Winter looked up at Jordan holding the box and nodded that, yes, he wanted it.
Jordan could have walked four feet and handed it to him. Instead, he turned it over in his hand, looked at it a moment, curled his lip just a bit and dropped the box at his own feet. If Winter wanted it, he would have to get up and pick it up off the floor.
Perhaps Jordan didn’t mean it as an insult. But at the very least it was a gesture of thoughtless disrespect, certainly not the kind of behavior fans would expect from His Airness.
Winter ignored it, and went back to his interview.
The incident only proved that, contrary to reports, Jordan was indeed quite human and fallible. As Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly had pointed out in an essay published in May 1998, Jordan performed great deeds of charity in privacy, neither seeking or wanting publicity for his actions. As befitting a role model and public figure of his immense stature, Jordan tried to save his worst moments for privacy, too. As Phil Jackson had explained, living with the master competitor could be trying at times.
At times the issue was merely a matter of Jordan’s playfulness.
“Tex is like a grandpa to all of us,” former Bulls trainer Mark Pfeil once pointed out. “But the players would mock him. Michael used to tease him and stuff. Over everything. One time in practice, Michael sneaked up behind him and pulled Tex’s shorts all the way down to his knees, and there was Tex’s bare butt sticking out.”
Winter smiled at recounting of Jordan’s prank and the star’s occasional testiness. They were small prices to pay for the privilege of working with the game’s ultimate competitor. “I’ve been with Michael now 12 or 13 years,” Winter pointed out. “I’ve been his coach longer than anybody. He’s only three years at North Carolina, four years in high school. The rest of it’s been with the Bulls, and I’ve been with him all but his first year. I really didn’t get very well acquainted with him at first. I just observed him more than anything else. Made kind of a study of him. I’d never seen anyone with such tremendous physical talents, the reflexes particularly. Catlike actions and moves. Alertness.”
All of it, the competitive nature, the physical talent, the leadership skills, the sense of humor, the drive, added up to a package that had fascinated the planet for more than a decade. Jordan was obviously bigger than basketball itself, except perhaps in the eyes of Winter. “I don’t think there’s anybody bigger than the team itself, than the five men functioning on the floor at the same time,” the coach said. “And that includes Michael. I think oftentimes where we might get in trouble is that too many people might think that’s the case, that one player might be bigger than the system or the program, the franchise. And he’s not. Even Michael. I don’t know that he realizes it. It’s probably just as well that he doesn’t. But we’re all dispensable. He would be hard to replace, there’s no question about that. But on the other hand, if the system is sound, the program is sound, the franchise is sound throughout, then it could continue to succeed.”
Having said that, Winter acknowledged that his triangle offense might not last past Jordan’s career itself, at least not in the NBA. In the women’s college game, the offense was thriving. Coach Pat Summitt had successfully incorporated it into her approach at the University of Tennessee, the game’s dominant program. The University of Connecticut, another top women’s program, also made use of the triangle, which Winter attributed to the dedication of female athletes and their coaches and their drive to teach and learn the fundamentals of the game. The NBA, however, seemed to be another story, with both Phoenix and Dallas having tried the offense and failing miserably.
The issue raised questions about the legacy of this great Bulls team. Certainly Jordan and his team had brought vast changes in the economics of the game, but in many ways the prosperity he brought to the game also threatened it. As far as his individual style, there were legitimate questions about the ability of Kobe Bryant and other young players to duplicate it successfully. More important was the style of the team itself. Had the Bulls brought any lasting changes as a group? Would the team’s style of play eventually force other teams to change?
Ron Harper was one of many Bulls who had struggled mightily to adapt to the offense after coming to Chicago. “If I was a coach, there would be some part of this I would try, I think,” Harper said. “But it’s a challenge. On this team you’ve got to know the spots for all five guys. I can go to the five man spot and be a center. I can be a four, a two, a point guard. You have to have guys who are interchangeable, more complete players. If your player is a good isolation guy, if that’s what his skills are meant for, that’s what you’re gonna need to do. But in this game, where the defenses are very solid, you need to get things that change up here and there. The way we play is a new kind of style. It’s old school, too. But it’s so old it’s new. The Bulls have been seen all over. People are seeing how we do things. But what Jim Cleamons tried to do in Dallas, it didn’t work. What they tried to do in Phoenix, it didn’t work. It worked sometimes, but they didn’t have enough success. Some teams have some players who’ve gotta have the ball all the time. On our team, guys don’t have to have the basketball all the time. Here, you very seldom see a guy hold the ball all the time. You have to pass and move yourself. You got to learn that you won’t have the basketball on this team here.”
Scott Burrell, who had also struggled with the triangle, said learning the system required immense patience because it left new players feeling out of synch. “It just makes you off balance and not ready to go out and play,” he said. “It drops your confidence ‘cause you can’t really go out there and play like you could. I think players lose with it because they don’t have faith in it. You gotta have faith in it. It’s hard to sell. You gotta have faith that it’s gonna work.
Jud Buechler was one of those players who had taken a quick liking to Winter’s offense. “Are you kidding me?” Buechler said when asked about it. “The triangle has given me a chance to play in this league. All the offenses in the NBA now, everything is so one-on-one, get the ball in isolation. As a player, it’s not a very fun style to play, because if you’re not that guy with the ball then you’re just standing around out there. I was the guy standing in the parking lot on the other side of the floor going, ‘Illegal defense!’ the whole time to the referee. I came to Chicago, and all that changed. The way the triangle is set up, you pass, you move, you make decisions. It’s more of a team game; it gets everybody involved. And that was my style of play. It’s definitely helped me.
“If you talk to anybody who knows anything about the game of basketball, they’ll tell you that they love to watch the Bulls play first of all because of Michael and Dennis and Scottie and the talent we have,” Buechler said. “But they also like the style and the way we play ball. Everyone touches the ball. You share it. It’s an exciting way to play. It’s the way every player would like to have it. Who wants to turn on a game and watch the ball go into the post and watch a guy back a guy down, a guy spaced out on the other side standing around? Those games aren’t very fun to watch.”
Buechler said he understood that Phoenix and Dallas failed in using the triangle, “but they didn’t give it any time. It’s not something you can throw out there for half a season. It takes years. It took this team two or three years to get it down and figure it out.”
“It is the type of offense where you need time,” agreed Bulls assistant Bill Cartwright, a Winter disciple. “You need time with it. You need people to run the offense at maximum speed. They must be able to recognize the cuts, who’s open and who’s not. They must be able to read defenses, and all of that takes time. We’ve been fortunate to have guys here for years running this offense.”
And that, in itself, helped explain why so many NBA teams opted to run isolation offenses. They were put together with quick assembly, while the triangle required many hours of intricate work. It’s the age of McDonald’s, of fast f
ood, of quick turnaround. The isolation offense was quick process in an age of quick processes. The circumstances presented a question: How would the NBA sustain a sense of quality once Michael Jordan’s Bulls ceased to run?
“It’s a very valid question,” Buechler said. “I’m not quite sure. Maybe they could change some of the rules of the game. Most of the offense are set up because of what the NBA has made for rules, particularly illegal defense. They want one-on-one play, they want exciting play. But it’s kind of backfired in terms of the types of offenses teams are running out there right now.”
“I think it’s a problem that the NBA needs to address,” Winter agreed. “What’s happening is that the NBA is a superstar league. It features the players, which it should. But in so doing, then the superstars are the ones who make the money and get the recognition. Consequently, they’re the ones who set the example for everyone who comes along in the league. What happens is, you don’t get team play.
“You see,” he said, “I think this offense is very simple, but it’s so basic that these players with these great individual talents and skills that they’ve developed on the playground don’t want it that simple. They want to make it their contest one on one against somebody, and that’s the thing the NBA is going to have to guard against. Showmanship is important. There’s no question that people come to see Michael Jordan play and to see him score. It’s a superstar league, but I think it has to get back to where the team becomes more important than the individual.”
Michael Jordan’s Bulls had discovered that even though they were a house divided, they could still win, playing against whatever obstacles that happened into their path. Entering April, they defeated the Timberwolves in Chicago, then zipped to Texas for a quick win over Houston before returning home to finish off Washington in the United Center, which had begun to earn a term of affection among Chicago sports fans—“the UC”—much like they might speak of the Eisenhower or the Kennedy.
The early April wins pushed Chicago’s win streak to a season-high 13, and the outburst gave them a nice pad over the Eastern Conference’s second place team, Larry Bird’s Indiana Pacers. In the Western Conference, however, the Utah Jazz hummed along, just ahead of Chicago in the race for homecourt advantage if the teams made it to the championship series.
Utah stumbled first, with a key road loss in Minnesota, opening the way for Chicago to take the best record in the league. The Bulls, however, experienced their own bit of faltering. They lost in Cleveland, then defeated Orlando and became the first team in the league to win 60 games. But then the Pacers came to the UC and met the Bulls with a physical challenge aimed at sending Jordan and his teammates to the line, where they stumbled. The Pacers won handily in Chicago, 114-105, a tremendous confidence booster for Bird’s team. In the aftermath, the Bulls lost again, this time on the road in Detroit, the outgrowth of which was a 62-20 finish to the season. That left them tied with Utah, except that the Jazz had won both games against Chicago during the regular season, meaning they, not the Bulls, would hold the homecourt advantage if the two teams met in the NBA Finals. Some observers continued to believe the Bulls would be vulnerable in the playoffs. After all, Longley was still troubled by aching knees, and the core of the roster showed substantial age. Most of the coaches and players seemed to worry little about that, except perhaps for Tex Winter, who worried about everything.
Instead, the Bulls turned to more important matters, the clashing of words and swords behind the scenes. The public relations struggle between the two sides continued at a feverish pace, with the competitors hoping to influence the thinking of various columnists in Chicago. Krause and Reinsdorf remained quite cautious, while Jackson, perhaps sensing his team’s success on the floor, became emboldened. The coach turned up the tempo of the struggle by speaking publicly on the issue. If nothing else, the situation taught that in the late stages of a struggle, one needed to choose his words very carefully. In retrospect, Jackson would see that the prudent thing would have been just to let the Bulls’ play do most of the talking. But he didn’t do that, and it would cost him.
“And magnificently we will float into the mystic.”
—Van Morrison
12: The Devil’s Advocate
Phil Jackson’s final weeks as coach of the Chicago Bulls were marked by more turbulence. But it was nothing that Michael Jordan couldn’t overcome. After all, the star lived for the playoff season, that time when every synapse in his competitive spirit was fused to every twitch of his muscle fiber, when his will was fully wired and hypercharged. Each spring, it seemed, Jackson and his staff would work on subtle means of reining in that immense force. Each spring, they knew the ultimate futility of their efforts. Their best hope was to preach togetherness, constantly reminding Jordan to include his teammates, to pull them along just enough so that when he needed them, they would be there to help.
Jordan knew this and complied whenever and wherever possible. He was gracious and diplomatic and respectful. Yet that took him just so far. In the end, he was the only one who really understood his attack mentality. Only he could sense when to unleash it. And he would be the first to admit that it wasn’t perfect. But it was damn near close, eerily close some nights, when he would slip into his terminator mode late in a key game with important things on the line. “He’s just so damn confident,” Tex Winter said one playoff night after Jordan had teetered between success and failure, what Winter referred to as the “high-wire act.”
The suspense had never been greater, with the future of his team and his career on the line. In reality, the public relations campaigning of the regular season had been only fun and games, a diversion. In the end, Jordan’s play would send the one single message that trumped all others.
It began in late April with the very first playoff game in the first round against the New Jersey Nets. The Bulls played sluggishly, blew a late, 14-point lead and allowed the young Nets to take them to overtime, where Jordan stole the ball from Kerry Kittles with 90 seconds to play, sped upcourt, tongue out, and dunked. Then he growled.
New Jersey’s Kendall Gill had fouled him going to the basket, and Jordan made the free throw, propelling Chicago to a 96-93 win.
The growl was a tad uncharacteristic, but these were emotional times.
“We walk away feeling lucky more than anything,” said Jordan, who finished with 39 points.
Chicago had opened the playoffs without Luc Longley, who had missed 23 of the previous 25 games with a bad knee. The Bulls had been outrebounded by the Nets in Game 1 and obviously missed his size on the boards. “It’s been incredibly frustrating,” said the 7-foot-2 Longley, the frustration obvious in his voice. “Originally we thought it would be something that wasn’t a big deal.” Yet days had become weeks from March into April, and the Bulls were already thin in the frontcourt.
“With Luc, he’s a very sensitive guy about the way things feel, and you just can’t push him before he’s ready to go,” Chip Schaefer said of the public pressure on Longley to get back into uniform. “I think it’s weighed on him a little bit. He’s had his toughness questioned a number of times, and I think that’s wearing on him, too, to have his toughness questioned.”
Longley would return for the second round of the playoffs, but the speculation hadn’t been fun. Part of the pressure on the center came from the exceptional standard set by Jordan, Schaefer said. “He hasn’t missed a game in the last three seasons, since he came back in 1995. That’s just really extraordinary. That’s just his determination. To me, that’s just his way of saying he refuses to give in. Michael hates to be beholding. He doesn’t want to owe you a favor. If he owes you a favor, it’s like, ‘What can I do to get the favor out of the way?’ There have been times, have been games the past couple of years, where he’s been sick enough or ill enough where he probably shouldn’t have played and probably another guy wouldn’t have played. But to me, that’s him saying, ‘I’m
not gonna give these guys a chance to say I didn’t earn my $33 million. I’m gonna be damn sure of that. I’m not gonna give these guys any ammunition when I sit down with them at the end of the season.’ He’s not gonna give them that chance.”
Actually, trainer controversy had engulfed the New Jersey series almost from the outset, but it didn’t involve player availability. When NBC reported that the Bulls had interviewed New Orleans Saints trainer Dean Kleinschmidt to replace Schaefer, the news touched off speculation that Krause was preparing to name Iowa State’s Tim Floyd to replace Jackson as coach for 1998-99. The report, attributed to Saints coach Mike Ditka, suggested that Floyd, a former Saints ball boy, was pulling his staff together to form the new Bulls regime. Floyd denied the account, and Ditka later issued a retraction.
Kleinschmidt told reporters he had talked with the Bulls but that Floyd had not contacted him on behalf of the team.
“In my search to find the finest possible trainer to carry on the excellent work of Chip Schaefer, I have interviewed Dean Kleinschmidt along with numerous others for that position,” Krause said in a prepared statement before Game 2, trying to quell speculation that the change was another sign of Jackson being pushed out the door. “Nobody else in our organization, or anyone acting on behalf of our organization, has interviewed any of our candidates. We have not hired anybody for any job, including that of head coach.”
Actually, Schaefer had learned in February from someone in his field that Krause was shopping around for another trainer. Each season Schaefer had struggled with the idea of returning to the Bulls because his wife had strong family ties in California and wanted to move back home, but he had assumed the decision to leave would always be his.
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