by Sam Smith
The Bulls were battling a lot of resentment. Earlier in the season, it was suggested that they were winning because of injuries to all the other teams. “We get good and now the league’s bad, right?” Jordan protested one day. “Well, there are some great teams in the league and we’re one of them.”
There were some very good reasons for the team’s success, especially the defense, like the terrorizing fireman’s drill the Bulls had become adept at. Jackson, who pieced it together from the teachings of Bill Fitch, Red Holzman, and Hubie Brown, is a great teacher, and the Bulls worked on it in almost every practice. Four players go against four, with four waiting on defense up the court each time to pick up the players who have penetrated the first group. It’s a scramble to get to the basket, and players learn about fighting pressure, but even more about playing midcourt defense. And midcourt is where the Bulls beat teams. The area from the free-throw line to midcourt is where plays begin, and that’s where the Bulls take teams out of their offense, often turning the mistakes into transition slam dunks by Pippen, Jordan, or Grant. Grant’s speed allows him to double and then retreat to his man, and Jordan and Pippen are the riverboat gamblers of the NBA, sharp dudes who will steal your underwear off you, but carefully. Jordan gambles in games the way he gambles off the court—on everything—and Pippen, though more conservative off the court, has a mean streak in him and likes the challenge of the chase. Together, they look like an octopus coming at a ball handler. And Cartwright is inside, if not to block any shots, then to create fear and loathing with his flailing elbows and bruising body, while Paxson is deadly spotting up for his shot. And while there seemed to be resentment of the Bulls around the Eastern Conference, some of the players saw something else.
“Teams are quitting on us, they’re afraid,” Cartwright noted after the Cleveland game. “You can see it in their eyes. They made a run and they quit. They were satisfied to do that. They don’t think they can beat us. We haven’t been playing that well, but these teams are scared. It’s like when teams used to play the Celtics.”
Mack Calvin was right. The Bulls are not a good free-throw-shooting team. The entire front line was averaging less than 70 percent from the free-throw line. In comparison, no one on the entire Celtics team shot less than 76 percent from the free-throw line. Jackson knew the Bulls were not a good free-throw-shooting team. “Bad mechanics,” he explained. He had set a preseason team goal of 78 percent, but had lowered that to 75 percent, and the Bulls had just reached that level. But Reinsdorf had watched that Bucks game on TV from Florida and seen the Bulls miss 7 free throws in 23 attempts, 70 percent for the game. Reinsdorf couldn’t understand how the Bulls could shoot better than 50 percent from the field and not much better than that from the free-throw line. He’d called Jackson again and wondered.
Jackson knew full well the team’s free-throw-shooting problems were due in large part to the poor form of Pippen, who was not a good outside shooter, either, but had a good shooting percentage because he dunked so often, as did Grant, although Grant was a better straight-on shooter from fifteen feet. Also, Jackson knew that Cartwright, a 79 percent career free-throw shooter, didn’t get many shooting opportunities in the Bulls’ offense, so it was hard for him to be in rhythm when he did get to the free-throw line.
“But short guys don’t understand this,” Jackson explained about Reinsdorf. “They can’t understand how guys cannot make free throws. That’s because they had to make free throws to play. Otherwise, they wouldn’t get in the game. If they couldn’t make ’em, they’d be sitting at home. It’s not that way with the big guys. They played no matter how they shot and nobody worried about the free throws.”
Until they became pros, that is, and small guys paid their salaries.
Wilt Chamberlain, of course, had problems at the foul line. The great scoring machine of NBA history was a 51 percent career free-throw shooter. He never liked to talk about his free-throw shooting because it was a failure and the big menacing Wilt wouldn’t hear of such things. He was an angry giant when he played. Once asked by a fan, “How’s the weather up there?” Chamberlain said, “It’s raining,” and then he spit on him. But the week of the Bulls-Hornets game, Chamberlain had finally agreed to have his number retired in Philadelphia. And he was feeling self-deprecating, a posture unfamiliar to many who knew Wilt, who was living mostly in record books these days. “I went to a psychiatrist once about my free-throw shooting,” Chamberlain deadpanned to reporters. “After six months I was still all screwed up, but the psychiatrist could make ten of ten.”
Jackson wasn’t aware of Chamberlain’s little joke, but he wasn’t joking when he went to Grant, Pippen, and King and asked them all to begin seeing a psychologist. He felt all had poor concentration on the court, and he’d made appointments for each one.
“He’s the one who’s got to be nuts,” Grant later said as he and Pippen canceled their appointments. King simply didn’t show.
On March 18, after a slow start, the Bulls ran away from Denver in the third quarter to a 13-point win in which Jackson got some substantial bench production, particularly from Will Perdue. Perdue was now something of a folk hero to the Stadium crowd, sort of a pet they wildly applauded every time he came into the game. It was a kind of derisive applause, much like that reserved for Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo in Madison Square Garden in the 1970s. Perdue was a clumsy white man who was not a total bumbler after all. He still played mechanically, thinking about shots before taking them, so he got few. But under Vermeil’s program he’d gained strength, and with that confidence he could now rebound without bending his knees to jump. His jump with his arms up was stronger, and he had become a really useful rebounding engine. His hands and feet would never be quick and his defense was still poor; opponents attacked the lane when he was in the game. But he could help, though not yet as much as Cartwright and perhaps not ever. Cartwright didn’t look pretty playing, but no one liked to drive into the paint against Cartwright. If he could knock out Akeem Olajuwon for two months, what might he do with some 6-3 guard? In practice, the players yelled “Incoming” or “Scud missile attack” when Cartwright started winging his elbows as he revved up for a drive to the basket. “Get those Scuds away from me,” Pippen would taunt Cartwright in the locker room in the Stadium, where Cartwright sat next to Pippen. Even the best centers, like Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, routinely were held under their scoring average by Cartwright.
The Bulls pounced on Atlanta again on March 20 and won by 22. It was their fiftieth win—they’d won fifty faster than any team in franchise history—and they had gone 18–1 since the All-Star break. The Hawks were starting to slip now, but many felt Bob Weiss should be Coach of the Year. “For a team that would rather pass a stone than the ball, it’s amazing the way they’ve been playing,” he joked. For the first time in years they had been playing basketball instead of ’Nique ball when Dominique Wilkins had the ball, and Doc ball when Glenn Rivers had the ball, and Mo ball when Moses Malone had the ball and so on.
Cliff Levingston had another good game against the Hawks. He’d had few good efforts this season, mostly because he simply could not figure out the Bulls’ offense and Jackson was afraid to leave him on the court. But he could be active on the boards—scrumming up the game, Jackson liked to call it—and he scored 12 points against the Hawks. Levingston was desperately disliked by some of the Hawks, and during the game Levingston took down John Battle hard on a drive to the basket. With just a few seconds left and the Hawks trailing by 24, the Hawks were yelling for Weiss to call a time-out. They wanted to run a play so they could try to get Levingston. Weiss said there’d be another time.
Earlier, another little drama played itself out at courtside. Kevin Loughery, the Bulls coach when Reinsdorf purchased the team, was now a Hawks assistant. He was sitting on the Hawks’ bench when Krause walked by. Krause usually sits there before the game to watch the Bulls players shooting, but when he saw Loughery he kept going without a word.
&nb
sp; “I knew I was fired the day he got the job,” Loughery recalled. “I knew all about Jerry Krause and he knew that I knew, so he couldn’t have me around.”
Loughery didn’t have much success with the Bulls and was never considered a great tactician, but he remained bitter nevertheless.
“You see,” Loughery was telling a reporter, “I was in Baltimore [as a high-scoring guard] way back when Jerry Krause was there and I knew he had nothing to do with signing Wes Unseld and Earl Monroe and all these guys he takes credit for discovering. And he knows I know and that he couldn’t con me. He was just a gofer.”
“Me and Murph haven’t talked in years,” Krause said to the reporter after he’d left Loughery. “Some guys never forget. He have anything to say?”
A disturbing pattern was developing for the Bulls as they went into Philadelphia and had their nine-game winning streak broken March 22. Jackson had begun to rely less and less on the bench players in important games. Only Perdue and Armstrong were getting any significant playing time, and Grant was feeling the fatigue as he went forty-two minutes and grabbed 10 rebounds, but slowed at the end as Charles Barkley climbed all over the Bulls and Philadelphia ran off a closing 15–4 streak to win 95–90. Jordan hit just 8 of 23 shots, and even though the rest of the starters combined to shoot 58 percent, it was hard to overcome a poor Jordan shooting game. In the team’s other loss in March—to the Pacers—Jordan had also shot 8 of 23. Pippen tried to be diplomatic in his postgame comments. “They forced Michael into taking some shots he doesn’t normally take,” said Pippen about Jordan missing 3 of his last 4 shots against double- and triple-teams. Despite that, Jordan had attempted 4 of the Bulls’ last 6 shots.
Grant, 8 of 10 from the field, had hit his only 2 fourth-quarter attempts and was exasperated. Cartwright, 5 for 9, hadn’t gotten a shot in the fourth quarter; neither had Paxson. They’d seen it before. “If Michael had just shot .500, well… ,” observed Paxson. The victories were almost shrugged off while the losses gnawed and rankled.
Jackson had played all twelve players for some time to try to keep harmony and find a rotation. It hadn’t worked and the starters were now being stretched, including Cartwright, who could least afford it. Jackson was worried about him breaking down since he’d had trouble with his hip and calf. Cartwright told friends he was feeling tired, but he wouldn’t tell Jackson. Jackson talked to him about sitting out a week in April if the races were decided to rest for the playoffs, but Cartwright didn’t like the idea. He felt that for the sake of his timing and game conditioning he needed to play. And, in any case, he felt he needed to be more involved in the offense as playoffs approached, not less. Jackson said they would talk about it again.
But if the Bulls were looking ahead a little, it was hard to blame them. Much had been made in the newspapers and on TV about the rematch with the Pacers because of Reggie Miller’s comments. Copies of the quotes about the Bulls’ lack of talent beyond Jordan had been pasted above the players’ locker stalls. Everyone was asked before the game about them. Miller felt his remarks had been taken out of context and stopped talking to reporters even before the team got to Chicago. In the game, he was heartily booed every time he touched the ball, but he played well and scored 34 points. He had plenty to say in the game, however.
The Pacers are a team known for what the players like to call “talking trash.” Talking trash is the on-court banter and brinkmanship some players use to motivate themselves or harass teammates. Not much goes on among Bulls players, but in Miller and Chuck Person the Pacers have two of the boldest trash talkers in the league.
Early in the game, Pippen went down against a Miller rush to the basket, trying to draw a charging foul. “Get up, you punk-ass motherfucker,” Miller screamed at Pippen. Pippen got the ball the next trip down, drove at Miller, and lost the ball trying to elbow Miller in the head. Pippen would be so annoyed he’d get into early foul trouble, commit 6 turnovers, and score just 10 points. “I should have waited to get him later in the game,” Pippen decided afterward. The taunts and cursing continued throughout the game, but the Bulls could not shake the Pacers until late even after an 11–3 start.
“We got too carried away with all that stuff,” lamented Cartwright. “We expended too much energy early.”
But the game became a riot. Detlef Schrempf got ejected for arguing after being called for a foul. He had previously been elbowed in the head by Cartwright and he was called for pushing with his elbow to ward off Cartwright. And Chuck Person was ejected late and drop-kicked the basketball thirty rows up into the stands in a wild display of emotion that had referee Bill Oakes screaming at him as he left the court.
With three of the six Pacers’ starters gone—Vern Fleming having already left with a back injury—the Bulls took control and won 133–119. It was their twenty-sixth straight home win, and it gave them the second-best all-time NBA home win streak. It would turn out to be good playoff practice for the Bulls, both physically and verbally. But another potentially explosive game was coming up: Olajuwon and the Rockets were coming into the Stadium Monday for the first time since Olajuwon’s injury.
Rockets management had gone near berserk after the injury and had done everything short of posting a bounty on Cartwright’s head. But Cartwright remained cool, and before the game he met Olajuwon on the court and thanked him for his restraint. In Houston, they were now talking about Cartwright as the Rockets’ most valuable player. The Rockets had run off eleven straight wins and had gone 15–10 without Olajuwon. They’d found they had players who could perform and not just watch while Olajuwon spun and drove and shot. And those players, the guards particularly, sliced up the Bulls. Kenny Smith, Vernon Maxwell, and Sleepy Floyd blew by Bulls defenders. The Cartwright-Olajuwon matchup would quickly be forgotten as both seemed timid in trying to avoid another controversy. Olajuwon shot 5 of 17 and Cartwright 2 of 9.
Jordan scored 34 points, thanks mostly to abandoning the offense after halftime and driving to the basket, but he, too, was frustrated. He was hardly satisfied the Bulls were a championship-caliber team yet. “Every time I’d switch guys, then they’d go to the other guy and he’d score,” he complained afterward. “I switch to Kenny and then they go to Maxwell and then B.J.’s in there at the end short-arming shots. Where was Hodges to spread the floor? And they played off Pippen [who went 4 for 17] and he couldn’t do anything. We’re going to see more of that in the playoffs.”
The media celebrated Jordan afterward for playing heroically despite a head cold. Jordan had slept in the trainers’ room before the game and wore a towel around his head at halftime. Both stunts amused the team, since Jordan had gotten sick because he had gone out to play golf Sunday on a cold, windy day after an all-night card session at home with friends. “I asked him why,” said Cartwright, “and he said he doesn’t sleep much. I’ve never seen a guy sick so much in my life.”
The players thought Jordan made much of his illnesses to impress the media, and they were especially appalled when he came out to shoot after halftime wearing a towel like a turban. “Maybe he thought someone in the building didn’t know he was sick,” said Grant.
Earlier, while Jordan slept, Levingston, who had gotten a nasty reputation on the team for sticking by Jordan and becoming something of a cloying toady, lay down next to Jordan and slept. He, too, claimed he was sick. “Cliff play golf, too?” Paxson wondered. “Don’t think so,” said Hodges. “I think it’s sympathy pains.”
The Rockets won by 10 and, more distressing, the Bulls scored 90 points for the second time in three games in playoff-style defensive ball. The Bulls’ bench came up short again, although Armstrong did score 15 points despite a couple of late misses when Houston went on a 9–0 run to assure the victory. Hopson didn’t even get in the game; Levingston played only five minutes and Stacey King, eight. Perdue had now taken King’s time at backup center and King was being used behind Grant, although Jackson felt he didn’t rebound enough to play power forward and threw
off the team’s offense when he was in the game.
The Rockets were now the hottest team in the NBA with their twelfth straight win. The Bulls’ twenty-six game home winning streak was over. They were just 12–12 against the top ten teams in the NBA and 4–7 against the top six in the Western Conference after having been swept in the season series with Houston. Jackson, though, had a way of keeping the team on track, and with a matchup against Boston looming at the end of the month, he knew he had to keep the team from looking ahead.
“Unless we win the next two games [against New Jersey and Washington], playing Boston isn’t going to mean anything,” said Jackson. The Boston game would be the last stand for the Celtics in their effort to overtake the Bulls for best record in the Eastern Conference and home-court advantage should the two teams meet in the playoffs. Kevin McHale hadn’t played in two weeks because of an ankle injury, but the Bulls expected to see him. Larry Bird was laboring like an elderly man with his back problem. Reggie Lewis had sustained back spasms, and Brian Shaw was playing on a bad ankle. The red-shirted Bulls would be the big bad redcoats coming into New England. But before that, there were the Nets and the Bullets.
“Those are the most important games we have coming up,” Jackson insisted. No one believed him.
Jackson was thinking about his offense. He was thinking about the playoffs and isolating Jordan on top of the floor. “It’s the offense everyone fears,” he agreed. But doing so ran counter to the principles preached by Winter and Krause. Jackson was a disciple of the team game, but he recognized the weapon he had in Jordan. And he knew Jordan’s distaste for the offense tended to sabotage it because he refused to cut without the ball.