing in Detroit, Harding apparently began shooting at teammate Terry Dischinger’s feet to make him “dance.”
Legend has it that Harding robbed the same gas station three times in his own Detroit neighborhood. According to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the third time Harding robbed the place, the attendant said, “I know that’s you, Reggie.”
“No, man, it ain’t me,” Reg was said to have replied. “Shut up, and give me the money!”
One night, Bulls guard Flynn Robinson awakened in the dark, cut on the light and supposedly found Harding pointing a gun at him. The Bulls, however, were almost desperate enough to overlook the strange behavior.
“I got a chance to get Reggie Harding,” recalled the team’s first coach, Johnny Kerr. “We needed a big center. I had heard about his pistol. Rumor had it that he carried it in his gym bag … He’d play one-on-one with Flynn Robinson. Flynn would beat him, and Reggie would say, ‘Get out of here Flynn before I pistol whip you.’ Everybody figured he might have it with him.
“When we were in the midst of that losing streak in November ‘67, we played the Lakers in Los Angeles,” Kerr recalled. “We needed a win in the worst way, and we had a one-point lead with just a few seconds left on the clock. The Lakers got the ball at half court, and I put Reggie in to guard Mel Counts, their big guy. I didn’t want them getting an alley-oop. Counts set up out near the free throw line, but Walt Hazzard, who was taking the ball out of bounds, threw the ball over the backboard and the buzzer sounded. I was jumping around and screaming because we had finally won a game. I looked up, and Reggie had decked Mel Counts. He got up and shot two free throws and beat us.”
During that same West Coast trip, Harding was called home for his mother’s funeral. For the next 10 days, the Bulls didn’t hear from him. Finally he returned to the team, saying that he had been appointed executor of his mother’s estate and needed the extra time away. A few days later, the Bulls placed Reggie Harding on waivers.
As the Bulls struggled to prominence over the years, their West Coast trips would always seem to mix the wonderful and the terrible. For example, in November 1986 Jordan averaged better than 41 points over the team’s seven-game western road swing. The Bulls lost six of those games.
By the 1990s, however, the West Coast trip had become something of a passage to greatness for the team. As Bill Wennington explained, when the team racked up six wins against a single loss in November 1995, it showed the Bulls just how dominant they could be and helped spur them to their record-setting 72-win season. Likewise, the next year they again won six games on the first western swing and knew their chemistry was still cooking. Thus, a 69-win season.
Yet the first western trip was also the time that Krause chose each year to travel with the team and evaluate the roster he had assembled. The things he saw then could help him make decisions on trades and other moves before the February trading deadline.
Krause’s presence around the team also created the potential for conflict and heavy razzing on the team bus and plane. Despite the charged atmosphere between the coach and GM during the 1997 offseason, Jackson had again attempted to persuade Krause not to travel with the team.
“Basically, in my conversation with Jerry in the preseason,” Jackson said, “I had asked him not to go. I said, ‘You always insist on going. I don’t think this is a good year to go.’ He said, ‘I know you could stop this stuff if you wanted to.’ I said, ‘Jerry, it’s what they feel like. If I stood up in this situation and tried to stop this, I would alienate this team.’”
Jackson viewed the extended trips as a time for the players and coaches to bond together, to seal their unity and commitment for another championship run. Because of that, he decided to bring the injured Pippen along. The forward wouldn’t be able to play, but he would undergo limited workouts and spend extra time with his teammates. “I brought Scottie along to get him back in stride with the guys, to practice with the team,” Jackson explained. “There was a chance he was going to be able to come back December 10. We didn’t want him to be out too long, and this was an opportunity, his first practice chance. He wouldn’t have the opportunity to practice if he stayed behind.”
At the time, the Bulls were not a team brimming with confidence. They had lost all three of their road games in the young season and badly needed to re-establish their prowess in the hostile environment of another team’s arena. It was a dramatic turnaround. The two previous seasons they had rung up phenomenal road records of 33-8 and 30-11. “The circumstances are different,” Steve Kerr, who had a bruised knee, told reporters. “I’d be surprised if we could pull off 6-1, frankly. We’re not playing well enough.”
“A certain understanding of going into the enemy’s territory and bonding together,” is how Jordan, who was averaging just under 25 points a game while shooting just under 40 percent from the floor, summed it up. “This is a great time for it, knowing we haven’t had much success on the road.”
This time around, the Bulls were scheduled to open with a Thursday night game at Phoenix, then visit the Los Angeles Clippers, Sacramento Kings and Seattle Super Sonics, then stop by Chicago for a two-day break at Thanksgiving before visiting Indiana, Washington and Boston. Without Pippen on the floor, the challenge against the running and gunning Suns would be controlling the game’s ebb and flow, Jordan explained to the media. “If we can dictate the tempo, we’re in good shape. If we let them dictate, we know we can’t run up and down like they can. They’re definitely looking to push the ball and outscore you. We want to keep the numbers way below 100 if we can.”
Without Pippen, the Bulls were averaging only 88.4 points per game, ranking them 28th among the 29 NBA teams in scoring. Worse yet, they weren’t shooting the ball well and were turning the ball over 18 or 19 times a game. Without Pippen, the game also became much harder for Jordan, because other teams found it much easier to double- and triple-team him.
“You hate to keep harping on his return, but let’s be honest—the guy is one of the great players ever … and he affects every aspect of the game,” Kerr said. “Until he’s back, I don’t think we can consider ourselves the real Bulls.”
Pippen would later admit that he wasn’t exactly unhappy with the circumstances. After yet another offseason in which Krause again explored trading the star forward, the Bulls were now getting a scorching lesson in just how essential he was to their chemistry. Without him, the Bulls had no teeth. They were old, too, and like old men, they had to gum their way through games.
To ease up the offensive pressure on Jordan, Jackson figured he would try starting sixth man Kukoc, which gave Chicago something of a three-guard offense. The main problem there was that doctors had just discovered Steve Kerr would miss several games with a cracked femur, meaning that the struggling bench would get dramatically weaker.
Jackson had told his assistants of his intention to make this final season one of great fun, but just weeks into the schedule it was clearly not fun. Tex Winter watched Jackson struggle with not only his own emotions but those of his players. “We have been working on the physical, mental and spiritual sides of these players,” Jackson admitted to the reporters covering the team, “to increase their appetite for the game, their hunger for playing, making basketball fun.”
Winning, though, was fun, and the Bulls couldn’t accomplish that against the Suns. “We lost the game in Phoenix in which Dennis had a wide-open layup down the stretch and he missed it,” Jackson recalled. “We lost a game we probably should have won on the road again.”
It didn’t help matters that before the Phoenix game, Rodman had jetted to Oakland for a Rolling Stones/ Pearl Jam concert, then topped off the excursion afterward by stopping in Vegas to roll bones into the wee hours.
Normally, when the Bulls were dominant, the team was willing to overlook Rodman’s indifference on offense. But with Pippen out, that indifference grew as yet another item in Jordan’s craw.
On the team plane that night from Phoenix to Los Angeles, Krause decided to approach Jordan, Pippen, Randy Brown, Scott Burrell and Ron Harper as they were playing their usual card game at the back of the plane. The team had decided that Steve Kerr, who was injured, could go home to be with his pregnant wife. But that created a problem in that Kerr and little used rookie Keith Booth were scheduled to make a promotional appearance with Jerry Reinsdorf in Sacramento. The team chairman had not been around the team yet. What made the circumstances worse was that Krause had a speck of cream cheese on his face from a post-game snack. From several accounts of the incident, the ribbing he received was substantial. Krause spoke to the players for a few minutes without success in finding a replacement for Kerr and left.
Then, about 15 minutes later, the GM made another run back to the group to try again. According to accounts of the incident, he still had the cream cheese on his face, creating shades of his earlier days with the team, when one or more of the players concocted the “Crumbs” nickname.
Krause’s second visit to the card game reportedly drew some chiding barbs from Jordan along the lines of, “What’s the matter with you, Jerry? Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to eat?”
“We all know that Jerry likes to eat,” Harper would say later. “He don’t know that he has food on his face, though. But he likes to eat, though. MJ told him. MJ said some words to him and we laughed at him. But, you know, Jerry wants to be part of the team. He’d be very successful if he stayed away.”
Ultimately, Harper agreed to go on the appearance with Reinsdorf in Sacramento, not out of any sense of allegiance to the chairman or the GM but because he didn’t want the rookie Booth to be stuck alone making the appearance. As it turned out, the appearance was a nice event, Harper said, and in person Reinsdorf was great. “Jerry’s a good guy,” Harper said, pointing out that the team chairman made sure that the event promoter didn’t try to keep the players too long.
As for Krause, Harper said, “He’s brought some players to this team, but he has some players who are frustrated with the way he treats them and the things that he says. It’s a cumulative thing. It’s added up over the years. It’s not like it’s gonna go away overnight.”
Jordan’s answer to the losing streak was his biggest scoring outburst of the regular season, 49 points against the Clippers, the 150th time he had scored more than 40 in a game. The performance was tempered by the fact that it was the lowly Clippers, and the Bulls needed double overtime to vanquish them. Still, it was a win, and the Bulls wouldn’t have gained it if Jordan hadn’t come up with a Jordanesque play off his own missed free throw at the end of regulation to send the game to overtime.
The Clippers, who had only one win to go with 11 losses, held a 102-100 lead with 15.7 seconds to go in the game. Jordan was fouled, but missed his first free throw. When the second shot came off the back of the rim, Jordan got the rebound, took the ball back up top, then executed a move on the Clippers’ Brent Barry for the tying layup.
In the second overtime, Jordan scored all nine of Chicago’s points, giving him a run of 13 straight points, for the 111-102 win.
After the game, Daily Herald writer Kent McDill noticed Pippen sitting alone in the locker room. “There was a chair next to him,” McDill recalled. “So I just went over to say hi and see how things were going, when he thought he was gonna come back. And I said something about what game are you aiming for. And he said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna play for the Bulls anymore.’ Ron Harper was standing next to him, and Ron looked down at him and made some sort of snide remark. Scottie was laughing, and then he went on: ‘I’m tired of the way I’ve been treated, and I don’t want to play for any team that Jerry Krause is on or represents. I don’t want to represent Jerry Krause.’ He said a bunch of that stuff. Then he and Harper started laughing about where they were going to end up, what team they were gonna play for and this other stuff. Then Scottie finally looked at me and said, ‘I want to be traded.’
“It was all too jocular for me to actually write it,” McDill said. “It all seemed kind of silly. I knew that the Bulls probably wouldn’t trade him even if he wanted to be traded.”
Later Jackson would note that Pippen’s agent had come to Los Angeles. “I just heard his agent had been in L.A.,” the coach said, implying that agent Jimmy Sexton’s presence might have had something to do with Pippen’s statements.
McDill didn’t write the story after the Friday night game in Los Angeles. But on Sunday in Sacramento he saw Pippen again. “Before the game he was standing there before introductions,” the reporter recalled. “And I just said to him, ‘When are you going to have your press conference to announce that you want to be traded?’ He said, ‘As soon as you write the story.’ So I asked a couple more questions. Then I went into the press room and started writing down the stuff that had happened Friday night as well. At halftime, I saw him again, and he said, ‘Are you gonna write it?’ I said, ‘To be honest with you, I already did.’ I told him what the story was gonna say, and he said, ‘That’s exactly how I feel. I want to be traded. I don’t want to play with the Bulls anymore.’
“It obviously wasn’t a well thought-out decision,” McDill said, “because the Bulls aren’t going to trade a player just because he wants to be traded. It’s not like they were gonna get what they wanted for him in value, when a player announces he wants to be traded. At the time he was angry and had things he wanted to say, and I’m sure he wanted to stir the pot a little bit. Which he did.”
Indeed, Pippen’s comments made headlines across the country. “I ain’t coming back,” he had told McDill. “I want to be traded. I want to go to Phoenix or L.A.” Even worse, he had insinuated he was malingering, saying, “Maybe I’m healthy” now.
“He hasn’t said anything to me,” Krause said when asked about the comments. “We spent a lot of money to bring everybody back and try to win a championship. I don’t know anything about it.”
Pippen told McDill his anger had boiled over a September letter Krause faxed him warning him not to play in his own charity game in the United Center. “He said he would fine me. Can you believe it?” Pippen said.
“It was a league mandate that I send that letter,” Krause said.
The good news for the Bulls was that they got a second straight road victory, 103-88, that Sunday against the Kings, and their defense showed some real teeth. Randy Brown, a former King, had a strong game, and Kukoc scored 18 to help Jordan with the scoring burden.
But the team training room was the scene of another ugly exchange between Krause and Pippen and Jordan before the game. “Something happened in Sacramento in the training room,” Schaefer recalled. “Jerry walked in the training room, and they said something. Michael and Scottie were in there, and he came in and they started going at each other. They get into these sparring things over drafts. Michael likes to poke fun at Jerry over his claims of drafting and finding Earl Monroe and different people like that. Michael gave a little jab that day at Krause for claiming that he discovered Scottie. Something was said that kind of set Scottie off.”
Jordan had always found it amusing that Krause claimed to have discovered Monroe, a Hall of Famer, when the Bullets took him with the overall number two pick in the 1967 draft. Krause, though, took immense pride in being what he figured was one of the first scouts to spot Monroe playing for Winston-Salem State. Krause said coach Gene Shue and other members of the Bullets front office weren’t as enamored of Monroe, but Krause said he persuaded them to take the high-scoring guard by offering to give up his salary for months until Monroe showed that he was indeed a worthy draft pick.
“I think that whole thing with Michael stems from Earl Monroe,” Krause said. “I used to needle him. I used to say, ‘Someday you might be as good as Earl Monroe. You remind me of Earl and Elgin. You’re a combination of Earl Monroe and Elgin Baylor, and you might be as good as both of them someday. Earl did it on the ground. You’re doing it in the air. Elgin was the first one to do it in the air. You remind me of him.’ And then every time after that, ‘He’d say, ‘That fuckin’ Monroe.’ Then, he’d say, ‘Where’d you take, Monroe? Second in the draft? Big fuckin’ deal?’
“Well, he has no comprehension of what it took to get Earl Monroe,” Krause said.
Again, these spats might seem almost foolish to outside observers, but when their egos and personalities collided, Krause and Jordan and Pippen were a volatile mix.
With an 8-5 record, the Bulls set out for Seattle, the scene of their strangest hour. On the flight up, they partied to celebrate another win. Although the news of Pippen’s comments had yet to hit the streets, he partied a bit too much, perhaps over his recent freedom of expression.
“It was a trigger to a very big event this year that was rather embarrassing,” Jackson said. “Unfortunately for the players, it was an opportunity for them to unload against Jerry. It set about a mechanism between the two of us. It was embarrassing. I had to discipline the players about it, or else. And risk losing by standing in between (them and management) on what they considered an affront to their world. Or I could sit there and incur the embarrassment that followed. For the most part, I pulled them aside and talked to them personally about it. Not to do this because it’s embarrassing to the whole bus basically.”
When the team landed in Seattle, there were two buses waiting to carry them to their hotel, one for the players and coaches and one for the broadcasters and staff people. Krause chose to ride the team bus.
“Scottie began his tirade right after that,” Jackson said. “That was the thing that sprung it all open.”
Obviously intoxicated, Pippen began yelling at Krause about signing him to a new contract or trading him. The harangue went on and on and turned increasingly uglier.
“Why don’t you trade me?” Pippen screamed.
“I finally turned around,” Jackson said, “and grabbed a bottle of beer and held it up to Pippen and pointed to it like, ‘Beers. You’ve had too many beers to drink.’ Joe Kleine thought I was toasting him. He said, ‘Were you toasting Scottie? I’ve never seen anything like that.’ I said, ‘No, I was holding up a beer and pointing at it, saying, You’ve had too many. You better quiet down. I didn’t want to have to get up.
“This is beyond what normally goes,” Jackson said. “I didn’t like it at all. Jerry said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I can take it. Don’t worry about it at all.’”
“With Scottie, that meant nothing to me,” Krause said later. “He was drunk, and he thought the best way to get out of here was to piss me off more.”
“These days and age, if you stare at a guy something can be said,” Ron Harper said of the incident. “I think that Scottie was just letting some of his frustrations out. So he said some things.”
“It was the venting of his frustrations,” Jordan agreed. “I think it’s devastating the relationship between the two of them. I don’t think Scottie can ever overcome that.”
Asked later about his conflicts with Krause, Pippen replied, “I can’t say exactly where they come from. We don’t have any type of relationship. There are a lot of little things that have gotten to the point where they’ve turned into things that are big.”
“I’m not quite sure what cracked in Seattle,” Chip Schaefer said. “I’m not sure it was alcohol. I don’t know if it was a combination of things. Something snapped hard. We all know it was an accumulation of the trade stuff.”
“That’s something that we will never understand,” Jordan said later when asked about Pippen’s relationship with Krause. “How that relationship formed and bridges were burned. The situation deteriorated even more when I was gone from the game and then even more when I came back. That’s one thing I can’t comment on. But we all have differences with management and certainly with Jerry Krause. Some of us can deal with it in different ways. Believe me, when I step on the basketball court, the last person I think about that I’m playing for is Jerry Krause.”
Certainly part of the situation was Pippen’s anger and bitterness over the contract he had signed in 1991. Considered one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players ever, Pippen was ranked 122nd on the league’s 1998 salary list. He had put the financial issues aside and focused all his energy on making the team a winner. He had done this thinking the team would eventually reward him. But instead the signals he received every summer from Krause’s actions was that the team continually shopped him around in trades. The one thing that Pippen really wanted, beyond pay commensurate with his ability, was the respect and honor of staying with one team his whole career.
“Scottie has always held a real good idea about his place in basketball history,” said McDill, who has covered the team for more than a decade. “And he thinks a player who stays with one organization his entire career has a better reputation after they’re done than a player who gets traded. He’s always wanted to be one of those guys who gets to play his entire career with one team. But in this situation he’s being pushed out in a lot of ways.”
“From my standpoint, I would love to have finished my career in Chicago,” Pippen said. “It’s a great tribute. And to go out on your own and not be forced out of the game.”
That, in part, was his motivation for putting aside his feelings about his contract. But he felt Reinsdorf and Krause had responded to his show of good will and effort by again trying to trade him. “I had accepted the fact that I was fairly underpaid and that with the way the new collective bargaining agreement was done, it was something I was gonna have to deal with,” Pippen said. “It was a process, something I was gonna have to deal with. So, you know, just go ahead and play the game.”
“He definitely wants the respect, and he deserves it,” Jordan said of Pippen. “I think the thing that pisses him off more is that at no time did they ever put me on the trading block. And the things that he’s done, they put him on the trading block.”
“Babe Ruth was traded twice,” Krause responded. “Wilt Chamberlain was traded. There have been very few guys through the years who haven’t been traded.”
(Krause didn’t note that their teams suffered terribly after Ruth and Chamberlain were traded.)
“Scottie Pippen was a great player,” Krause said. “He was one of the few players who truly excited me. He’s still a fine player. But, as far as trading anybody goes, I have learned that the organization has to come first. Now, Michael can never be traded. But I would have to add that any deal we’d ever talked about was somebody who would have to be a knockout for us.”
As for Krause, his biggest irritation was what he saw as Pippen’s whining over the 1991 contract. At the time, Pippen was coming off a serious back injury and wanted a long-term contract to protect his future. Sitting in his office during an interview, Krause recalled, “I sat right here with Scottie Pippen and said, ‘Don’t sign this seven-year contract. Don’t sign it. It’s stupid.’ He said, ‘No, I want the security.’ So I said, ‘Then don’t come back to me.’
“The players can tell you this,” Krause said. “When they’re ready to sign a contract, I take the pen out of their hands and say, ‘Look, we fairly negotiated this. Your agent did a fine job. We did a fine job. But if you don’t like this, don’t sign the damn thing. Give me the pen back. Because what I don’t want you doing is coming to me next year or the year after, because we ain’t going to renegotiate. You sign it, you live with it. You have two bad years, three bad years, we live with it. You have three great years, we live with it the same way. Don’t come back to me.’
“I’ve never had a player give me the pen back,” the GM said.
Pippen’s 1991 deal also included a large portion of the money deferred. Krause said that by 1994, when it became apparent that Pippen had agreed to an inferior deal, the player asked to move the deferred sum into current dollars. “Scottie came to us,” Krause said. “They had a lot of money deferred in that contract. They came to us and wanted the deferred money brought up to current, and it was quite a bit of money. And we said, ‘All right, this is the end of the talk till the end of the contract. I’ll never talk about this again. It’s over. I’m done.’ We brought the deferred money current, and three weeks later he was talking like a magpie.
“So you can understand,” the GM said, “why I have hard feelings at times. And the money we brought up to current was in seven figures.”
He also pointed out that the Bulls had given “Rabbi trusts” to both Pippen and Horace Grant early in their careers. Those trusts or deferred annuities didn’t count against the salary cap at the time and were later ruled illegal by the league. But Pippen’s and Grant’s remain in effect because they were grandfathered in before the league’s ruling, Krause said. “Twenty to 30 years down the road, they got annuities coming in. They’re like tax free annuities, because they’re not taxing. The organization loses money on the deal, because the organization pays the taxes on it. Other general managers for other teams say they won’t do it anymore because it now counts against their salary caps. But we did it for Scottie and Horace. We were so good to players that the league outlawed it.”
Pippen said that in place of the money, he would have been pleased with a simple “thank you” from Krause or Reinsdorf. But neither man ever expressed their appreciation for Pippen’s leadership role with the team while Jordan was gone from the game or for Pippen’s unselfish approach once the superstar returned in 1995.
“Not to this day,” Pippen would say later. “I would think you would do that. That’s good manners. But this team has gotten so much success. It’s like Krause said, ‘It’s this organization that’s been able to win, not just the players.’”
In fact, he had not spoken to Reinsdorf in several years, since a chance encounter at a White Sox game three or four summers before the incident in Seattle.
So the anger had built in Pippen until the alcohol emboldened him to unleash it on Krause in Seattle. As it was, Pippen might have been able to undo some of the damage the next morning when he again encountered Krause on the team bus headed to practice.
“Good morning, Scottie,” Krause said.
“Go to hell, Jerry,” Pippen replied.
Upon hearing that Pippen had made trade demands to the media, Jackson tried to make light of it, knowing that the emotional Pippen was capable of misspeaking, particularly if reporters were gouging his sensitivity with questions. “I think he’s just joking the press, personally, and throwing a barb out there,” the coach told reporters that Tuesday in practice.
“We know that he’s not happy with his contract,” Jordan said. “He didn’t have to go public, but he did. I’m not shellshocked by anything that happens. This organization is at a crossroads. The future is in front of them. Sometimes, decisions get made for business or personal reasons and not basketball.”
Then Seattle forward Vin Baker weighed in on the issue. “He is one of the top three or four players in basketball,” he said of Pippen. “The Bulls couldn’t have won all those championships without him.”
“I’m not surprised he wants to be traded,” Harper told reporters. “He feels they are not loyal to him and he has been loyal to them. He has played hurt; he has won five championships. He feels they should come out and do something for him.”
Pippen responded to Jackson’s comments by saying he was not just trying to make things interesting. “I think I’ve been treated very unfairly by this organization and … it’s gotten to the point now I don’t see myself carrying on with it,” Pippen told reporters. “I would rather leave things as I can remember them as a player and go on. It’s very difficult. I have a lot of respect for teammates and fans in Chicago. I’ve enjoyed my 10 years playing (there). I never saw the day when I would have to turn the other cheek, it just sort of came to that.”
He was asked what he would do if Krause didn’t trade him before the league’s February trading deadline. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll come to that bridge when I cross it.”
“You never close doors,” Krause told reporters that same day in response to questions about his plans. “However, we spent a tremendous amount of money to bring this team back intact. It would take a knockout deal for us to trade any key guy on our team. If somebody doesn’t knock us out, I’m not going to trade Scottie.”
“For Scottie’s situation,” Jackson said later, “everything kind of broke. The venom kind of broke, and he said, ‘I can’t play for this team anymore.’ He had crossed a bridge with the organization. It was very disappointing. And it took him a while. We had to come back here and really work with Scottie.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to leave the team,” Jackson told him.
“Scottie thought he had shown himself the door, because he had had too much to drink,” the coach explained. “It was over the edge.”
The team returned to Chicago just before Thanksgiving, and Jackson arranged for the team’s therapist to spend some time with Pippen counseling him on his anger. Over the break, Pippen phoned Jackson late one night for a long discussion during which the coach realized that Pippen seemed fairly set in his position not to play for the Bulls again. The coach knew that the team couldn’t be successful without Pippen, that changing his mind would take the best efforts of a variety of people, including Jordan, Harper, Jackson himself and several teammates.
“Unfortunately, it took him a while,” Jackson said. “He wasn’t ready to play for another two months. And so it was a situation where he had time to cool out, to look at it and say, ‘Well, my options aren’t very good. I really don’t have another place to go, and this is the right thing to do.’”
“We let Scottie be Scottie,” Harper later said, “and let him grow into what he will put himself into. We all are by his side.”
Part of the strategy, though, included Jackson and Jordan openly expressing their displeasure with Pippen’s position. That Monday, December 1st, the coach and star player both suggested that they felt betrayed by Pippen’s demands. “It’s all right to hold it against Scottie,” Jackson told reporters. “We care about Scottie, but we’re going to hold this against Scottie because he’s walking out on us, there’s no doubt about that. Some things are personal and some things are public. Publicly, we like Scottie, but personally there’s always going to be a … residual effect of having gone to bat for Scottie.”
Jordan had already told reporters the previous Saturday that he was “disappointed, very disappointed, that (Pippen) hasn’t been able to put aside his dealings with management.”
Jackson and Jordan said they wouldn’t have returned to the team if they had known Pippen was going to leave. “There is that kind of feeling: ‘Hey, we came back to do this job together and Scottie ducked out the door,”’ Jackson said.
“It would have made a big difference in terms of me and Phil and a lot of other players,” Jordan said.
Jackson recalled for reporters that Jordan had come out of retirement in 1995 due in part to Pippen’s great urging. “I don’t think Michael forgets the fact that when Scottie was here alone in ‘94 and ‘95, that he was … saying, ‘Come on back, come on back, Michael, and help me out with this load,”’ Jackson said. “So I’m sure Michael’s going to get back at Scottie, hold his feet to the fire.”
Resolving the issue could take six weeks or more, the coach pointed out, and the team could become greatly affected by the distraction.
A little more than a week after Pippen’s explosive verbal attack against Krause, Latrell Sprewell of the Golden State Warriors ignited a media firestorm by attacking coach P.J. Carlesimo and choking him at practice, then leaving the building only to return later and throw punches at the coach. The entire incident, Sprewell said later, was aimed at forcing the team to trade him.
The Pippen incident was far too private for any of his teammates to discuss publicly. Still it seemed obvious that Jordan was speaking subtly to his teammate when reporters asked him to comment on the Sprewell incident.
“I’ve been angry at coaches,” Jordan said. “I’ve been angry at people. I’ve been able from the teachings and learnings of my background to control myself. Each and every person is different. I’m not saying I haven’t been angry enough to think about doing certain things. But also I’ve been smart enough to think about the alternatives that action would cause. Some people do lose their cool. Some people don’t think about those alternatives, the repercussions of their actions.”
The hopeful sign, for Dennis Rodman at least, came that Wednesday when the Bulls traveled to Boston to play the Celtics and Pippen went along for the ride. “He’s here tonight because he still wants to be part of the team,” Rodman told reporters.
Asked if the situation was a distraction, Rodman replied, “It can’t be. We’re grown men playing a game, and we’re getting paid lots of money. We have to be able to put the distraction aside and go out and work. If Scottie doesn’t come back, that’s his choice. You have to live with your own choices. For me, my choices paid off. Some people might not like the choices I’ve made, but they’ve definitely paid off. It’s a different situation with Scottie.”
One of Pippen’s ways of dealing with the anger was to pick up the phone and call Reinsdorf for their first chat in a couple of years. “He just wanted to be traded,” Reinsdorf said. “He said he hated Krause. He couldn’t even refer to him by name. He kept calling him ‘your general manager.’”
Reinsdorf said he told Pippen that Krause hadn’t been shopping him around in trades but merely listening to other teams’ offers.
“I talked to him for about 20 minutes, and he was supposed to call me back but he never did,” Pippen revealed later. “He just sort of talked his way around some things. I’m still waiting on that call.”