Encouraged by his coach, Jordan was already preparing a similar adjustment, which would be aided by an offensive system that rephrased the new tactics presented by the defense as gifts. Jackson believed it was no longer a matter of how high he jumped. The opponents’ new defensive tactics actually worked in Jordan’s favor by forcing him to a more sustainable approach.
“My game is less spectacular because I’m taking more outside shots,” he acknowledged. “People saw… my creativity a little better because I was going to the hole more and creating more and dunking on people more and more. It’s tough to get in there now because everyone’s clogging the paint. Most of my inside play now is strictly from post-ups. When I’m on the perimeter, either the double-team is started or they back up and give me the jump shot.”
Jumpers were always a function of the confidence of the moment, not just for Jordan but for anyone playing the game. The triangle provided him an important option if he got backed into that corner. Instead of shooting jumpers or trying to knife through the defense to attack the basket, he could now slip into the low post and feel confident that the offense would deliver him the ball at just the right moment.
“It’s just an adjustment to the way people play me,” he explained, “and it’s not really because of my physical deficiency or deterioration. It’s more the way teams are playing me.”
Watching Jordan find those post-up moments in the previous playoffs had made Jackson confident that his star would continue in adjusting his game, sustaining his success. Jordan cautioned that he wasn’t going to engage in wild experimentation, just subtle adjustment. And he did offer this promise to his many fans: there would still be dunks. “My game is such that creativity is always going to be a part of it,” he told Isaacson. “But it just happens. It’s not something I plan. It was something I was taught very early in my career. To go out and try to please the crowd, you never really play the game you want to play.”
Despite all that, the 1992–93 season still opened with a quick, unforeseen flare-up when Horace Grant took umbrage at Jackson’s allowing Jordan and Pippen to sit out portions of training camp. The coach was concerned that they recover from their busy summers. Grant complained to reporters about “double standards” and “preferential treatment.” Later in the season, he would accuse Pippen of arrogance. Ultimately, this sniping would cause a rift between the two friends, but both agreed that they weren’t as close as they had been. It was the sort of divisiveness that Jackson loathed. To go with it, the Bulls encountered a rash of physical ailments. Cartwright, thirty-five, and Paxson, thirty-two, had off-season surgery on their creaky knees, and Pippen would be troubled by a bad ankle for most of the year. For Jordan, the pains were first his arch, then his wrist, and always the ever-present tendinitis in his knees.
B. J. Armstrong, who had struggled with the Bulls’ triple-post offense, finally was comfortable enough to replace Paxson in the starting lineup. The coaches had decided that the twenty-one-year-old Armstrong was simply better equipped to play in the Bulls’ pressure defense, and that would make the difference in the playoffs. Plus, he would lead the league in three-point shooting, hitting better than 45 percent.
For the regular season, however, Jackson planned to back off from the pressure defense, hoping to conserve his players’ energy and health. The move irritated Jordan, who felt that without their defense, games became harder to win. The change also revealed another issue for the veteran club: boredom. The slowed pace worked against them until at one point during the season Jordan called an on-court huddle and told his teammates to resume the pressure. Later, he debated Jackson’s strategy with reporters. “Maybe we gamble and we lose our legs,” he said. “I still don’t think we get conservative now. When we slow down, things get too deliberate.”
If nothing else, the issue demonstrated the mental interplay between the coach and star player. Sometimes it resembled a board game in which Jordan was perfectly capable of holding his own.
In the end, these issues merely added entertainment value. Their only real opponent was what Jordan called “monotony,” that loss of joy that had concerned Jackson at the start of the season. December would bring the coach’s two hundredth win. He had reached the mark faster than any coach in league history. Concerned as he was about his off-kilter team, he took little sense of achievement from the milestone.
“Guys were hurt,” Jackson explained. “Pippen with his ankle, Jordan with his plantar fascia. All of those things prevented us from getting a rhythm. We weren’t in great condition. So when practices were done hard and precise, we ended up suffering in our game effort.”
Rather than miss games, Jordan had to sit out his favorite time with the team. “I have always liked practice,” he said, “and I hate to miss it. It’s like taking a math class. When you miss that one day, you feel like you missed a lot. You take extra work to make up for that one day. I’ve always been a practice player. I believe in it.”
His loss of being able to experience joy in practice was the first major sign, he would say later. Practice was where he had played some of his best basketball. The things he did there were the prelude to his performances in games. He had always approached it with tremendous anticipation and enthusiasm. It had never been something to just get through, or to sit out.
“I knew it was time for me to get out,” he would say later, looking back.
“They were tired,” recalled Bulls trainer Chip Schaefer. “No question. Michael and Scottie were tired in the fall of ’92. That was just a tough long year and really a tough year for Michael. It seemed like one thing after another. The press was picking on him, things just happening all year long. As soon as one thing would let up, it seemed like another came into play. There was one book or one incident constantly. It got to be not about basketball but personal things that really shouldn’t have been part of it at all. You could just see it starting to wear on him a little bit. In some private moments, he expressed that. It was really evident that he was getting tired, tired physically, tired mentally of the whole thing.”
The situation left Jackson digging in his bag of mental tricks to keep things fresh and to keep his team motivated. “Phil played a lot of mind games,” Jordan recalled. “He waged psychological warfare to make you realize the things you have to do to be a winner.”
Some rewards along the way helped out. On January 8, Jordan scored his twenty thousandth career point, a total he had reached in just 620 games. The only man to do it faster was Chamberlain, who reached the milestone in 499 games. “It looks like I fell short of Wilt again, which is a privilege,” Jordan said. “I won’t evaluate this until I’m away from the game. I’m happy about it, but we still have a long season to go. I’m sure as I get older, I’ll cherish it more.”
No matter how hard Jackson worked, the team always returned to the same issues. In a telling span of games that same month with Orlando, Magic coach Matt Guokas instructed his roster, which included rookie center Shaquille O’Neal, to keep their attention on Jordan. “Every time he had the ball at the free throw line extended and below, we would double-team him with the next closest guy,” Guokas recalled. “Then we made sure we would rotate to John Paxson because we were concerned about his shooting. We were leaving a lot of things open. And Michael just carved us up.”
He found open teammates, and everyone reveled in the victory. Left unguarded for stretches, Pippen and Grant had big nights and the Bulls won easily. Two games later, the teams met again in Chicago Stadium, and this time, Guokas elected to let Jordan roam while they worked to keep his teammates covered. Orlando was missing starters Nick Anderson and Dennis Scott that night.
“I said, ‘There’s no way we double-team him,’ ” Guokas recalled. He tabbed role player Anthony Bowie to take Jordan on defense. “I said, ‘I don’t care what he gets, but no dunks, no layups. Make sure you’re back on defense. Give him all the jumpers he wants.’ Which was the way everybody played Michael earlier in his career. So we go out and we�
��re dropping off of him, playing about eight to ten feet off, taking away his drive. But it’s one of those nights where he’s hitting his jumper.”
Jordan took shot after open shot, a career-high 49 attempts, 7 more than all of his teammates combined, and they began to look disgusted while the Magic kept it close. “We’re still in the game,” Guokas recalled. “And their guys are not.”
The contest went to overtime, and Jordan finished with 64, his second-highest game. The Magic, though, came away with the win, confirming for Guokas that the best strategy was still to try to make Jordan a one-man team.
In March, Washington Bullets rookie LaBradford Smith scored 37 against him in Chicago, and afterward Jordan claimed Smith had told him “Nice game, Mike.” Jordan was supposedly furious at the comment. In the postgame show, he talked of being embarrassed and how it wouldn’t happen the next night, when the two teams were scheduled to meet again in Washington. He later said he would get all 37 points back by halftime, and spent much of the time talking about his retribution and psyching himself up. Although he seldom came onto the floor early for pregame shooting, he was out there the next night, working himself into a groove. He started the game 8 of 8 and would go on to post 36 by the half. He finished with 47, but it would be years before he admitted that he made the whole thing up. Smith had never said anything to him. He had falsified the entire affair as a means of driving himself to play at a higher level. The question was, how much longer could he play mind games with himself?
For each of the previous four seasons, his team had played more than one hundred games, and his knees had begun to feel every one of them. A week later in Houston, he sat tiredly in the locker room before the game and recognized that he was losing his legendary focus. His teammates, consumed with their own issues, were much the same, and Jordan realized this was exactly why teams failed to repeat as champions.
Jackson had sensed earlier in the season that his team was headed to the point where the players thought more about the future than they did the game in front of them. “My biggest lesson about being successful is that you don’t change,” Jordan would explain later. “The people around you change. When we became successful as an organization, a lot of people around this organization started to change. A lot of people can’t deal with being successful.”
First, he said, they become focused on their own interests, on what they don’t have. “That’s not a fun mentality to have,” he added.
He then began telling his teammates he was done. They’d have a couple of beers after a game, and he would talk about it. No one believed him. But he began telling others, too, like his father, the people in his entourage, Dean Smith, and other confidants. His teammates considered it merely bellyaching. Jordan decided that if he was nearing the finish, he wanted to close it out in the right fashion.
Would he and his teammates be able to outrun these bad thoughts long enough to win another title? Dean Smith had always wanted to come see Jordan play in Chicago, and he showed up at one of the final regular-season games that spring. They visited before the game, and Jordan told his old mentor that he was thinking about moving on from the game. Jordan went out and played self-consciously that night, mindful that Smith would reserve his greatest scrutiny for his defensive play. In Carolina practices, the coach awarded points for defense, not offense. Any time that he knew Smith was watching him on TV, Jordan tried to make sure he focused on defense. He would laugh to himself, thinking that he was almost a decade out of school and still Smith had that power over him. On this night late in the season, he played poorly on offense and put all of his energy into defense.
With two final losses, to Charlotte and New York, the Bulls finished with fifty-seven wins, their fourth straight fifty-win season, good for another divisional championship, but they had lost home-court advantage for the playoffs to the Knicks. Individually, Jordan would claim a seventh straight scoring crown (30.3 points per game), tying him with Wilt Chamberlain. He would be named All-NBA first team again, and both he and Pippen would make the All-Defense first team.
“It’s a funny thing to look at the history of the NBA and the way teams kind of rise and fall,” trainer Chip Schaefer noted. “For all intents and purposes, it looked like it was going to be New York’s year. They paid their dues. The Knicks absolutely destroyed us, beat us by 37 points in late November that year. They played like it was Game 7 in the playoffs. We went in kind of yawning. No big deal. Michael sprained his foot early in the game, and they just crushed us. We still won fifty-seven games that year, but we just kind of foundered.”
For two years, the Knicks had seen their championship hopes end in seven-game playoff battles with the Bulls. They figured they needed the home-court advantage to advance out of Jordan’s shadow. New York coach Pat Riley drove his team to sixty wins and gained that edge. The Bulls, meanwhile, seemed almost distracted heading into the playoffs. But they quickly picked up the pace, sweeping three from Atlanta in the first round, then devastating the Cleveland Cavaliers again by winning four straight. Jordan capped the series with a last-second game winner in Cleveland that closed the chapter on his domination of the Cavaliers.
“Once the playoffs rolled around,” Schaefer recalled, “Michael managed to turn it on again. But we faced New York again. We didn’t have home court so there really wasn’t much reason to be optimistic about it.”
Jordan hated the Knicks. “They play like the Pistons,” he said testily. Moreover, Jackson and Riley still disliked each other from their playing days. In Game 1 in Madison Square Garden, the Knicks knocked Jordan into a 10-for-27 shooting night and won, 98–90. “I told the team I let them down,” Jordan said, but the same thing happened in Game 2. He missed 20 of 32 shots, and New York seized a two-game lead, 96–91. Afterward, the smugness in the city was tangible—and for good reason. “Now the Bulls are down two games and have to beat the Knicks four games out of five games if they are going to have a chance at three titles in a row,” wrote New York Daily News columnist Mike Lupica.
The outcome was further weighted in the aftermath with a New York Times report that Jordan had been seen at an Atlantic City casino in the wee hours before Game 2, suggesting that perhaps he wasn’t properly rested for competition. Jackson and Krause quickly came to his defense. “There is no problem with Michael Jordan,” Krause told reporters. “He cares about winning and is one of the great winners of all time.”
“We don’t need a curfew,” Jackson added. “These are adults.… You have to have other things in your life or the pressure becomes too great.”
Jordan himself was unrepentant, but his father stepped up and explained to reporters that he had encouraged his son to go to Atlantic City. Privately, however, many around the team were staggered by the father’s poor judgment. Jordan already faced scrutiny and an NBA investigation over the Slim Bouler case, and James Jordan thought it might be a good idea for his son to go gamble in Atlantic City in the midst of a playoff series?
With this issue hovering over the team, the series moved to Chicago. “The Bulls came back for practice at the Berto Center,” recalled veteran Chicago radio reporter Cheryl Raye-Stout. “I’ve never seen as much media gathered for an event. Michael stepped out of the training room, and I said, ‘Michael, would you just go over the chain of events for us? Would you tell us what happened and where this story is coming from?’ He did, and then a television newsperson from a local Chicago station started grilling him as though he were an alderman being convicted of a crime. Chuck Goudie from Channel 7 was saying things like, ‘Do you do this before every game? Do you have a gambling problem?’ He kept hammering and hammering away, and eventually Michael just shut up and walked away.”
Jordan ceased speaking with the media, and his teammates followed suit, which would lead to fines from the NBA for violating media policy.
James Jordan had hovered around for years, smiling pleasantly, joking with those in and around the team, continually encouraging his son. Now, with the tension hi
gh and his son seething, he picked a rainy Sunday to talk to the media outside the team’s practice facility. “I don’t mind speaking for Michael,” he said. “He’s my child. You do whatever you can for your child.”
He had told Michael privately that he believed he had no more challenges on the court, that it was the off-court issues that were driving him away from the game, and now James began his talk with the reporters first by almost pleading, but then his voice lost any softness. “He knows he’s in the fishbowl, under the microscope,” the father said, adding that there should be some time in Jordan’s life where that was not the case. “You just have to say, ‘Hey, this guy’s human.’ I mean, what is enough? That’s the big question right now, what is enough? Pretty soon, when you keep tipping the bucket up, there’s not going to be anything in there after a while. You’re going to pour it all out. And that’s what we should start realizing as fans.”
Trying to offer insight about his son, James Jordan told reporters, “My son doesn’t have a gambling problem. He has a competition problem.”
The immediate competition problem was the Knicks. Jordan was sure his Bulls would win. The hole was deep, it seemed, but they had found the bottom. With Pippen taking charge, Chicago won big in Game 3 in the Stadium, 103–83.
“The moment I knew we were going to win that series was after Game 3,” Chip Schaefer recalled. “After we’d beat them pretty soundly and brought the series back to 2–1, Patrick Ewing made a comment that, ‘We don’t have to win here in Chicago.’ As soon as I heard him say that, I knew we were going to win the series. If you have that attitude, you may lose a game and lose your edge. You can’t assume you’re going to win all of your home games. As soon as he said that, it told me he was counting on winning all their home games, which wasn’t going to happen. It was Scottie who got us that series. He always seemed to have a knack when Michael might have been having a tough time, to step up and do what needed to be done.”
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