Suddenly, Chicago’s record was 4-4, and observers suggested that perhaps Jordan was carrying too much of the burden. He was averaging 26 points a game but, with an inflamed right wrist and sore right index finger, his usually stellar field goal shooting had drooped to the 38 percent range. “When he does try to do too much it means that he feels there’s a lack of aggressiveness by his teammates,” Jackson told reporters. “They don’t know what to do or they’re floundering. So he picks up the ball and starts carrying it on his own, and right now he’s not shooting well enough to do that.”
What was worse, neither were his teammates. As a team, Chicago was shooting 41.5 percent and scoring 87.5 points per game. For 1997, the Bulls had averaged 103 points per game. Without Pippen, they had failed to score 100 points in any of their eight games. “Our offense has always been able to provide Michael space to score, and the other players an opportunity to hit open shots when he’s double-teamed,” Jackson said. “Right now, what’s really frustrating is that he’s finding guys off the double-team and we’re not making those shots.”
“Those of us around Michael aren’t contributing enough, and Michael’s trying to take it upon himself to score,” Steve Kerr agreed. “As a result, we’re out of whack.”
Kerr would finally figure that his own poor performances were a matter of worrying about the team’s conflict, about the future. It was then, early in the season, that he decided just to have fun, as Jackson had been encouraging them all to do, “to live for the moment.”
“We’re in a shooting slump. We have been since the season started,” Jackson acknowledged. “We’ll break free of it, and when we do we’re going to win games in bunches.”
It looked like Rodman would contribute to the woes that Friday night, November 14th against the Charlotte Hornets. As game time grew nearer, he was no where to be found. The next day, headlines would report the incident as yet another sign of impending doom for the team. Yet Rodman had actually been sidetracked by nature. Driving to the United Center, he had been suddenly struck by the need to go to the bathroom. Then the urge became immediate. Unfortunately, he was in a residential area. Frantically, he got on his cell phone and dialed the United Center looking for directions to a restroom. Apparently that effort produced no results, but one of his assistants thought of a place where Rodman could stop, knock on the door to somebody’s home and ask to use the facilities.
He walked into the locker room at 7:25, just minutes before the 7:30 game. “Everybody was ready to run out on the court, and Dennis comes strolling in,” said one team source. “Phil looked at him and said, ‘Dennis, how nice of you to join us.’ You’d think he would have hurried up, but he took his time, got a shower, ate his chicken dinner and walked out on the court.”
Rodman didn’t appear on the bench until 7:59 remained in the first quarter. He checked into the game with 6:52 left after Jason Caffey was called for a second foul.
“Then Dennis just turned it on and got a bunch of rebounds, and we won,” said a team employee. “Who else could do that?”
“Free will, it’s like butterfly wings.”
—The Devil’s Advocate
7: The Wild, Wild West
For every season of their 32 years of existence, the Chicago Bulls had packed up in November and headed west for an extended road trip. In the old days, their disappearance usually cleared the Chicago Stadium schedule for a visit from the circus.
On the other hand, it could be argued that just about every year, the Bulls seemed to take the circus with them. As writer Kent McDill of the Daily Herald once pointed out, there was always something going on. Either one of the team’s stars was making the gossip columns of the local West Coast papers after being seen in a strip bar, or something truly strange would come up. Such as the November 1996 trip, when center Luc Longley severely injured his shoulder while body surfing.
“It’s always a tough haul,” Jackson said of the long ride out west.
Even in the Bulls’ earliest days, the excursions were marked by weirdness and bad luck. Take, for example, the sad case of Reggie Harding, who joined the Bulls in the fall of 1967 when they had lost 11 of their first 12 games. Desperate to shore up their weakness at center that season, the coaching staff had pulled in the 6-foot-11 Harding from the Detroit Pistons. One of the first players to move directly from high school to the pros, Harding had struggled with the adjustment and had even been suspended for the 1965-66 season. Sadly, time would show that Harding, who had been raised on Detroit’s mean streets, could never overcome his gangster background. (He would be shot to death in 1972.) He was known for finishing practice and leaving without showering, pausing only to towel off and spin the cylinder on his revolver. Once while playing in Detroit, Harding apparently began shooting at teammate Terry Dischinger’s feet to make him “dance.”
Legend has it that Harding robbed the same gas station three times in his own Detroit neighborhood. According to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the third time Harding robbed the place, the attendant said, “I know that’s you, Reggie.”
“No, man, it ain’t me,” Reg was said to have replied. “Shut up, and give me the money!”
One night, Bulls guard Flynn Robinson awakened in the dark, cut on the light and supposedly found Harding pointing a gun at him. The Bulls, however, were almost desperate enough to overlook the strange behavior.
“I got a chance to get Reggie Harding,” recalled the team’s first coach, Johnny Kerr. “We needed a big center. I had heard about his pistol. Rumor had it that he carried it in his gym bag … He’d play one-on-one with Flynn Robinson. Flynn would beat him, and Reggie would say, ‘Get out of here Flynn before I pistol whip you.’ Everybody figured he might have it with him.
“When we were in the midst of that losing streak in November ‘67, we played the Lakers in Los Angeles,” Kerr recalled. “We needed a win in the worst way, and we had a one-point lead with just a few seconds left on the clock. The Lakers got the ball at half court, and I put Reggie in to guard Mel Counts, their big guy. I didn’t want them getting an alley-oop. Counts set up out near the free throw line, but Walt Hazzard, who was taking the ball out of bounds, threw the ball over the backboard and the buzzer sounded. I was jumping around and screaming because we had finally won a game. I looked up, and Reggie had decked Mel Counts. He got up and shot two free throws and beat us.”
During that same West Coast trip, Harding was called home for his mother’s funeral. For the next 10 days, the Bulls didn’t hear from him. Finally he returned to the team, saying that he had been appointed executor of his mother’s estate and needed the extra time away. A few days later, the Bulls placed Reggie Harding on waivers.
As the Bulls struggled to prominence over the years, their West Coast trips would always seem to mix the wonderful and the terrible. For example, in November 1986 Jordan averaged better than 41 points over the team’s seven-game western road swing. The Bulls lost six of those games.
By the 1990s, however, the West Coast trip had become something of a passage to greatness for the team. As Bill Wennington explained, when the team racked up six wins against a single loss in November 1995, it showed the Bulls just how dominant they could be and helped spur them to their record-setting 72-win season. Likewise, the next year they again won six games on the first western swing and knew their chemistry was still cooking. Thus, a 69-win season.
Yet the first western trip was also the time that Krause chose each year to travel with the team and evaluate the roster he had assembled. The things he saw then could help him make decisions on trades and other moves before the February trading deadline.
Krause’s presence around the team also created the potential for conflict and heavy razzing on the team bus and plane. Despite the charged atmosphere between the coach and GM during the 1997 offseason, Jackson had again attempted to persuade Krause not to travel with the team.
“Basically, in my conversation with Jerry in the preseason,” Jackson said, “I had asked him not to go. I said, ‘You always insist on going. I don’t think this is a good year to go.’ He said, ‘I know you could stop this stuff if you wanted to.’ I said, ‘Jerry, it’s what they feel like. If I stood up in this situation and tried to stop this, I would alienate this team.’”
Jackson viewed the extended trips as a time for the players and coaches to bond together, to seal their unity and commitment for another championship run. Because of that, he decided to bring the injured Pippen along. The forward wouldn’t be able to play, but he would undergo limited workouts and spend extra time with his teammates. “I brought Scottie along to get him back in stride with the guys, to practice with the team,” Jackson explained. “There was a chance he was going to be able to come back December 10. We didn’t want him to be out too long, and this was an opportunity, his first practice chance. He wouldn’t have the opportunity to practice if he stayed behind.”
At the time, the Bulls were not a team brimming with confidence. They had lost all three of their road games in the young season and badly needed to re-establish their prowess in the hostile environment of another team’s arena. It was a dramatic turnaround. The two previous seasons they had rung up phenomenal road records of 33-8 and 30-11. “The circumstances are different,” Steve Kerr, who had a bruised knee, told reporters. “I’d be surprised if we could pull off 6-1, frankly. We’re not playing well enough.”
“A certain understanding of going into the enemy’s territory and bonding together,” is how Jordan, who was averaging just under 25 points a game while shooting just under 40 percent from the floor, summed it up. “This is a great time for it, knowing we haven’t had much success on the road.”
This time around, the Bulls were scheduled to open with a Thursday night game at Phoenix, then visit the Los Angeles Clippers, Sacramento Kings and Seattle Super Sonics, then stop by Chicago for a two-day break at Thanksgiving before visiting Indiana, Washington and Boston. Without Pippen on the floor, the challenge against the running and gunning Suns would be controlling the game’s ebb and flow, Jordan explained to the media. “If we can dictate the tempo, we’re in good shape. If we let them dictate, we know we can’t run up and down like they can. They’re definitely looking to push the ball and outscore you. We want to keep the numbers way below 100 if we can.”
Without Pippen, the Bulls were averaging only 88.4 points per game, ranking them 28th among the 29 NBA teams in scoring. Worse yet, they weren’t shooting the ball well and were turning the ball over 18 or 19 times a game. Without Pippen, the game also became much harder for Jordan, because other teams found it much easier to double- and triple-team him.
“You hate to keep harping on his return, but let’s be honest—the guy is one of the great players ever … and he affects every aspect of the game,” Kerr said. “Until he’s back, I don’t think we can consider ourselves the real Bulls.”
Pippen would later admit that he wasn’t exactly unhappy with the circumstances. After yet another offseason in which Krause again explored trading the star forward, the Bulls were now getting a scorching lesson in just how essential he was to their chemistry. Without him, the Bulls had no teeth. They were old, too, and like old men, they had to gum their way through games.
To ease up the offensive pressure on Jordan, Jackson figured he would try starting sixth man Kukoc, which gave Chicago something of a three-guard offense. The main problem there was that doctors had just discovered Steve Kerr would miss several games with a cracked femur, meaning that the struggling bench would get dramatically weaker.
Jackson had told his assistants of his intention to make this final season one of great fun, but just weeks into the schedule it was clearly not fun. Tex Winter watched Jackson struggle with not only his own emotions but those of his players. “We have been working on the physical, mental and spiritual sides of these players,” Jackson admitted to the reporters covering the team, “to increase their appetite for the game, their hunger for playing, making basketball fun.”
Winning, though, was fun, and the Bulls couldn’t accomplish that against the Suns. “We lost the game in Phoenix in which Dennis had a wide-open layup down the stretch and he missed it,” Jackson recalled. “We lost a game we probably should have won on the road again.”
It didn’t help matters that before the Phoenix game, Rodman had jetted to Oakland for a Rolling Stones/ Pearl Jam concert, then topped off the excursion afterward by stopping in Vegas to roll bones into the wee hours.
Normally, when the Bulls were dominant, the team was willing to overlook Rodman’s indifference on offense. But with Pippen out, that indifference grew as yet another item in Jordan’s craw.
On the team plane that night from Phoenix to Los Angeles, Krause decided to approach Jordan, Pippen, Randy Brown, Scott Burrell and Ron Harper as they were playing their usual card game at the back of the plane. The team had decided that Steve Kerr, who was injured, could go home to be with his pregnant wife. But that created a problem in that Kerr and little used rookie Keith Booth were scheduled to make a promotional appearance with Jerry Reinsdorf in Sacramento. The team chairman had not been around the team yet. What made the circumstances worse was that Krause had a speck of cream cheese on his face from a post-game snack. From several accounts of the incident, the ribbing he received was substantial. Krause spoke to the players for a few minutes without success in finding a replacement for Kerr and left.
Then, about 15 minutes later, the GM made another run back to the group to try again. According to accounts of the incident, he still had the cream cheese on his face, creating shades of his earlier days with the team, when one or more of the players concocted the “Crumbs” nickname.
Krause’s second visit to the card game reportedly drew some chiding barbs from Jordan along the lines of, “What’s the matter with you, Jerry? Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to eat?”
“We all know that Jerry likes to eat,” Harper would say later. “He don’t know that he has food on his face, though. But he likes to eat, though. MJ told him. MJ said some words to him and we laughed at him. But, you know, Jerry wants to be part of the team. He’d be very successful if he stayed away.”
Ultimately, Harper agreed to go on the appearance with Reinsdorf in Sacramento, not out of any sense of allegiance to the chairman or the GM but because he didn’t want the rookie Booth to be stuck alone making the appearance. As it turned out, the appearance was a nice event, Harper said, and in person Reinsdorf was great. “Jerry’s a good guy,” Harper said, pointing out that the team chairman made sure that the event promoter didn’t try to keep the players too long.
As for Krause, Harper said, “He’s brought some players to this team, but he has some players who are frustrated with the way he treats them and the things that he says. It’s a cumulative thing. It’s added up over the years. It’s not like it’s gonna go away overnight.”
Jordan’s answer to the losing streak was his biggest scoring outburst of the regular season, 49 points against the Clippers, the 150th time he had scored more than 40 in a game. The performance was tempered by the fact that it was the lowly Clippers, and the Bulls needed double overtime to vanquish them. Still, it was a win, and the Bulls wouldn’t have gained it if Jordan hadn’t come up with a Jordanesque play off his own missed free throw at the end of regulation to send the game to overtime.
The Clippers, who had only one win to go with 11 losses, held a 102-100 lead with 15.7 seconds to go in the game. Jordan was fouled, but missed his first free throw. When the second shot came off the back of the rim, Jordan got the rebound, took the ball back up top, then executed a move on the Clippers’ Brent Barry for the tying layup.
In the second overtime, Jordan scored all nine of Chicago’s points, giving him a run of 13 straight points, for the 111-102 win.
After the game, Daily Herald writer
Kent McDill noticed Pippen sitting alone in the locker room. “There was a chair next to him,” McDill recalled. “So I just went over to say hi and see how things were going, when he thought he was gonna come back. And I said something about what game are you aiming for. And he said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna play for the Bulls anymore.’ Ron Harper was standing next to him, and Ron looked down at him and made some sort of snide remark. Scottie was laughing, and then he went on: ‘I’m tired of the way I’ve been treated, and I don’t want to play for any team that Jerry Krause is on or represents. I don’t want to represent Jerry Krause.’ He said a bunch of that stuff. Then he and Harper started laughing about where they were going to end up, what team they were gonna play for and this other stuff. Then Scottie finally looked at me and said, ‘I want to be traded.’
“It was all too jocular for me to actually write it,” McDill said. “It all seemed kind of silly. I knew that the Bulls probably wouldn’t trade him even if he wanted to be traded.”
Later Jackson would note that Pippen’s agent had come to Los Angeles. “I just heard his agent had been in L.A.,” the coach said, implying that agent Jimmy Sexton’s presence might have had something to do with Pippen’s statements.
McDill didn’t write the story after the Friday night game in Los Angeles. But on Sunday in Sacramento he saw Pippen again. “Before the game he was standing there before introductions,” the reporter recalled. “And I just said to him, ‘When are you going to have your press conference to announce that you want to be traded?’ He said, ‘As soon as you write the story.’ So I asked a couple more questions. Then I went into the press room and started writing down the stuff that had happened Friday night as well. At halftime, I saw him again, and he said, ‘Are you gonna write it?’ I said, ‘To be honest with you, I already did.’ I told him what the story was gonna say, and he said, ‘That’s exactly how I feel. I want to be traded. I don’t want to play with the Bulls anymore.’
Blood on the Horns Page 20