AT THE START OF THE NEW SEASON, INTEREST IN JORDAN AND the Wizards slackened among the Washington-area fan base. Sales of Wizards season tickets fell, according to a Washington Post report, from roughly 14,000 seats during the first season of his comeback to about 12,000 seats in his second. Twenty-four hours before the team’s first home game against Boston, 1,200 tickets remained unsold, a Wizards publicist blaming the lagging sales on the game’s Halloween date.
The Wizards’ box office was not helped by what happened to the team on the season’s opening night on October 30 in Toronto, where the Wizards lost 74–68, shooting a dreadful 30 percent, and tying a franchise-low for field goals. Coming off the bench in the first quarter, Jordan looked sluggish, hitting only 4 of 14 shots for eight points in 25 minutes. He had more difficulty than ever driving to the hoop, his first 12 shot attempts consisting solely of jumpers.
But it was his 13th attempt, with 3:30 left in a game not out of reach, which drew the most attention. Dribbling out in front of the pack, seemingly on his way to a breakaway dunk, he became conscious of a Toronto defender slightly behind him, guard Alvin Williams. He rose, but he had lifted skittishly and too soon, too low. Triggering memories of his All-Star embarrassment in Philadelphia, he badly missed the dunk, throwing the ball off the back rim, complaining to a ref that he had been brushed from behind. But nobody could see this, and no gift would be bestowed upon him on a night when he went scoreless in the second half, missing all six of his shot attempts. Stackhouse, whose 19 points belied his own struggles, later tossed up an air ball.
None of the Wizards stars played well. With Jordan on the court, Hughes looked tentative. Stackhouse seemed to be searching for space away from Jordan in which to operate. “We started to press a little bit…” Stackhouse told reporters. “We got tight with plays.”
Jordan declared the game “pretty ugly.” He brushed aside his missed dunk (“I exploded pretty good. Just wished I finished it…”), then dismissed any suggestion that his playing time would remain fixed for the foreseeable future at between 25 and 30 minutes a game, as Collins insisted. “No, that’s just a starting point,” Jordan declared, putting Collins on notice.
The 1,200 unsold tickets for the home opener remained on sale the next morning. A greater portent of trouble could be seen inside and around MCI that night. In pricier season ticket sections, large patches of empty seats signaled that well-heeled and corporate ticket holders thought they had something more exhilarating to do than attend a Wizards–Celtics game featuring Jordan. Outside the arena, ticket scalpers faced another tough night. At the beginning of Jordan’s comeback, their business had been great—ordinary people happily paying $300 to $400 for a pair of floor seats, ready to shell out anything to see Jordan. It was what ticket sellers had dreamed about: big bucks every night, Jordan driving street sales up, up and out of sight—to be followed by obscene profits when the expected playoffs came.
But demand had been steadily slowing since the first season’s midway point, a scalper pointed out. It was about the time when fans began showing up with extra tickets—a single ticket here, a pair of tickets there—tickets unused because excitement was ebbing. Most of the scalpers’ tickets came from people with company season seats on or close to the floor, businessmen who arrived at the game with an extra ticket or two because they couldn’t find enough colleagues who wanted to take in another Wizards game. “Look around the floor,” the scalper said. “You’ll see a lot of empty seats here and there—ones, twos. Not everyone’s coming anymore.”
It was like going back to the same popular Broadway play. As a few months passed and demand slackened at the same pace as a culture’s fascination with the show, business went from pantingly hot to simply brisk, and from there slipped to merely very good. And there it would stay—solidly respectable—for a long while, because most people had bought their tickets long before—with season tickets now constituting more than 60 percent of all MCI seats in the Jordan era, and most of the remaining individual tickets purchased weeks in advance of games, a fact that generated a false sense of rabid interest. By midway into the first season, an eyeball assessment suggested that 10 to 20 percent of seats on the floor level went unoccupied on an ordinary night.
This hardly could have been more inevitable. After all, it was not a team that the new ticketholders had come to see but a man and his show, and having seen the spectacle a few times, they had no reason to hurry back. A Jordan game remained an event, but the event did not create the fervor that attached to fans’ embrace of the area’s football Redskins, or that partisans in any city felt toward a franchise with a hold on the city’s passions—say, the old Bulls with the young Jordan. The Washington show was devoid of a deeply caring fan base, reflective of a cultish appeal, the same Jordanphiles and basketball addicts showing up, night after night, as the empties grew from ones and twos to threes and fours in places.
Even with those unfilled seats, the Wizards had announced the same sellout attendance figure every night during that first Jordan season: 20,674.
It was 20,674, whether you could see 100 empties, 500 empties or 2,000. It was always 20,674.
It was a powerful number, but seldom a real number. Something had changed, something hidden by 20,674, something steadily more noticeable in those empty seats on the floor, in the ones and twos. It explained why my 12-year-old son, holding a scalped ticket, could watch Michael Jordan from about ten rows off the floor for $20, with another empty, if purchased, $100 seat alongside him. The thrill of the high rollers and corporate set was wearing off.
By the start of the second season, at least a third of the arena was unoccupied at tipoff for the home opener. Even after all the fans had taken their seats, a solid 20 percent of the arena remained empty. The Wizards would again lead the league in home attendance, as affluent patrons bought most of the good and pricey season seats. But fewer of them were actually showing up.
It was merely more evidence that they were selling an act, not a team. As fans’ fascination with the spectacle cooled, so, too, did their interest wane in Jordan the aging player—a reality evident in the tepid support for him in All-Star balloting. But nothing spoke louder about the absence of a connection than the growing number of empty seats around MCI—in many cases the seats of season ticket holders who had shelled out hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of dollars only to become blasé and turn elsewhere.
For Abe Pollin and Susan O’Malley, this meant needing—as in the pre-Jordan days—to find ways to sell tickets. Under O’Malley’s authority, the Wizards marketing department, seizing upon the expectation that 2002–2003 would be Jordan’s final season, soon unveiled the “Final Flight Plan”—an offer of tickets for six games, the purchase of which would guarantee the buyer free tickets to what was to be Jordan’s final regular season home game, in April. Later, as the Wizards began gearing up to sell tickets for a future team not to include Jordan, the marketing department would extend the offer of free tickets for Jordan’s last home game to anyone willing to purchase a package of tickets to games for the Jordanless Wizards, in the 2003–2004 season.
Privately, Jordan continued to express amazement at what O’Malley would do to make money off his name. That Pollin never countermanded O’Malley ensured that whatever the owner did for him would not be enough.
What Pollin gave him was nothing more or less than the praise the owner periodically showered upon other star players. Occasionally, after a victory at home, Pollin popped into the locker room to congratulate Jordan and his teammates. Jordan would usually still be in his uniform, sweaty, not yet having showered, anxious to get moving. Preceding Pollin, serving as the owner’s advance man, Wes Unseld would arrive in the locker room, telling Jordan, Collins and others, “Mr. Pollin wants to come in and say hi.” Always in public, and usually in private, Unseld referred to the owner as “Mr. Pollin.” Jordan called him “Abe.” It reflected the difference between a longtime executive who viewed himself as an employee and a star who regarded himself as an aspiring titan doing business with an established baron.
And here would come not merely Pollin but Pollin’s small entourage toward Jordan, complete strangers in some cases who, as witnesses remembered, would stare at Jordan, almost wordlessly, as Pollin said to him and others, “I’m so proud of my team.”
The gawking went on long enough, thought one witness, that it felt like the strangers were looking over Jordan the way excited visitors to a horse farm once admired Secretariat, happy and proud of themselves for having made it to this place where they could be up this close to a sight this spectacular—Michael Jordan in front of his locker. Jordan had told people that he didn’t do the “show pony thing” for people, not for anyone, but when Pollin and his entourage appeared, he courteously gave them a few minutes, shaking hands, making small talk. It said much about his feelings toward the Pollin visits, however, that word of them leaked, particularly through those in the locker room who did not care for Pollin, believing his presence at Jordan’s locker was an exercise in ego.
Momentarily finished with Jordan, the owner sought out coaches and other players. “I’m so proud of my team,” he repeated. The line did not go over well in the locker room. It smacked of a rich man’s paternalism to some of the inhabitants, rich themselves. Their reaction bespoke a reality: The players did not think of themselves as part of an owner’s team, nor did they see Pollin as their leader or patriarch. Pollin was just an owner. It was their team, thought several players and at least one official inside. They, not he, did the running and sweating. He had little to do with their daily fight, and so they wished he would stop referring to the Wizards as my team, as if he had the most claim to it.
At the very least, the irritated official thought, Pollin should drop the my and substitute our. It was his organization, but it was their team and their locker room, their territory. They would have preferred that Pollin stay out of it, most of the time. He owned it, he owned everything inside the arena, but it was their sanctuary, and respect for their turf and privacy in the first few minutes after a game was due them. They needed time to relax, to come down from the war on the court, to congratulate or console one another. You do not come inside the players’ and coaches’ sanctuary, the official insisted, so why was it that Pollin did not understand this?
For an outsider, the attitude could be difficult to understand. Pollin owned the club, and so why should he not at least be welcomed inside a locker room whose stalls, uniforms, big-screen TV, medicines, trainers, clubhouse attendants, players and coaches his money had paid for? Why should he not gush about a team he owned and helped to build? But Pollin was the type of owner whom several players and the Wizards officials did not particularly care for. They loved winners, and he was not one. He was neither a money man deeply involved in the day-today details of making them better and happier, nor a money man who completely stayed out of the picture and left the team to be run by executives experienced in basketball.
Instead, Pollin fell between those two types, a man who did not invest as heavily as other NBA owners in his team but who wanted to be closely identified with it. A few players much liked what they had heard of Dallas’s Mark Cuban, who, besides tapping into his fortune to pay huge salaries, heavily invested in new facilities and perks for his players. Absent a Mark Cuban, the disgruntled Wizards official said he would not have minded working for someone like Chicago’s Jerry Reinsdorf, who was regarded as someone who largely kept his distance from the Bulls’ basketball operations during the team’s glory days. Reinsdorf owned the Chicago White Sox, too, and there existed a deep feeling in Chicago that he was far more passionate about the White Sox than the Bulls, that he would have exchanged nearly all his Bulls championships for just one World Series title. People who worked in basketball did not mind such an attitude. They much preferred a businessman who stayed out of their way and did not need anyone’s reflected glory, over someone like Pollin, who seemed to them to talk of my team too much.
Pollin built the team, such as it was, from next to nothing. His organization was not thought to be a great NBA franchise, it was not thought to be even a very good franchise, but Pollin saw it as solid, and improving all the time. “So proud,” he’d say to Jordan and the rest of his players. One night, as Pollin walked back to Jordan’s locker, ready to schmooze a little longer, he found it empty. Jordan had grabbed his clothes and headed for the showers—not rudely, thought the observing official, but only because it seemed that Pollin and his entourage had finished with him for the evening. Pollin was unbothered, ecstatic over his team’s win. “Michael was great, great,” he told somebody. It was a reference to the on-court performance of Michael Jordan, the player.
Even with his skills declining, no player could possibly have loved more the simple act of getting ready to compete. Anyone wishing to prepare for any professional task in life would have been well advised to watch Jordan during warm-ups. Most players gabbed like kids and desultorily shot jumpers. Jordan had rituals that no distraction could penetrate, his free-throw practice looking just as it would in the game: He bounced the ball twice on the floor, aligned its seams, threw it underhand about a foot straight up in the air with enough reverse spin that you could see the seams twirling, caught it, jiggled it slightly, bent his knees, looked down, raised his head, then lifted his arms slowly and shot, always with perfect rotation, the ball’s seams in symmetry—never a knuckleball.
If a teammate’s practice shot caromed weirdly and headed toward him, he merely raised his own basketball and coolly ponged it. Then he resumed his shooting. He did it in a practiced solitude, no matter that thousands stared and the world around him seemed unable to be still. A couple of teammates roughhoused close by. The miniature blimp hovered 20 feet over his head. Cheryl Miller, the former basketball star and now a television commentator, yelled his name from the baseline, trying to get his attention. He gave no sign of perceiving anything but the rim. Bounce, bounce, spin, catch, bend, shoot. He did it 12 times. Then he lifted his head, blinked, heard Miller’s shout, smiled, walked over to her and exchanged kisses on the cheeks.
On this night of the Wizards’ home opener, he had listened to the anthem and taken a seat on the bench, his new ritual. Stepping onto the floor about six minutes into the game, he had a big night, scoring 21 points in 21 minutes, while Stackhouse added 22 points and 10 assists. The Wizards annihilated Boston and won by 45, the worst loss in Celtics franchise history, and predictably, the media and nearly everyone else made too much of it. The Celtics had come into the game woefully tired, their two stars, Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker, having logged 40 and 42 minutes, respectively, in a game just the night before.
Just the same, Jordan looked smooth and efficient, showing no signs of knee problems, his greatest cause for irritation coming late in the third quarter, when the Celtics dispatched a 6′ 1″ rookie named J. R. Bremer to try guarding him while Pierce stuck to defending Stackhouse. Did this suggest that the Celtics thought the Wizards had a new primary threat in Stackhouse, that Jordan had become number two?
As if to punish his foes’ impudence, Jordan immediately hit two jumpers over the undersized Bremer. Afterward, the Wizards’ leading scorer joked about the apparent new order to things. “You can’t disrespect the Godfather like that,” a grinning Stackhouse said of the Celtics’ decision to place Bremer on Jordan.
Everybody smiled on this night. Bryon Russell had played sensational defense, helping to shut down the weary Pierce, limiting him to 16 points, on 3–16 shooting. The Wizards dominated every rebounding statistic, and overwhelmed the Celtics in fast-break points. Collins never had sounded more impressed. “That’s as good as I’ve ever had a team play,” he said, attributing much of the success to the Wizards’ rarely employed running game. “[Before the game] I told the guys: We got to run the floor…. I didn’t want to get in a half-court game [with Boston]…”
Players wanted to celebrate, whispering into cell phones, making plans. Lue hurried out, speeding off in his silver Mercedes. In a hallway, Jordan aides waited for the boss. George Koehler muttered into a phone, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll see you there or at Café Milano. No, no. He feels good.”
And Jordan did. No stim treatment. No shuffle. He was reasonably happy: His teammates had looked good. It was only the second game of the year, but never would the team’s mood be as bright again that season. He talked with pleasure about Kwame Brown, who had played the best games of his career on back-to-back nights. Having pulled down a stunning 18 rebounds and blocked five shots just the night before in Toronto, Brown hit 8 of 12 shots, scored 20 points and blocked six shots against Boston, playing every bit like a first pick in the NBA draft might be projected to perform at some point in his second season. “I think [Brown] is relieved, I’m relieved, everybody is relieved…” Jordan said, then delivered a warning. “The thing he’s gonna have to deal with is it’s expected every night. So you gotta be ready to do it every single night…” Coming on a little heavy, Jordan ratcheted back, concluding on a cheerier note. “If we can get that consistent play from him, he’s infectious to everybody. Everybody feeds off things like that.”
Aside from Jordan and Stackhouse, no Wizard received as much attention as Brown, who received questions aimed at trying to discover how he had emerged from his hellhole. At 20 now, he wasn’t the same kid who had amiably, if hesitantly, answered reporters’ questions a season earlier. The ridicule and doubts had chipped away at him, leaving an edge. “I’m a year older…” Brown icily said to a reporter. “I bet you weren’t the best at your job in your first year.”
The same people kept making the same mistakes around him. Even after two games in which Brown had put up All-Star numbers, a smiling Collins called him “stubborn.” “Kwame—and I say this with great affection—he’s stubborn now…” Collins said. “In all seriousness, there’s a stubborn streak in him that is good from the standpoint of—” Collins paused, floundering already, uncertain where he was going with this on Kwame’s big night. Good from the standpoint of what? “You know, the last year, he fought a lot of things…”
It was Collins’s way of building bridges.
But, even as Wizards officials privately talked of Brown arriving at training camp overweight and out of shape, Brown had demonstrated improvement. Then his play began sliding again, first slowly, then with a rush that left Jordan and Wizards officials more frustrated than ever. Only two weeks after the Boston game, he sunk to a two-point, three-rebound performance against Utah, and Collins had to yank him after 21 minutes.
He already had his own NBA playing history: big games early, followed by a fall that could not be broken. A school of thought had formed that perhaps he had an innate problem with endurance that extended beyond his lack of conditioning. His motivation, or lack of it, still baffled coaches. Although he showed flashes of something, running the court and rebounding better than a year earlier, he didn’t seem to be adding any new dimension to his play—no offensive moves, especially.
The awful feeling began taking hold again that perhaps Jordan and the brass had blown the number one pick in the draft; that, if Kwame didn’t improve relatively soon, the pressure would mount to get rid of him in exchange for whatever the market would bear for a high-risk project player. Maybe, coaches told one another, he could still become the next Jermaine O’Neal. But it seemed just as likely at that moment that they had deluded themselves, a year and a half earlier; that what they had here was a callow kid short on desire and talent. Not a bad kid. Just a kid. A man-child overrated and pushed too soon. And so, in the NBA’s mind-set, maybe a lemon.
What made the pain worse was the knowledge that, in romancing Brown, Jordan and his staff had passed on an opportunity to pursue other young players already in the league, notably Elton Brand and All-Star Shareef Abdur-Rahim. The Wizards’ basketball executives and scouts—all handpicked or approved by Jordan—had looked at other ballyhooed high school players about Brown’s age but they had overlooked more experienced talent, particularly Spain’s nimble, long-armed, seven-foot Pau Gasol, the 21-year-old forward who would become the NBA’s Rookie of the Year. Jordan had been smitten by Brown.
The top man, his brass and the scouting staff settled on either examining the new rage—American high school players—or, in 2002, opting for the safest picks—well-known college stars from big-name schools. They were players whom any group of weekend Fantasy League executives could have picked, the kind of selections that freed a scouting staff, and the top man himself, from having to beat the bushes in search of a gem from a small school. For all of Jordan’s mocking of Jerry Krause, at least Crumbs had traveled and probed enough to consider a little-known kid out of Central Arkansas, Scottie Pippen.
The choices of Jordan’s crew prior to the last of his comeback seasons reflected a new caution. Burned by their experience with Kwame Brown, the unofficial top man and his staff drafted likable, earnest players who had virtually no chance for greatness on a professional level, only a serviceable reliability at best. Each was a major college star whose skills simply did not translate well enough to the pro game to make them superb NBA players. Even after overcoming injuries, Jared Jeffries, a thin but agile 6′ 11″ forward drafted out of Indiana after his sophomore year, would neither look strong nor quick enough to stand out among the league’s best players. Hardworking Juan Dixon, an All-American shooting guard on an NCAA championship team at Maryland (located nearby, which ensured he would be a popular selection) did everything winningly at the college level, but nothing well enough for the NBA—neither skilled enough as a ball handler to play point guard nor quick enough generally to free himself for jumpers or drives. Renowned for his steals in college, he often found himself beaten off the dribble in the pros. The latest two draft choices of the Jordan crew would do nothing to improve the team’s prospects.
Jordan had skillfully presided over one major task during his executive days, unloading those fat contracts of underproducing Wizards veterans. Otherwise, his record as the Wizards’ official and unofficial leader was characterized by missteps, and a preference for favoring friends over fresh faces. The pattern extended into his front office, for which he had hired two of his longtime friends, Rod Higgins and Fred Whitfield. Higgins had played with Jordan in Chicago, later to be an assistant coach and an official in the Golden State front office. Whitfield had no prior NBA experience, a longtime Jordan buddy who had worked at Nike, negotiating deals with NBA players looking for endorsement contracts with the shoe company. Higgins served as the Wizards’ assistant manager, and Whitfield as the director of player personnel, charged with, among other things, understanding the salary cap and closely advising Jordan whenever it came to such matters as how best to unload fat contracts.
The two subordinates were adequate, simply not great, like the rest of Jordan’s basketball operation, which had nothing to show for an abundance of player signings and transactions. The culture of cronyism extended to the hiring of Collins and even the acquisition of a player in 2002. Jordan wanted the Wizards to sign his longtime friend and old teammate Charles Oakley, who, in early 2002, had made clear he would not be signing again with the Bulls. Oakley would turn 39 in the first half of the new season, a 6′ 9″ power forward whose production and playing time had steeply declined during the previous year. But Jordan had fond memories of his off-court days with Oakley, and how Oak had served as his on-court bodyguard. The Wizards signed Oakley.
The move illustrated the cross-purposes at which top Wizards officials worked. Collins did not have plans to play Oakley often. With the organization having decided against re-signing Popeye Jones, Collins preferred to take a chance on younger frontline players like Brown, Haywood and Etan Thomas, having concluded that, at nearly 39, Oakley could not endure heavy playing time. In lieu of giving Oakley many minutes, Collins flattered him, praising his work as a tutor for Brown. It was a human relations strategy destined to blow up, for a simmering Oakley had come to Washington to play. Collins went to him at the start of the season and tried to assuage his irritation. “Oak, I don’t know when your number is going to be called, but you always gotta be ready for me,” Collins said. “That’s why you’re here. And I want you to be a player. You’re not here just to be a cheerleader. You’re going to play.”
“A guy who has been great for Kwame is Charles Oakley,” a smiling Collins told the press, after not playing Oakley at all in the home opener. “I told Oak, ‘You can do more for that guy than I ever could.’”
Oakley projected an agreeable calm early, aiding new assistant coach, Patrick Ewing, in working with the team’s young big men. But with time, he became increasingly perturbed. He tried remaining publicly positive while sending a notice. “I think I can help the team, and I didn’t come here to sit,” Oakley said. “And I don’t think they brought me here to sit. I’m ready. I’m a ready veteran who’s gonna do anything to help. Sometimes you ask yourself…” His words trailed off.
Jordan had lured him, only now he had no real place for him. It was a reflection of sloppy planning everywhere. The off-season jettisoning of veterans Jones, Chris Whitney and Hubert Davis had left a critical vacuum in veteran leadership that would go unfilled.
Things got worse. The new combinations of pieces did not fit. Jordan didn’t think his teammates passed him the ball enough, particularly their new point guard, Larry Hughes. And Jordan believed he himself wasn’t receiving enough playing time. He wanted the problems remedied. Remedied meant immediately. He decided to pay Collins a visit.
He’d experienced a rough first 10 days by the time he reached Collins’s office. He had discovered the difficulty of functioning as a reserve, of coming off the bench cold when everyone expected him to be hot, complaining about needing time to get loose, the reserve’s lament. He went 5–14 for only 10 points, in a loss at Minnesota, where Stackhouse had a productive 25 points and the Wizards blew a nine-point lead during a fourth quarter in which they shot only nine percent.
It grew tougher the next night for him, though not for the team, which won back at home against abysmal Cleveland, with Stackhouse playing spectacularly, scoring 35 points. Hurtling toward the hoop and knocking foes around, the new Wizards star made bank shots, scoops and dunks against a variety of Cleveland defenders, and when the defenders played off him, leery about being beaten inside, he hit a series of jumpers. He made 9 of 16 shots, had three steals and looked like the prospective megastar again.
Meanwhile, Jordan went scoreless through three quarters.
Along the way, a pair of Cleveland defenders, like pickpockets, stole the ball off his dribble, so coolly that for an instant it seemed Jordan didn’t know what had happened. He finished with six points on only 2–6 shooting, the numbers of a suffering benchwarmer. Afterward, virtually all the talk was of Stackhouse. Adrian Dantley, a former NBA star who served as an analyst on Wizards telecasts, excitedly said, “They won the game without Mike. Mike was really not a factor…. Stack is going to walk away with a lot of MVP games. He’s the Man.”
Collins sounded equally enamored of Stackhouse: “He’s fearless. That’s why I’ve always loved Jerry Stackhouse. He will attack the rim, he will put his body in there, he’ll get knocked down…. He gives us atone that we desperately need.”
Trying to spread a little love, Collins segued eventually to Jordan, praising his “great passes. He kept us organized…. And that frees Jerry up to do what he does…”
Suddenly, Collins saw Jordan as a “quarterback,” a distributor of the ball. As in the days when he tried to get Jordan to stop holding the ball by telling his other players that they had to pass more, his spiel sounded designed to plant and reinforce suggestions. “Michael can be a facilitator for us with his brilliance….” he said. “A basketball genius…. And what I would like him to do, without having to handle the ball that much off the dribble, is to be able to get the ball in spots where he can be the quarterback.”
Jordan was subdued. Somebody asked him what it felt like to be a “facilitator.”
“When the time comes, or it presents itself, and Doug asks me, then I’ll step my offense up,” he said slowly, his baritone deeper than ever. “But right now, we got good rhythm with Jerry and the way he’s playin’, and we’ll feed off that.”
“Last question, guys,” the Wizards p.r. guy said.
“No more,” Jordan said.
On the evening of their next game, he entered Collins’s office and told him what he didn’t like.
Collins accepted the blame for not getting the ball to him enough. He assured Jordan that he would make sure his teammates did a better job of feeding him down in the post, from where he could shoot his fallaways.
Playing against a Laker team missing the injured Shaquille O’Neal, Jordan had a fine game, hitting 9 of 14 shots for 25 points in a season-high 30 minutes. But others were the big stars—particularly Kobe Bryant, who had 27, and Stackhouse, who had 29, including the most important hoop of the evening. A three-pointer by the Lakers’ Robert Horry had given the Lakers a one-point advantage with 2.9 seconds left, when the Wizards called time-out to set up an out-of-bounds play.
Collins called for Stackhouse to take the last shot.
The ball wouldn’t be placed in Jordan’s hands at all. Nobody along the bench, not even the old Chicago people like Bach and Oakley, could ever remember that happening. Jordan, who would be guarded by Bryant, would serve as a decoy.
Collins diagrammed the play. Stackhouse would inbound the ball along the left sideline to Russell, who would immediately toss it back to Stackhouse, setting just enough of a screen against Stackhouse’s defender that Stack could hopefully break for the rim along the left side and get a layup, dunk or a short bank shot.
Two-point-nine seconds, Collins told everybody, was plenty of time to get to the rim and either score or get fouled. Jordan would stand in the lane just before the ball was inbounded, then dart toward his right, hopefully luring Bryant and clearing out the left side for Stackhouse.
Jordan said nothing.
The moment encapsulated both the coach’s and his new star’s chief strengths—Collins’s aptitude for drawing up a quick play, and Stackhouse’s gift for bursting to a basket and beating somebody one-on-one.
Everything worked. Stackhouse fed the ball to Russell and received a return pass while Russell set the slightest of screens on the Lakers’ Devean George, who received no defensive help. Stackhouse dunked at the buzzer for the victory. MCI exploded. Kobe Bryant was furious. Jordan was quiet. His teammates pounded Stackhouse’s shoulders.
Almost immediately, the focus turned from the win to questions about how it was that Stackhouse received the ball at the end of the game.
Was the last play really designed for Stackhouse? somebody asked Collins.
“Yes…”
Why not go to Michael?
“I mean, I got two great players,” Collins reasonably answered. “I shouldn’t have to make excuses when we win.”
Stackhouse sounded relaxed. “This is the kind of thing that could catapult us to some really good things…” He complimented Collins on isolating the court for him. “Doug drew up a good play to kind of get everybody to go to the other side of the court, and I had an opportunity to get free.”
Jordan had his own view of the play. “Doug drew it up, and it worked perfectly, in terms of me being the decoy and everybody focusing on me.”
He wanted people to remember the indispensability of his aura on that last play. “I’m going to take more [of the opponent’s] attention…. If you look—everybody is looking at me, as if I’m an option…. [It] was easy to get an easy layup.”
The next night, in Cleveland, the Wizards won by 14, improving their record to 4–3, and Stackhouse led all scorers with 27 while gathering a team-high nine rebounds. The game climaxed a great opening run for Stackhouse, whom the NBA selected as the Eastern Conference’s Player of the Week. No one could have known that his best days of the season were already behind him.
As Jordan’s minutes steadily increased and he inched closer to taking back what he wanted, both he and Stackhouse were plagued by bouts of erratic play, wild swings during a string of losses in which each player would score in the high 20s on some nights and in single-digits on others. Stackhouse suddenly could not make a jumper. “There’s a lot happening,” he muttered. “A lot of new adjustments to make.”
Jordan said nothing critical about Stackhouse’s performances, and that alone made their relationship different from Jordan’s dealings with other players. He continued losing confidence in Larry Hughes, finally going to the new point guard and telling him that he had to do a better job of getting him the ball. If he didn’t get him the ball enough, he would be on the bench.
With the team’s three offensive threats struggling, the club made no headway in the Eastern Conference playoff race. Jordan had simultaneously run out of patience with his playing status and the team’s performance. After Hughes had only two points and Stackhouse went 4–19 with only nine points in a loss at Memphis, Jordan told the media that it might be time for him to play considerably more.
Collins publicly surrendered. “I’ve tried to keep my eye on [Jordan’s minutes],” he said. “But I don’t think Michael wants me to keep my eye on that. Michael feels he is strong enough to do these things. All the eyes are on me about the minutes, but I have to trust him. It’s his body, and he knows what he can and cannot do.”
On Thanksgiving Day, Jordan announced that the season would be his last as a player, finding the precise words that he thought would free everyone from worrying about his body, declaring he had no future as a player. He would play out the season, he told reporters, and return to Wizards management. “I think we have the right [players] in place,” Jordan said. “They will continue with their education when I go back upstairs.”
The team lost its fifth in a row the next night in Indiana, sinking to 6–9. Afterward, Jordan told Collins that his role as a reserve had ended, that he wanted to be returned to the starting lineup immediately. He became the starting shooting guard the following night at home against Philadelphia, taking the place of Jerry Stackhouse, who, in turn, took the small-forward position of Bryon Russell.
Stackhouse had a luminous evening, scoring a season-high 38 points. Jordan added 16 points, hitting 8–20 shots in a season-high 37 minutes. To look at the scoring lines of the Wizards’ two stars—a combined 54 points from the duo—suggested a big night for Washington, especially since Juan Dixon had come off the bench to score an unexpected 18.
But the Wizards had only four fast-break points to Philadelphia’s 23. In their two games before Jordan’s return as a starter, they had averaged more than 15 fast-break points, with the team frequently piling up fast-break points in the high teens and low 20s. That statistic meant nothing now: the team did not run with Jordan on the floor. If Jordan wanted to slow down, Stackhouse and others complied.
Such deference made for cordial relations between the two stars, but it also made for two games within a game, two styles of disjointed play, the way an All-Star Game feels. The individual statistics of the two stars were glittering, but the whole was less than the sum of the parts. Philadelphia’s 19-point advantage in fast-break points meant the visitors enjoyed a one-point lead with less than 10 seconds to play. Then Jordan blocked an Allen Iverson shot. Washington had the ball. The Wizards called time-out with 5.4 seconds left.
Collins diagrammed another last-second inbounds play. The coach ordered that the ball go to an isolated Jordan around the top of the key. Jordan, who would be guarded by Aaron McKie, would either drive to the basket or shoot a pull-up jumper. If Philly double-teamed him, he would pass outside to Stackhouse.
The play looked stymied from the beginning. Jordan drove from the top of the key down the left side, hoping at least to be fouled, only to be cut off and double-teamed by the Sixers’ Keith Van Horn. Down to three seconds now. Jordan went up in the air, with Van Horn so high above him that a block was certain if he tried to shoot. He attempted a pass to Russell underneath the basket. The ball was tipped, Van Horn reaching for it as the horn ended the game. The Wizards had lost six straight, to fall to 6–10. They scored 94 points, their two stars having combined to shoot better than 50 percent, and they were still losers. The game, serving as a microcosm of the season, bore lessons. All-Stars do not make teams. Gods do not necessarily fare well when coupled with aspiring gods.
Walking off the court, Jordan mumbled disgustedly to himself. Later, he told his teammates, You cannot NOT get a shot in that situation.
No one uttered that he was the one who did not get off the shot.
“We made a lot of dumb mistakes,” Jordan said to the scrum.
It was a display of pique to be oft repeated. He had entered the starting lineup with the team three games under .500, the same spot in which it found itself, 10 evenings later, in early December. Then came the first of his many memorable insults that season. After a blowout loss at home to Portland, a team graced by Scottie Pippen, Jordan found himself being prodded by questions that he interpreted as suggesting that Pippen finally had bested him. His pride kicked in. “His horses were ready,” Jordan said, in dismissive distillation, “and my mules were sick.”
Almost always in his adult life, he had restrained himself when the cameras rolled. His composure broke more often now, an anger growing in direct proportion to the pressure mounting on both the professional and personal fronts. In late October, he had filed a lawsuit in Cook County, Illinois, against his former mistress Karla Knafel, alleging she was trying to extort $5 million from him—$5 million being the exact sum that, according to Knafel, Jordan owed her as part of an oral agreement, in the early ’90s, that had called for her not to publicly reveal their sexual relationship or to file a paternity suit against him, as she was pregnant at the time with a child that turned out not to be Jordan’s. In his suit, Jordan acknowledged paying Knafel $250,000 to keep quiet about their affair. A famous man, with an image to protect, had worried about a secret, and tried buying somebody off. Now he asked that she be prohibited from seeking any more money from him.
Jordan declined comment about his lawsuit, other than to say one day during the preseason, “That’s private. That’s totally private.”
No one in the media asked him about the subject for a month. Then Knafel filed a countersuit against him in late November, asking the Cook County court for enforcement of the alleged oral agreement, including the $5 million payment. The odds of Knafel legally prevailing were slim. Even if she could prove that Jordan made such a promise (it would be her word against his), Jordan’s attorney might point to several court decisions outside of Illinois that had declared such hush-money agreements unenforceable, and powerfully argue that Illinois courts should follow the same path.
But Knafel’s countersuit presented a public relations mess for Jordan. Her suit offered details of their relationship from its origins, in the spring of 1989. Allegedly, NBA referee Eddie F. Rush met Knafel on an evening when she performed as a singer in an Indianapolis hotel, and that same night introduced her over the telephone to Jordan, raising the question of the nature of the relationship between a league ref and the NBA’s most famous player, particularly whether the ref was doing some friendly pimping for the player that might leave his objectivity about Jordan forever compromised. Otherwise, the alleged details sounded unremarkable, as NBA affairs go. The star and the aspiring singer saw each other infrequently over the next two years, perhaps together on no more than six occasions, according to sources close to Knafel. But their relationship continued even after he married. In Phoenix, they dined together, had sex and went go-carting, according to her story, which included accounts of how she occasionally accompanied him in public—once to a commercial shoot.
Casual seemed the best characterization of their affair. Knafel had no expectations that he would be monogamous, as she wasn’t. But that hardly was relevant to the impact that her suit and story might have on Jordan’s stature. Knafel’s attorneys had a photo of their client and Jordan together on a bed—a picture taken, they claimed, in a Phoenix hotel room. Everything that the Jordan attorneys and publicists had hoped to keep private was breaking publicly, including information that the two sides supposedly engaged in settlement talks that had broken off.
It was about the time that pundits—his defenders and detractors—began assigning dueling adjectives like “great” and “disillusioning” to Jordan, when neither of those words really fit. If he were a literary character, he wouldn’t have been a god but more like John Updike’s former basketball star and aging dreamer Rabbit Angstrom—glib, kind of charming, always believing it will happen for him, looking for the next gamble, and gripped by a wanderlust he hadn’t yet come to terms with. The disdain for Jordan’s extramarital mischief in particular always missed the point. He never displayed a sordid character in the relative sense of that term (how many Americans engage in adultery, after all?), but simply an ordinary character—ordinary in his cravings, ordinary in his failings, ordinary like many American males who have belittled their work associates, or sniped from the shadows at the big boss running the operation, or manipulated underlings, or had affairs, or neglected the people closest to them, or left wives and children at long stretches to gamble and golf. Ordinary.
However, from the beginning, ordinary would never do, not for a commercial god whose image and words would sell an estimated $2 billion worth of goods during his career. You needed an image transcendent for that, something mythic, and his partners had seen that this happened. It was a certainty that, at some point, a portion of the media would scrutinize the image—which is what made the Karla Knafel episode potentially so dangerous to his image and marketing appeal, and much of why he had tried to buy her silence in the first place. So what once had been simply ordinary now sounded cynical and manipulative, raising further questions about him.
In Wizards country, it was taboo to ask about Knafel. Two days after the filing of Knafel’s countersuit, a television camera crew came to MCI after a practice on November 21, approaching Jordan for a comment about Knafel’s move. As usual, Jordan wore something from his Jordan Brand wardrobe for the cameras—on this day, a Carolina–blue and white letterman’s jacket with a big J on it, and his tall Carolina blue fez-like hat.
Jordan decided against talking, hurriedly striding down an MCI hallway alongside a woman from the Wizards’ p.r. department, the camera crew following, filming.
A man from the crew asked him, “Any comment at all? On the lawsuit?”
“Nothing,” interjected the p.r. woman.
The TV man repeated his question.
Jordan angrily tried shooing him away: “Come on, dude. Come on, man. Come on now. My goodness. Why don’t you come here every day? Don’t just come here yesterday or today. Come here every day. Then I give you respect.”
It was instinct now for much of sports media to back off or downplay sensitive stories involving Jordan, or risk becoming a pariah. His publicist already had told me that I would not be receiving any more one-on-one sit-down interviews with Jordan (though no other print journalist in the country received one either). By the winter of Jordan’s second season, I was regarded as a troublemaker, a reality that his publicist made no effort to hide. I’d already written about his sway over Doug Collins. I’d revealed that he called Kwame Brown a faggot. I’d reported on his belittling of teammates, and the roots of his failed relationship with Richard Hamilton. I’d written about his gambling night in Uncasville, Connecticut, and the closed practices in violation of league rules. And he knew I would eventually be writing about the Knafel matter, as I’d been asking people about it. In short, I’d seriously gotten myself on his bad side. If journalists wanted to know the risk of being in such a place, they needed only to look at what had happened years earlier to no less august a publication than Sports Illustrated.
After he retired from basketball for the first time, and went off to hit about .200 for the Double-A Birmingham Barons in the Chicago White Sox organization, Sports Illustrated ran an article positing that he and the White Sox were embarrassing baseball. It would be part of just one out of 52 cover stories that the magazine ran on Jordan by 2003, the vast majority of which were flattering, a few even worshipful. But anybody wanting to know what Jordan expected from the media needed only to watch the respected Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum approach him after a game, during the second comeback season.
McCallum, whom Jordan liked and who’d had nothing to do with the baseball article, hoped for a personal interview to be woven into a prospective story about Jordan’s 40th birthday, in February 2003. He broached the idea to Jordan alongside a wall leading out of the locker room.
“Yeah, my girl told me about it,” Jordan said, glancing up at the ceiling. “I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
You’re not going to talk to me, McCallum said.
“I talked to you,” Jordan said, looking down at him and rubbing the top of McCallum’s head. What clasping elbows and shoulders had become for Bill Clinton, rubbing heads was for Jordan. “I talked to you. I still love you. I still love you; I just don’t love your magazine.”
McCallum allowed as to how this had been going on a long time.
Now Jordan smiled through pursed lips. There would be no story for Sports Illustrated. He looked at McCallum and then turned his head toward a writer along the wall whose presence had come to irk him, glancing at me for a couple of seconds. He looked back at McCallum, then quickly eyed me again, raising his voice slightly. “I carry grudges.”
I can’t say I was surprised.
What surprised me, however, was something a Washington Post colleague said to me, a few months earlier: “I hear Mike Wilbon isn’t talking to you. It’s in a magazine. It says he won’t talk to you.”
Michael Wilbon is a sports columnist at the Post, as well as an acquaintance and admirer of Jordan. David Falk happily described him, with tape recorders running, as “our buddy.”
The colleague showed me the line in the magazine that said Mike Wilbon was not speaking to me. It was along the lines of this: Sources say Wilbon won’t talk to Leahy.
I decided to let the thing blow over. But something happened at the end of the first comeback season that seemed destined to make things nastier. An article appeared in City Paper, the alternative Washington weekly, which contrasted a story I’d written about Jordan to Wilbon’s years of columns about Jordan.
A section of the article was certain to leave bad feelings. The reviewer began by quoting portions of Wilbon’s columns about Jordan, including this Wilbon passage about the start of the 2001–2002 season’s training camp: “There was one important thing you could feel on the practice court even after Jordan left the court: energy. Make that two things: energy and hope.”
Then the reviewer put Wilbon on the horns of a dilemma, by basically asking what his much-touted relationship with Jordan had delivered for his readers. What had Wilbon gotten for all his presumed connections within the NBA and the Jordan camp? Why did he so seldom seem to turn up anything revealing about Jordan? Why had he not uncovered and/or written about any of the matters that appeared in my story?
In brushing aside the criticism, Wilbon told the City Paper that he disagreed with much that I’d written about Jordan. Fair enough. I kept quiet, not wanting a public spat with a Post colleague. Less than a year later, during a Post online chat with readers, Wilbon publicly said that he didn’t care to read anything I wrote on the subject of professional basketball (this meant Jordan, as I’d never written about any NBA subject other than Jordan). The dustup felt like something from junior high, but it was out there now. I felt free to reply.
All along, I thought that Wilbon’s treatment of Jordan highlighted the basic danger in getting too cozy with a subject. Many sportswriters believe they have something special merely because they have a relationship with an athlete, and therefore access. That access lends a certain cachet; they can tell their friends and colleagues that they have the athlete’s private cell-phone number and can get him on the phone when big stories break. But what sportswriters in that situation never tell their readers is that their access lasts only as long as their cooperation does, that at the moment the latter is called into question by the athlete, their access wanes or ends altogether. If the journalist ceases to be malleable or ever writes anything deeply critical about his athlete, their relationship dies.
That wasn’t going to happen here: Wilbon always could be relied upon to provide the steadfast Jordan defense and generally trumpet the latest wave of Jordan optimism. Embracing Jordan’s vision during the last comeback season, Wilbon predicted that the Wizards would reach the finals of the Eastern Conference playoffs. He would keep that cell-phone number.
But what did such conditional access yield for him? Such a sportswriter relied on Jordan to be his chief source about Jordan. That arrangement could only favor the star, who now had a conduit for whatever message he wanted to deliver to the Wizards, the league and the public. If things ever were to get bad for Jordan with Pollin (and things would, of course), then he could get on the phone with Wilbon and deliver a rebuttal. It was as if, in that moment, the athlete had his own column.
And that is when sports columnizing about a figure like Jordan becomes celebrity journalism, an exercise in giving the deified celebrity-athlete a forum to say whatever he wishes, and making it sound noble. The arrangement has been around as long as the sportswriting profession. It was the way of many sportswriters during the first half of the 20th century, and Hedda Hopper, too. It was part of the basic compact between sports businesses and sportswriters. It is why, historically, sportswriting has given us but half stories about too many celebrated athletes, until long after the athletes’ departures from the games and sometimes from life. Joe DiMaggio was a half-story during his career. Babe Ruth, too. And Marciano, Louis and Mantle. The problem with being so cozy to a Jordan is that the basic compact is always in place. And it is a short fall from being a sportswriter to an adjunct publicist.
So I found myself alone in Washington in writing about such things as hush money and Jordan calling Kwame Brown a faggot. It was like being a castaway.
Amid the bright hopes for the Jordan-Stackhouse coupling, the Wizards went 8–7 in December, which brought their record at the close of the calendar year to 14–17. The most painful loss in that span came at home, the day after Christmas, when the team faced Detroit, the occasion marking Richard Hamilton’s return to MCI. Jordan already had taken a veiled swipe at Hamilton, talking about how the Wizards finally had found someone capable of guarding a strong guard like Kobe Bryant, that the team had suffered in that same matchup a season earlier. “Last year, in L.A., when [Bryant] got that [intensity], he took over the game,” Jordan said. “We made it a point that it wouldn’t happen this year. We got someone who, I think, can definitely challenge him, and that’s Stack and B-Russell.”
Hamilton and Jordan matched up against each other for a part of the game, with Hamilton winning their personal and statistical battle, scoring 22 to Jordan’s 17 and outplaying him through key stretches of the second half. Ben Wallace, another ex-Wizard who had found success in Detroit, blocked a Jordan shot in a critical moment. The Wizards led at the end of three quarters, then unraveled in the game’s final minutes. Jordan had four turnovers in the fourth quarter alone. The last two were the most costly. First, he had the ball slapped away by Pistons defender Michael Curry, unable to retrieve it in time to shoot before the shot clock expired. Then with 15 seconds left in the game, trailing by three and battling Curry’s tight defense, he dribbled the ball off Curry’s foot. Lue dived for it and somehow got it back to Jordan, who was promptly stripped again, the theft leading to a Pistons dunk, wrapping up the game.
“We went dead in the water,” Collins said. “And when our team does that, I can’t bring them out of it. I can’t do it.”
Hamilton whooped going off the court, ecstatic in the visitors’ locker room. He looked as though the Pistons had won a Game Seven. Someone asked him how he felt when Jordan lost the ball during the Wizards’ final possession. “Oh, happy,” Hamilton said. “You know, happy. I couldn’t feel anything better than that. M.C. [Michael Curry] played great defense on him. He turned the ball over, and we pulled it out.”
Did he feel vindicated?
He rubbed a towel slowly over his FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME chest tattoo, as if burnishing it. “Uhhh, I can’t really call it revenge. I just say, Man, we’re one up on them. I know they’re over there heartbroken.” He allowed himself a little smile. “I’ve been in that locker room before. And I’m just happy to be in this locker room right now.”
Who got the better end of the deal in the Stack-Hamilton trade? someone else asked. Was he happy being in Detroit?
He deftly ignored the first question, answered the second. “Oh, I’m happy [with Detroit], man. I mean, I definitely feel welcome. It’s good to feel appreciated for what you do.”
Is that how you felt in Washington?
He rubbed his towel against his tattoo for a few seconds more, just thinking. He answered slowly. “Like I said, it’s good to feel appreciated. I feel welcome [in Detroit]. And that’s all a player asks—to feel welcome.”
He never had looked happier inside MCI. He asked about former teammates, like Tyrone Nesby, who had gone off to Europe to play. He hugged old friends. His big night against his old team had been a jettisoned player’s dream. He allowed as how the Pistons’ system was more suited to him. “There’s opportunity to develop me,” he said. “By myself. You know what I mean? I can—what’s that word I’m looking for—just do me. Everybody is looking at me to step up and make things happen…. And the coach has been great…”
He had another thought. He put his shirt on over his tattoo, buttoned it, looked around, wondered how he wanted to put this. “Them trading me, you know, it was kind of funny, because when I first got here [in Washington], it was like, Man, [I knew that even] if I go ahead and blow up [play well], they might trade me. I ain’t got no hard feelings about [the Wizards]. I’m in a winning situation now, you know.”
He would be in the playoffs that year and, increasingly, it looked as if the Wizards might not be again. Hamilton now took his own swipe. “[The Wizards] have the greatest player ever to play the game,” he said, smiling. “When I played with him, I always felt we had an opportunity to win. I don’t know what their problem is now. That’s something they have to figure out—it’s not our problem.”
About 75 feet away, and 20 minutes later, the man whose problem it was stood before microphones. “We had no offensive rhythm,” Jordan said. He wouldn’t compliment the player in the other locker room whom he had shipped away. “He felt he had something to prove,” he said of Hamilton. “So he came out and forced the issue…. I think we did a pretty good hold on him…. And in the second half, I don’t think he made that big of an impact.”
“I think the trade was a good thing,” Hamilton concluded, smiling.
On that same night, the Wizards began slowly coming apart. Jerry Stackhouse had become upset at Doug Collins’s demand for more passes and plays in their half-court offense, particularly during the last minutes of the game. He’d led the team in scoring with 24 points, but the team had lost, and he felt he had hardly touched the ball when it counted most. He believed he wasn’t getting nearly enough opportunities to run or attack the rim. Worse, he thought, Collins’s strategy had deprived him of the chance to exploit physical mismatches against smaller, slower defenders, like his former Pistons teammate Jon Barry. “I should be wearing out his ass, but I can’t do it if I don’t have the ball,” Stackhouse said. “[Collins says], ‘Pass the ball, pass the ball.’ But we’re not playing instinctively.”
In the next game, a home win over Atlanta, Stackhouse shot 21 times and had 29 points, at his best in the final minutes.
Is this what you wanted tonight? someone asked him afterward. Having the ball more down the stretch?
“Yes,” he said tersely.
Player relations threatened to become a bigger problem for Collins. As usual, Larry Hughes had started that night at point guard, but Collins sat him down in favor of Ty Lue with the game on the line. In a setup offense, Lue did a better job than Hughes of distributing the ball, thought some of the coaches, who realized, besides, that Jordan increasingly preferred having Lue on the floor in critical situations. Collins worried about Hughes’s reaction if he continued being lifted from games in key moments. Given Stackhouse’s public peevishness, it already had been a hard week; Collins didn’t need any more dissenters. His stress seemed to be mounting. “You always run the risk [as a coach],” Collins said, “of [thinking], ‘I hope Larry’s okay.’ I’m so ultrasensitive to these guys’ feelings…I’ll tell you, as a coach, one thing you find out in losing [is], You better walk on eggshells, because guys just get so sensitive.”
The next 10 days should have been the most pleasurable of the season for Collins. The team had its only notable run all year, winning five games in a row, and Jordan scored 41 points—the 117th 40-point game of his career, and his first of his season—during a valiant 53-minute performance in a double-overtime victory at home over Indiana. For the first time in his comeback, he found his range from behind the three-point line, hitting three of four bombs, to go along with 12 rebounds. It was the high point of a stretch in which Jordan won Eastern Conference Player of the Week honors.
Even with 61 points between Jordan and Stackhouse on their home floor, however, the team had struggled to beat Indiana. They would have lost but for the 23 points of Hughes, who had shot 19 times, a fat number reflective of Hughes’s need to shine, too. Hughes was quite open about his aspirations: He wanted nothing less than to be regarded as among the top 15 players in the league. His whole life, he thought, had been pointing toward this moment—a measure of stardom, big money ($4.9 million that season), a chance to join the league’s elite and an opportunity to help his family. In large part, he had left St. Louis University after his freshman year because his younger brother had recently undergone a heart transplant, and his family had no health insurance. He would do whatever was necessary, he said, to take care of his family.
He had an up-tempo style at odds with Jordan’s walk-it-up-and-set-down-low preference. Time was
running out on Hughes’s point-guard days. Just as the coaches thought about slashing his playing minutes, however, he would have a big night, and keep his position. A week after Indiana, he had 16 points and 11 rebounds in a loss against his old Golden State teammates, and 22 points and eight assists during the following week in a win over Orlando. He couldn’t be successfully melded into the Jordan team, but, with all his gifts, he couldn’t be spurned yet either, the coaches told one another.
The team was a prisoner of all its offensive talent. But the refs could roll only one ball onto the court. Nothing was going to change: Jordan remained exasperated with Hughes, and Stackhouse was increasingly dissatisfied as Jordan assumed greater control over the style of the offense. Collins’s quandary was impossible to resolve. How could the coach satisfy the demands of such indulged stars—one an aging god, the other a 28-year-old new to the team and presumably in his prime—each of whom had spent nearly all his career accustomed to having an offense built around his demands?
Stackhouse badly wanted to run, but by then, Collins had come to believe, despite his early season enthusiasm for fast breaks, that he did not have the players, particularly a sterling point guard, to run effectively. Besides, with Jordan scoring in big numbers again, the team didn’t need to run, thought Collins, who could point to Jordan’s 32 points in a 15-point victory over Orlando as proof of the setup game’s effectiveness.
But, with the Wizards, even good produced bad: So reliable was Jordan’s shot in stretches that running became ever rarer, making it difficult for the team to shift gears when the idol tired and his shot betrayed him. Often when the Wizards had a clear opportunity to fast-break, Collins’s booming voice rang out with a play, halting everyone.
Though he wouldn’t yet publicly say it, Stackhouse thought the coaches were catering to Jordan. His mood had grown darker. A Wizards official thought he saw a major blunder in the works. He pointed out that Stackhouse could run, Hughes could run, Lue could run, Kwame could run. Early in the year, before Jordan reentered the starting lineup, they frequently ran with effectiveness. Why not run? he asked. “Setting up, with five players on five,” said the official, “is the hardest way to score a lot of the time. But Doug always has thought he had Michael and the strategy to beat you. Michael liked that. And for Doug it was like, Give me the chalk and I can always find a shot for Michael or Stack.”
Openly displaying his skepticism to Collins’s approach, Charles Oakley weighed in. “Doug calls plays ninety, ninety-five percent of the time,” said Oakley. “It’s good to have a system. But when we play those teams in the West that like to run, it’s hard to run plays on them every night. I know you want to show you’re Coach of the Year, but sometimes you gotta run.”
With potential fast breaks cut off, the young players looked over their shoulders and waited for Jordan. Arriving downcourt, he often bore fruit, another fadeaway jumper whistling the net. But the dependency on him came at a cost to several players’ spirits and the team’s versatility. Privately, Collins had lost confidence, said the official, in the team’s young big men, including Brendan Haywood, so that as the season moved into its second half, the team’s options narrowed further still. Now, besides having little inclination to run, there was virtually no plan for an inside game with a center or power forward. The limits of the Wizards’ game plan meant that whenever Jordan went cold in the stretch, the team could generally be fitted for a coffin. It would not matter then that Collins screamed for ball movement, or called out instructions. The set plays ended with low-percentage perimeter shots, a disproportionate number cast by Jordan and Stackhouse, the latter of whom was becoming rankled that he couldn’t just grab the ball and go.
Nonetheless, Collins preached confidence, at least in front of the team. In mid-January, he told his players that they had a realistic shot of seizing home-court advantage in the opening round of the playoffs.
By then, dissatisfaction verging on dissension gripped the club. The scene at a time-out during a January game was illustrative of a .500 team sliding toward ruin. With the Wizards trailing and Collins fuming about people not listening, the players began grumbling among themselves about not taking advantage of fast-break opportunities, the strife bursting into the open. One person on the bench listened incredulously, thinking, It’s coming apart. Players sniped at one another, some directly, others behind their teammates’ backs:
“Wake up, Kwame.”
“We gotta run. Had fuckin’ numbers there, three-on-one there.”
“Fuckin’ Stack gonna take another shot?” (This was mumbled. No one would have likely said this to Stackhouse’s face.)
“Coulda gone got a dunk. We had numbers.”
“Attack the fuckin’ rim.”
“Be quiet.”
“Everybody’s standin’—why are we standin’?”
An exasperated Jordan shut them up, barking: “Settle down. Pass the ball. Slow it down.”
For several seconds, the man who always had a play to run had no play. He just looked at all of them. The players hardly noticed, filling the silence by resuming their muttering and bitching at one another. Collins finally interrupted, resuming his diagramming, staring hard at Kwame, as if to say—thought the observer in the huddle—Pay attention. Collins had a play: Michael off a screen.
Now that’s a fuckin’ surprise, thought the observer.
None of the players said anything. Collins shouted: We can do this.
Silence.
They were the most sensitive, the most fragile team he’d ever been around, he privately told people.
He had so much, and he had nothing.