The Jordan Rules

by Sam Smith

  At the same time, Jackson revered those Bulls for their defense—they still hold the all-time league record for most games in a season in which opponents scored under 100 points. They controlled the court by forcing opponents to alter their offense, a technique Jackson would later adopt for his own Bulls; it would become their most successful tactic.

  Describing Motta’s team, Jackson wrote, “Chicago stops the ball from moving by taking away the passing lanes. They literally isolate the man with the ball and force a team into playing baseline basketball … Norm Van Lier, for example, can pick off a laterally thrown pass just by outrunning the ball. Playing against the Bulls makes a team slow down and make sure of their passes. It’s like playing against an octopus.”

  Fifteen years later these words would describe his own team.

  If Motta inspired Jackson, he also inspired future NBA coaches Jerry Sloan, Rick Adelman, and Matt Guokas, all of whom played on that 1974–75 team, and Bob Weiss, who was traded by the Bulls before the season. Motta’s 1974–75 division winner lost in the conference finals to eventual champion Golden State, although the Warriors actually trailed the Bulls three games to two at one point. Motta later blamed holdouts Bob Love and Norm Van Lier; he demanded that they not get full playoff shares and created a near mutiny among the players.

  When the Bulls won only twenty-four games the following season with their aging cast, Motta left Chicago to coach the Bullets, who had lost to the Warriors in the championship series the previous year. It wasn’t until Jordan arrived in 1984 that the Bulls began to regain any credibility. The Chicago Bulls had come a long way in twenty-five years, from 1966–67, when coach Johnny “Red” Kerr had to call the newspapers after games to report the score and spell the players’ names, to 1990–91, when every kid in America could spell Jordan.

  (And how well Jordan knew it. One day, a reporter was baby-sitting his one-year-old son. Jordan, who gravitated toward kids, kept trying to get a response, but the boy ignored Jordan and fiddled with his father’s mini-tape recorder. The reporter joked, “Guess he’s not impressed with the superstar.”

  “Give him six months,” Jordan shot back.)

  The Bulls were moving inexorably toward that second division title. One more win would clinch it, and they were prepared to get it from San Antonio at the Stadium.

  But they would have to wait a little longer. The Spurs pushed them all over the court, outrebounding the Bulls 50–29 and taking a 21-point lead late in the third quarter before Jackson switched to a small, quick lineup and began relying on some three-point bombing from Craig Hodges in a fireman’s drill exercise. The oft-forgotten Hodges hit 3 three-pointers in about two minutes, and within ten minutes the Bulls had sliced a 21-point deficit to 1. They appeared to be on the brink of yet another impossible comeback, but San Antonio beat their pressure and went on to win 110–107. Afterward, Spurs coach Larry Brown said the Bulls could be awesome if they could get the entire bench scoring the way Hodges had.

  Dennis Hopson only wished he could get the chance. For the third time in the last four games, he didn’t make it into the game, and he wasn’t happy about it. When the Bulls traded with the Nets for him in June 1990, he was a career 13-point scorer after three NBA seasons. But now he was the eleventh man, ahead of only Scott Williams on the depth chart. And despite his $900,000+-per-season contract, he was actually wishing he were back in New Jersey, which he had hated. Hopson wasn’t playing much, and he’d drawn Jordan’s wrath quickly.

  “I know he doesn’t like me, but he never says anything to me,” Hopson was telling a friend one day. “You hear all the things he says behind your back and then he comes up to me the other day and asks if I’d heard from Brad Sellers [Hopson’s teammate at Ohio State], and how was Brad doing. Can you believe it? The guy tries to run him out, and now he wants to know how he’s doing. Like he cares. I just said he was fine.”

  Hopson, with his hard, sharp features and tight skin that looked as if it had been stretched over his face and gave him an angry look, had feuded angrily with Nets coach Bill Fitch. “Get off my back,” Hopson had once yelled at Fitch during a game. “If you don’t like the way I play, get me out of here.”

  “Dennis,” the usually stormy Fitch said mildly, “I’ll do my best to accommodate you.”

  Fitch told Jackson that Hopson merely needed a change of scenery and could blossom with the Bulls. But Hopson chafed at the reduced role; he couldn’t adjust to the idea of coming off the bench. He was the kind of player who needed to get into the flow of a game, and needed more than four- or five-minute intervals to do it. The Bulls were now saying he really was a defensive specialist. Hopson wasn’t buying it.

  “When I first came here, they told me I’d be a scorer off the bench,” Hopson recalled about his conversation with Krause after the trade, in which the Bulls gave the Nets their 1990 first-round pick and two future second-round selections. “Defense never came up, which makes it look sometimes like I’m crazy. People look at me and say, ‘Here’s a guy they brought here to score, so what’s the problem? Why isn’t he scoring?’”

  So Hopson was actually thinking about being back in New Jersey. “Hey, I averaged nine point six my first year, twelve point seven my second year and then fifteen point eight, and I was learning and getting the shots and the opportunities,” he said. The Nets were a veteran team in the process of disintegrating when he arrived as the No. 3 pick in the 1987 draft, a kid who was supposed to breathe new life into a dying franchise. But Hopson was alone in that role. “I had nobody,” he recalled about that lonely first year. “Here, Horace had Scottie, and Stacey and B.J. were together, but in New Jersey they had guys like Mike Gminski and Buck Williams and Roy Hinson and Mike O’Koren, and I was always alone. And there’s nothing to do in New Jersey.”

  Hopson missed home and wanted to play in Cleveland, mostly because he liked Lenny Wilkens’s coaching style and felt the Cavaliers needed a shooting guard. Hopson, a muscular 6-5, 200-pounder who occasionally stunned the Bulls coaches in practice with athletic moves they’d only seen from Jordan and Pippen, told his agent to talk to the Bulls about dealing him to the Cavaliers after the 1990–91 season; he’d already made some inquiries on his own and had found the Cavaliers to be receptive.

  Hopson had once looked forward to coming to the Bulls, although he’d been warned that Chicago was a tough place to play. His best friend in college was Sellers, the former Bull who had gone to Greece to play in 1990–91. Sellers told Hopson what it was like to play with Jordan, but Hopson thought it was just a bad match since the fans and Jordan had wanted Johnny Dawkins and Sellers had never had a chance. But then he talked to another friend, Seattle’s Sedale Threatt.

  “I feel sorry for you,” Threatt told him. “There’s a reason there have been so many guards through there. You’re not going to get the ball. You play with Jordan, you watch. Sometimes you play more than other times, but mostly you watch.”

  Hopson insisted he’d been assured otherwise. The Bulls were looking for him to play twenty to twenty-five minutes and score in double figures off the bench. They’d told him that Paxson, Hodges, and Armstrong were all inadequate because they were small, that teams like the Pistons took advantage of them, and that the Bulls needed a big guard to play with Jordan. He’d get eight to ten minutes behind Jordan and at least another ten beside him and perhaps even more at small forward.

  “No way,” his friend Ron Harper, the big guard now with the Clippers, told him. “You’re not going to get any minutes there. Just look how they play. Where are the minutes going to come from? Man, it’s going to be bad for you.”

  The same words had come from another Ohio friend and former Bull, Charles Oakley. Oakley said he liked Jordan, but forget it, man, you weren’t going to get to score.

  Hopson was starting to get worried, and by training camp he was in a near panic. He and Armstrong had become close friends, and Armstrong told him right away: “You’re going to wish you were back i
n New Jersey. You’re going to look back and think it was better.”

  “No way,” said Hopson. “You’re crazy. You know what it’s like there? People booing you, the few that do come to games. Losing every time. No, I just want to get a chance to win some games again.”

  After the Bulls won their NBA title, he was asked jokingly whether he’d rather be in New Jersey. He answered “Yes” without hesitation. And he wasn’t joking.

  Despite the loss to San Antonio, the Bulls found themselves division champions when the Pistons lost to New York on Saturday night. There wasn’t much celebrating; Pippen didn’t even know. “I wondered why we had these division-championship T-shirts in the locker room,” he would say later. Jordan hadn’t celebrated, either; he had a 7:00 A.M. tee time. After all, game time Sunday against Philadelphia was 2:30 P.M., and that gave him plenty of time for a round of golf. His golfing mania had become nearly insatiable and he was now playing often during the season.

  Jordan had even found a way to use his golf as a psychological ploy against the 76ers. Jordan made a point of telling Sixers assistant coach Fred Carter about his game, knowing Carter would try to use it to motivate Hersey Hawkins, who’d be playing Jordan. The Sixers, Jordan hoped, would be driven to distraction by the notion that he was so confident about playing them that he actually spent the morning on the golf course. A few days later, Barkley would complain about Jordan’s early-morning golf game on his Philadelphia radio show, saying the Bulls hadn’t taken the 76ers seriously. “If I had done that,” observed bad boy Barkley, “I’d have been killed.”

  Despite the golf flap, which left Jordan’s teammates predictably annoyed, Jordan managed to score 41 and steal 4. If Jordan had indeed intended to distract Hawkins, he succeeded: Hawkins shot just 3 of 10 in the first half for 6 points. But the 76ers were proving stubborn, even though Barkley wasn’t playing because of a knee injury; he had come to Chicago to watch the nationally televised game, however, and he was clearly enjoying himself.

  “Hey, Stacey,” he yelled at King, who was being booed by the fans during a rare game appearance, “what time’s practice tomorrow?

  “These guys ain’t winnin’ no title. They’re too soft,” he’d shout occasionally, and when lead referee Jess Kersey would call a foul, Barkley would continue, “Don’t help these guys out, Jess. They’re soft.”

  Of course, there was some truth to Barkley’s assertion; many around the league still questioned how long the Bulls could last in the playoffs with guys like Grant and Cartwright as their power players. And the 76ers were whacking the Bulls around on the boards in this game, just as San Antonio had done a few days earlier. The Bulls’ weaknesses were beginning to show. They could be pushed around, as Detroit knew, and sometimes you could get them out of their game that way. Rick Mahorn was doing just that, as he went on to grab 14 rebounds, and even Armon Gilliam, who was being called “Charmin” Gilliam by his teammates because he was so soft, was muscling inside for offensive rebounds.

  There was plenty of theater in the game: Pippen dunked over 7-7 center Manute Bol, sending the 76ers’ bench into convulsions of laughter, and Bol entertained them further by dribbling between his legs after a rebound. But the game got serious down the stretch, and the 76ers would force it into overtime. The street-clothed Barkley grabbed Hawkins in the huddle and shouted at him as the overtime period was about to begin, “If you want to be an All-Star [which Hawkins was that season for the first time], now’s the time you’ve got to take over.” And he did, scoring 6 straight 76ers points, including 2 baskets on brilliant drives against Jordan. The 76ers refused to surrender the lead, and won 114–111 when Armstrong came up short on a last-second jumper.

  John Paxson watched from the bench, shaking his head. Armstrong had played the last twenty minutes of the game, almost the entire second half. He seemed tired and, predictably, his shots were short at the end. Jackson told the coaches he was leaving Armstrong in to see how he would finish a game; the Bulls would need Armstrong in the playoffs, and Jackson wanted to see how he fared in a pressure situation. It wasn’t the best strategy, given Armstrong’s obvious weariness, and the coaches also knew it, but they understood: It was another experiment out of Jackson’s behavioral laboratory.

  But Paxson didn’t understand. He sat on the bench, examining both the game and his life. He thought about the technical foul he’d drawn against Orlando in the Stadium a few days before, and the disapproving look his four-year-old son had given him for it. Ryan Paxson had become a big basketball fan, watching his dad on TV, turning off the lights to introduce himself when the pregame introductions came on, and playing his own game with a small basket set up in front of the TV during Bulls games. Paxson would use the game as a means of communication and discipline. When Ryan was naughty, John would call a time-out, and Ryan would have to go sit down. And when he’d really get out of control, John would call a technical on him, to teach him a lesson. But, he asked himself, what lesson was the father learning? Paxson, though slower than most guards he faced, was a tough competitor. It was one reason he stayed in the starting lineup. Armstrong was quicker, yet he couldn’t pressure the ball as well as Paxson. “He plays defense better than he’s got any right to,” marveled Bach. Paxson did things out of sheer will, and despite chronically aching knees and ankles he had the fourth-best streak of starts in the league. But his fiery desire could bring with it a nasty temper in games. And his ensuing arguments with referees had gotten him labeled a complainer and probably cost him some calls. Paxson vowed to get more control of himself.

  But watching Armstrong play the final twenty minutes of the Philadelphia game began to convince Paxson that his Bulls career was at an end. The team hadn’t talked to him at all about a new contract. Paxson figured Armstrong would start in 1991–92, but he didn’t really mind. “I’m the perfect backup point guard for this team,” he would say. “I can run the offense, I can play with Michael, and I can shoot. I can play both guard positions and I wouldn’t mind being a backup. I just want to get paid.” But there were always doubts about guards after they hit thirty, especially white guards. This game, Paxson believed, only showed that his career in Chicago was over, no matter what the Bulls said.

  Caroline Paxson was angry about the team’s treatment of her husband. She’s a delicate blonde, quiet, shy, and loyal to John, who always arranges for a friend to drive her to and from the Stadium for games—he doesn’t want her going alone. Krause told associates that she would screw up her face and eye him angrily whenever she saw him. And Bach, whom she liked, said he hated to look at her these days. She would look at him with pleading eyes, as if to say, “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  As Caroline and John drove home in silence after the 76ers game, John finally made a decision. “Let’s sell the house,” he said.

  “I’ll call the realtor tomorrow morning,” Caroline said quickly.

  Jackson was experimenting again. Jordan had pretty much abandoned the offense, and was scoring in droves. In the last five games, he’d averaged 29 shots per game and 39 points. Pippen, too, was spending considerable time freelancing, and in the 76ers game the two had scored 51 of the starters’ 55 points in the second half. Armstrong was the only reserve to score in the last two quarters. So Jackson was trying to figure out how to restrain Jordan without his knowledge. He tried putting him in the corner of the triangle offense where it would be hard for him to get the ball, but when that failed, Jackson just took him out of the game, twice after he’d hit a pair of jumpers.

  “Hey, don’t take me out after I hit a couple of shots,” Jordan complained. “At least let me miss a few.” He was angry after the April 9 Knicks game in the Stadium, and he was offering unusually curt answers to reporters’ questions. The Bulls had managed to survive the Knicks, 108–106, on a Paxson jumper with twenty-two seconds left (the Armstrong experiment had ended) and a Cartwright steal as the Knicks tried to get the tying basket. It truly was one of those games in which victory
went to the team making the next-to-last mistake. It wasn’t a particularly good performance, but the Bulls were overconfident against the Knicks. They’d beaten them in the playoffs in six games in 1989, and had only lost once to them since in the regular season, when Trent Tucker took an inbounds pass and hit a three-point basket, all in one tenth of a second; the league later ruled that the shot should have been waved off for lack of time but refused to change the outcome of the game. That disputed field goal had become the source of immediate controversy. “You can’t shoot the ball in a tenth of a second,” Jackson had complained afterward. The incident reminded Bach of a 76ers-Portland game in which Archie Clark dribbled and dribbled with just a few seconds on the clock and finally put up the game winner. Portland officials tried to find the timekeeper later, only to be told they couldn’t talk to him. “I don’t want to talk to him,” said one Trail Blazers executive. “We just want him to time the rest of our lives.”

  Bill Cartwright thought the team was tired, both physically and mentally. It was a long season and most of the team’s goals had already been accomplished; the games just seemed to drone on and the Bulls, Cartwright felt, needed the playoffs to revive them. He was worried, too, about players like King, who was still blaming everyone but himself for his problems. Horace Grant had come in and worked hard to earn his position and respect with the team, but King seemed to expect it to be given to him. Cartwright had also listened to Armstrong complain about his lack of opportunity, as had Perdue and Hopson. And he had grown weary of Levingston, who was often late for practice and complained often and loudly about his lack of playing time. Levingston would sit around telling the other players about the big parties he was throwing and purchases he was making, even though everyone knew about his financial problems.