Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  “We were gonna play full-court pressure defense,” Jackson said. “We were gonna throw our hearts into it.”

  That required a competitive focus, and Jackson figured to build that by turning Jordan and Pippen loose on each other. They had been pitted against each other in Pippen’s rookie year, but now Jackson made a priority and a habit of it.

  “Phil took over,” Johnny Bach recalled, “and I think he found the right mix for Michael and Scottie and the younger players. And what it was, was heavy competition, so that Michael each day had in front of him Scottie Pippen. A lot of times Phil would put Scottie with the best team and put Michael with the irregulars. The competition was fierce. Phil would seek to do this very quietly, not overtly. It would be a game to ten baskets, and the losers would have to do some silly thing like running a set of sprints or something. If it was only one game and Michael lost it, he might say, ‘Hey, Phil, we’re going another ten.’ We’d go ten more baskets. It was probably exactly what Phil wanted, but he was always like, ‘Well, let’s see.… I don’t know if we can.… Okay, if you want to throw it up, let’s go.’ ”

  “The competitive angle was good,” Bach said in another interview, in 2004, his eyes sparkling at the memory. “Scottie learned at the hand of the king. I always said of Scottie, ‘Here’s the pretender to the throne, and of Michael, here’s the king sitting there.’ I think Scottie had to learn that way. Come every day, and play every day hard. And find that game that he did, of being on top of the floor, bringing the ball up the floor, and being just a physical tormenter on defense with those extended arms. He had like Michael a little bit of that joyous smile. He enjoyed what was going on.”

  The effort brought immediate returns, Bach recalled. “Pippen got better. Now, he had to play Michael every day. That would give you a headache. Practices were very intense in those days.”

  And not just for the team’s two stars. Rookie guard B. J. Armstrong from Iowa was pitched against veteran John Paxson. The competition triggered a dislike between the two that added to the intensity of practices.

  “That was one of Phil’s dictums,” Bach explained. “He wanted competition between them.”

  Whatever improvement the Bulls made under Jackson would hinge on the maturing of Pippen and Grant, the two young players with the most potential to give the defense its bite. As the schedule opened there was a sense that they had grown. “He’s on the cusp of greatness,” Bach said that fall of Pippen. “He’s starting to do the kinds of things only Michael does.”

  “It’s just a matter of working hard,” Pippen said. “I’ve worked to improve my defense and shooting off the dribble. I know I’m a better spot-up shooter, but I’m trying to pull up off the dribble when the lane is blocked.”

  In addition to Armstrong, Krause had brought in two other rookies, all three in the first round, including center/forward Stacey King and forward Jeff Sanders. That August, Krause had re-signed free agent guard Craig Hodges, and picked up an old standby in a trade with Phoenix, forward Ed Nealy, who became a favorite of both Jackson and Jordan with his earthbound brawn and willingness to hustle.

  The team developed some confidence as they moved through the preseason undefeated in eight games. Yet everyone knew the Bulls still had to get comfortable with Winter’s strange new offense. And then there was the matter of Cartwright, who was something of a loner on the team. Jordan still openly resented the big center, who seemed to have trouble catching the ball in traffic. The triangle meant he was going to have the ball more than ever.

  Time to Read

  On opening night, Jordan scored 54 in Chicago Stadium in a duel with Cleveland’s Ron Harper, who finished with 36. The Bulls won in overtime but lost the next night to Boston. Three nights later, they beat the Pistons by 3 in the Stadium as Jordan scored 40. It was obvious the Bulls were doing different things on offense, but their early efforts were almost hard to recognize as the triangle.

  After a West Coast road trip, they finished November with an eight and six record, and it became clearer that Jackson’s decision to use Winter’s pet system was a major gamble. Winter had spent years developing his triple-post offense, an old college system that involved all five players sharing the ball and moving. Winter had used it successfully everywhere he coached in college, where he had enough practice time to teach it. But in his one NBA head coaching job with the Houston Rockets in the 1970s, he had gotten fired after star Elvin Hayes refused to learn the system. By the 1990s, the triangle remained totally foreign to most pro players. With their heavy schedules, professional teams simply didn’t have the necessary practice time. But Jackson was determined to have an offense that featured ball movement, and he certainly had the backing of management. Winter, however, knew better than anyone that the switch would require nothing short of a revolution.

  For years the pro game had worked on isolation plays and one-on-one setups, while the triple-post, or triangle, used very little in the way of set plays. Instead the players learned to react to situations and to allow their ball movement to create weaknesses in defenses. Doing that meant that the players virtually had to relearn the game, from Winter’s own peculiar interpretation of the fundamentals to the way they approached the floor. No longer were they merely running through rote plays. They now had to learn to stop and read and react to the defense. It was as if each position was played like a quarterback, particularly for the guards and wings.

  The offense focused on the post with a wing on each side, positioned high and extended out from the foul line to create spacing. More important, it was a two-guard front, which meant that the guards aligned together, spaced apart at the top of the floor. One of them would initiate the first pass, then “fill the corner,” or take position in either corner of the half-court, which would require a defender to move with him. This immediately created an unbalanced floor and gave the remaining four players, especially Jordan, room to work. Understandably, the man filling the corner had to be a reliable three-point shooter, which made Paxson and Hodges ideal.

  The offense did not feature a traditional penetrating point guard. Winter wanted the defense penetrated mostly with the pass. The rule of thumb was that it often took two years or more to gain true comfort in Winter’s system.

  For that reason, the coaches agreed to modify the triangle to a one-guard front that first season. They were going to ease the team into it. Even so, only Winter fully understood the offense, which meant that Jackson turned over huge amounts of the practice to him. Soon enough, Winter was virtually organizing and running entire sessions, which was remarkable power ceded to an assistant coach. Suddenly, he went from the elderly advisor nobody paid attention to, to the man running the show.

  “There were a lot of competitive people put together in that offense, which Tex alone could run,” Bach recalled. “And Phil was the ideal coach, who could step away and say, ‘Players have to find their tempo. The players have to improve. They have to handle a lot of situations. I’m not here to settle every single thing.’ Phil was able to do it. He was really great.”

  The key test was Jordan, a player who was already a master at reading the floor. The triangle required that the most highly skilled players, the guards, share the ball with the less skilled, the post players. That would lead to some turnovers, Jordan saw immediately.

  He chafed at what he came to call the “equal opportunity” offense.

  “It took some time,” Paxson recalled. “Michael was out there playing with these guys, and unless he had a great deal of respect for them as players, I think he figured, ‘Why should I pass them the ball when I have the ability to score myself or do the job myself? I’d rather rely on myself to succeed or fail than some of these other guys.’ ”

  “The more he learned about it, the more he saw how steadfastly Tex believed in it,” Bach said of Jordan. “And Phil was the head coach and he was saying how things were going to be. It was like a gold mine. You got players in the system, seeing it, and prospering.”

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bsp; But that took much selling by Jackson, and months with the team under Winter’s instruction. At first, the primary selling points for the triangle were that it brought floor balance and it gave Jordan room to work. Both were obvious. The floor balance alone made the Bulls a better defensive team right away, because the offense always left a guard at the top of the key ready to “get back” on defense. The coaches knew they could win some games on this ability to defend in transition.

  “Whatever offense you teach, you must be able to defend after the shot is taken,” Bach offered. “You have a duty to know where to go. Tex’s offense gave you the balance and the ability.”

  The transition was not easy. Some observers, such as Chicago Tribune reporter Sam Smith, sensed an atmosphere bordering on mutiny over Jackson’s first two seasons as Jordan’s frustration built. Jackson worked against this by playing the good cop to Tex Winter’s bad cop.

  “I’ve always been very much impressed with Michael as well as everyone else has been,” Tex Winter said, looking back. “I’ve never been a hero worshiper. I saw his strong points, but I also saw some weaknesses. I felt like there was a lot of things that we could do as a coaching staff to blend Michael in with the team a little bit better. I thought he was a great player, but I did not feel that we wanted to go with him exclusively. We wanted to try and get him to involve his teammates more. Until he was convinced that that was what he wanted to do, I don’t think we had the chance to have the program that we had later down the line.”

  Different types of players reacted to the offense differently. For guards and wings, there was much to learn. Post players had less of a challenge, but running the triangle required a change in the instinctive way that most pros had learned to play.

  “For me it was great,” recalled John Paxson. “A system offense is made for someone who doesn’t have the athletic skills that a lot of guys in the league have. It played to my strengths. But it tightened the reins on guys like Michael and Scottie from the standpoint that we stopped coming down and isolating them on the side. There were subtleties involved, teamwork involved. But that was the job of Phil to sell us on the fact we could win playing that way.”

  It helped tremendously that Jordan had played in a system at North Carolina, Winter explained, looking back. But it also may have added to his skepticism.

  “Everything was geared toward the middle, toward the post play,” Jordan recalled. “We were totally changing our outlook… and I disagreed with that to a certain extent. I felt that was putting too much pressure on the people inside.”

  Jackson brought Jordan into his office and said, “The ball is like a spotlight. And when it’s in your hands, the spotlight is on you. And you’ve gotta share that spotlight with some of your teammates by having them do things with the basketball, too.”

  “I know that,” Jordan replied. “It’s just that when it comes down to getting the job done, a lot of times they don’t want to take the initiative. Sometimes it’s up to me to take it, and sometimes that’s a tough balance.”

  Making these changes would require much patience. The operative phrase became that Jordan was “going to have to learn to trust his teammates.”

  “There were times when Michael knew he was going to get 40 points,” Jackson said. “He was just hot those nights. He was going to go on his own, and he would just take over a ball game. We had to understand that that was just part of his magnitude, that was something he could do that nobody else in this game could do. And it was going to be okay. Those weren’t always the easiest nights for us to win as a team. But they were certainly spectacular nights for him as a showman and a scorer.”

  The process tested Jackson’s brand-new relationship with Jordan. Yet it also provided the opportunity for that relationship to deepen. It wasn’t just his teammates that Jordan was learning to trust. It was his coaches as well.

  “A lot of times,” Jackson explained, “my convincing story to Michael was, ‘We want you to get your 30-some points, and we want you to do whatever is necessary. It’s great for us if you get 12 or 14 points by halftime, and you have 18 points at the end of the third quarter. Then get your 14 or 18 points in the fourth quarter. That’s great. If it works out that way, that’s exactly what it’ll be.’ Who could argue with that? We’d tell him, ‘Just play your cards. Make them play everybody during the course of the game and then finish it out for us.’ ”

  Later, Winter would look back and marvel at Jackson’s determination to stick with the offense and his persuasiveness with Jordan. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were embarking on the most remarkable era in pro basketball history, rooted in the great discipline Jordan and his teammates began developing that first year.

  “Phil was definitely set on what we were going to do and he wouldn’t waver,” Winter recalled. “Even though the triple-post offense evolved through my many, many years of coaching, Phil was sold on it even more than I was at times. There’s times when I would say. ‘We should get away from this. Let Michael have more one-on-one opportunities.’ And Phil was persistent in not doing so. It’s to his credit that we stayed to his basic philosophy of basketball.”

  Their philosophy, their system, made Jackson’s Bulls unlike any other team in the NBA.

  As Christmas presents that first year as head coach, Jackson began the practice of giving his players books. He gave Jordan a copy of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the allegorical story of a man searching for gold. The team’s transition unfolded in fits and starts that December. Jackson’s Bulls would find bursts of momentum and go on winning streaks. First came a five-game run right before the holidays, then another five heading into the New Year. The offense continued to struggle, but the defense came alive. Across the league, other coaches began talking about it—and fearing it.

  By January the offense had come together enough for the Pistons to take notice after beating the Bulls by 10 in Detroit. Even though they had won, Joe Dumars recalled spotting a new challenge. “I went back to Isiah after the game and I said, ‘We’ve got a problem.’ He said, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘This is going to cause some problems. Where he is on the court with the angles and stuff. That now causes major problems for me.’ Before when he just had the ball out front and he was going one-on-one, he was facing everybody and you could see where he was. And I knew where the help was, but when he caught that ball in the post in the triangle and guys started cutting, I didn’t know where help was going to come from then. So I knew the very first game they ran the triangle, we had a problem, and we won the game. But he was flashing from the weak side, he was in the post. He was in new spots where we had never had to double him like that before. When we did double, he just threw it in and waited and then everybody cut. With the triangle, you throw it in, guys cut baseline. I knew this was going to be a problem.”

  “We saw immediately that it was going to be harder to double-team Jordan with the Bulls using the triangle,” Brendan Malone recalled.

  For the first time in his four seasons in the NBA, Dumars recalled taking note of that older gent on the Bulls’ bench. It was Tex Winter. The triangle guy. Across the league, opponents began making the same discovery.

  “Tex’s offense emulated the offense I had played in with New York,” Jackson explained. “The ball dropped into the post a lot. You ran cuts. You did things off the ball. People were cutting and passing and moving the basketball. And it took the focus away from Michael, who had the ball in his hands a lot, who had been a great scorer. That had made the defenses all turn and face him. Suddenly he was on the back side of the defenses, and Michael saw the value in having an offense like that. He’d been in an offense like that at North Carolina. It didn’t happen all at once. He started to see that over a period of time, as the concepts built up.”

  The offense showed promise, but Jordan wasn’t yet convinced the team itself was ready to win a championship. He began calling for changes in the roster in advance of the 1990 trade deadline in Februar
y. The fans also complained that the Bulls’ front office needed to make a move right away.

  Once again, Jordan called for the acquisition of Walter Davis. “What turned the tide was when Michael told us we needed to go out and get Walter Davis,” Jim Stack remembered. “It was like do or die that year, that ’89–’90 season. Michael said we wouldn’t be able to win the way we were constituted.”

  Krause sent Stack out on the road for about ten days scouting Davis, to see if he could help the Bulls. “Walter Davis was, I felt, basically done defensively,” Stack recalled. “The way Phil was coaching, Davis was not going to be able to guard the guys like Mark Aguirre, Xavier McDaniel, Larry Nance. Indiana had Chuck Person. There were a lot of gifted, physically strong small forwards in the Eastern Conference. He physically was not going to be able to guard the guys we needed to guard. So we didn’t make a move at the trade deadline.”

  The Calm

  In February, the Bulls began to falter again, and during a West Coast road trip things reached a low point with four straight losses. Even worse, Cartwright missed several games as he struggled with sore knees. The All-Star break in Miami quieted some of the noise. Pippen joined Jordan on the Eastern squad for the first time, and Hodges won the three-point shootout by making nineteen straight shots.

  Jordan and Dumars hadn’t known each other personally until that All-Star Weekend, when Jordan phoned to invite Dumars and his wife, Debbie, up to the Jordans’ room for dinner and conversation. The couples hit it off that evening, and the two men advanced their friendship. “Our wives talk all the time,” Jordan said later that year of the budding relationship. “We had the opportunity to play with him at the All-Star Game and see him on the social side. I’d always admired his athletic ability and basketball talent, and a good friendship has been built. There’s a mutual respect because of the talents we have to put against each other when we play.… But we can’t get too close now because we have to compete against one another. It’s hard to compete against a good friend. To compete against a good friend, you tend to get a little bit relaxed and joke around a little bit too much when you should be serious. But that won’t happen because we both are focused on what we have to do for our respective teams.”