Jordan and his teammates clearly smelled blood. The Pistons managed to make a strong rush early in Game 1. “We were beating them in the first game,” recalled Brendan Malone. “That’s the quietest I had ever heard Chicago Stadium. And then off the bench came Cliff Levingston, Will Perdue, and Craig Hodges. Levingston and Perdue went to work on the glass, and Hodges was red-hot in that series.”
With that spark, the Bulls went on to take the first three games with an attitude. They were executing their triangle offense better, and that gave them the edge, Malone recalled. “They had gotten better with more time in the offense. It was difficult to double-team Michael and leave someone wide open.” Ultimately, Winter’s offense had created some operating room for Jordan and produced open shooters around him. After the series, the Pistons would be left to answer criticism that they had focused too much on Jordan and left his teammates with good, clean shots.
“You have to put the majority of your focus on him,” Dumars said, looking back at the season. “It’s hard to go on the floor and not focus on that guy because he can dominate so much of what happens. It’s hard to walk on the floor and not think about what he’s going to do.”
On the eve of Game 4 in Detroit, the atmosphere around the series turned harsh when Jordan unleashed his pent-up anger in a press conference. “The people I know are going to be happy they’re not the reigning champs anymore,” he said of the Pistons. “We’ll get back to the image of a clean game. People want to push this kind of basketball out. When Boston was champion, they played true basketball. Detroit won. You can’t take that away from them. But it wasn’t clean basketball. It wasn’t the kind of basketball you want to endorse. We’re not going to try to lower ourselves to that kind of play. I may talk some trash, but we’re playing hard, clean basketball. They’ve tried to provoke us and we’ve kept our poise.”
Jordan then concluded boldly, “I think we can sweep this team.”
The Pistons, particularly Thomas, were enraged by his tone and comments. “No, we’re not going to get swept,” Thomas vowed.
Dumars made no such claims, but he was taken aback by Jordan’s antipathy. “It surprised me,” the Detroit guard confided later. “I was disappointed that he started bad-mouthing what our championships had meant to us.”
Brendan Malone, however, had seen the end coming for Detroit’s physical style earlier in the playoffs when NBA commissioner David Stern said he was shocked by what he saw as hard fouls and “thuggery” starting to become the approach of other teams as well. “That type of basketball ended,” Malone said. “I think it stopped when David Stern went to the playoffs that year and saw players get into a fight right in front of him. He decided he was going to clamp down on the physical play in the NBA.”
Officials then hit the Pistons with a flurry of flagrant foul calls early in their series with the Bulls, Malone said. “One was on Joe Dumars, who was physical but who wasn’t considered over the top. And I knew then the league had made a decision that you couldn’t play that way anymore.”
As he had forecast, Jordan exerted his will the next day, and Chicago swept Detroit. At the end of the game, Thomas and the Pistons stalked off the floor without shaking hands or congratulating the Bulls. Daly had asked them not to do it. The snub angered television viewers and Chicago fans and perhaps cost Isiah Thomas an opportunity to be on the Olympic team.
“It was incredibly satisfying, the fact that they had to walk by our bench,” John Paxson recalled on the twentieth anniversary of the victory. “You could still see Isiah was kind of ducking down, shoulders kind of slouched, trying not to be seen.… But it did kind of validate what we believed in—that we played the right way. They were really good, but their time had come and gone, and it was our turn now.”
Rather than join Thomas in the protest, Dumars stopped to congratulate his foe. He too was upset with Jordan’s comments, but he remembered the pain in Jordan’s face at the end of each of the previous seasons. “That look is the reason I stopped and shook his hand when they beat us,” Dumars recalled in 2012. “I was not going to walk past the guy and not shake his hand. I shook Phil’s hand and Michael’s hand and a few of the other guys. I figured if that guy can shake my hand with that kind of hurt and disappointment he had in his face, there’s no way I’m going to walk off this court and not shake his hand.”
Thomas and the rest of the Pistons had been enraged by what they saw as Jordan’s disrespect, Malone recalled. “That was also Phil Jackson and Tex Winter,” the Detroit assistant said. “It was an attitude that their way was the only way to play basketball. I thought that was insulting. There are all kinds of ways to play basketball. They had that attitude. But it was just their time to win. Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen had matured and were ready to play. Pippen really came of age and so did Horace Grant, and Michael finally had some help to win a championship.”
Dumars attributed some of the incident to the fact that Thomas was simply a poor loser. The Detroit star had also reacted poorly four years earlier after a loss to the Celtics.
“Isiah has never said to me, ‘I hate Michael Jordan,’ ” Dumars explained in 2012. “He has said to me, ‘I hate losing.’ Regardless of who it was, Isiah would have hated losing that series. That’s what I make of the situation.”
The snub was a slap in the face, a final insult for the Bulls, and it ensured that their hard feelings against Detroit would endure. “I have nothing but contempt and disgust for the Pistons organization,” Jerry Reinsdorf said, looking back four years later. “Ultimately, David Stern felt the pressure and made rules changes to outlaw their style of play. It wasn’t basketball. It was thuggerism, hoodlumism.… That’s one of the things that made us so popular. We were the white knights; we were the good guys. We beat the Bad Boys, 4–0, and they sulked off the court the way they did. I remember saying at the time that this was a triumph of good over evil. They were hated because they had used that style to vanquish first the Celtics and then the Lakers, who had been the NBA’s most popular teams for years.”
The vanquishing of the Bad Boys had been such a hurdle for Jordan and his Bulls that even though they still faced the league championship series, they couldn’t help but pause for celebration, memorably kicked off by Jerry Krause. “He comes in the front of the plane and he’s celebrating,” Jackson recalls. “He’s dancing, and the guys are going, ‘Go, Jerry! Go, Jerry!’ ” The days of mooing had been put on hold, but the players still had no idea what to make of their most unusual GM. “He’s dancing,” Jackson recalled with a grin, “or whatever he’s doing, and when he stops, they all collapse in hilarity, this laughter, and you couldn’t tell whether it was with him or at him. It was one of those nebulous moments. It was wild.”
Magic Time
In the recent past, the Bulls had pondered acquiring both Danny Ainge and Buck Williams, but both of those players wound up in Portland with Clyde Drexler. The Trail Blazers had ruled the 1991 regular season in the Western Conference with a 63–19 finish, but the long-dominant Lakers led by Magic Johnson found a way to prevail in the conference finals and ousted Portland, 4–2.
Suddenly, Chicago was hosting the opening of a dream of a championship series for basketball fans, Michael versus Magic, the Bulls versus the Lakers, and ticket manager Joe O’Neil found himself in a nightmare situation. It had never been easy finding enough home game tickets for Jordan while avoiding making his teammates angry. As the Bulls began moving farther into the playoffs and playing bigger games, the ticket challenge grew, particularly in terms of meeting Jordan’s demands.
“I kind of knew the number he was looking at,” O’Neil recalled. “I always told him, ‘Don’t surprise me. Don’t tell me you need twenty tickets at the last minute,’ which he did all the time.”
One of the biggest issues was finessing Jordan’s requests while keeping Pippen and Grant happy, O’Neil explained. “I remember going into the locker room telling Scottie and Horace and the guys, ‘You get four extra tickets for t
he game. Don’t ask me for any more. There are no more tickets. That’s it. Four tickets for everybody.’ Then I’d hand Michael a packet of like forty.”
The issue grew so large that O’Neil told Jordan to hide his tickets from his teammates. Finally, the ticket manager began meeting Jordan surreptitiously, in a hockey locker room in Chicago Stadium, to give him the tickets.
Ticket demand got out of control once it became clear that the Bulls would be hosting the Lakers in Game 1. “We were about four days out from the Finals starting and I was overwhelmed,” O’Neil remembered of that first year. “I didn’t have enough tickets. Michael needed this, and everybody needed this. I remember going home, getting home about seven that night and walking in to my wife and saying, ‘Susan, I don’t think I can do this. I’m overwhelmed. The whole world is coming after me. It’s Michael versus Magic. I don’t have enough tickets. I don’t think I can do this anymore.’ My wife said to me, ‘I have an idea. Why don’t you take out the garbage?’ So I walked out and took out the garbage. I’m pulling it out to the street, and the light goes on across the street and the guy runs out, hands me a credit card and says, ‘I hate to do this to you, Joe, but can you get me two?’ I go back in the house and tell my wife, ‘I got an order for two taking out the garbage.’ ”
This wasn’t the first time a matchup of Michael and Magic created an instant and controversial demand. In 1990, promoters planned to stage a one-on-one game between Johnson and Jordan for pay-per-view television. Jordan, who had spent his life challenging people to one-on-one, found the idea immediately fetching. But the NBA nixed the event—which would have paid big money to the participants—after Isiah Thomas, who was then the president of the players’ association, objected. Jordan lashed out at Thomas’s intervention, charging that the Detroit guard was jealous because no one would pay to see him play.
Johnson said he would love to play the game, but he declined to get involved in the scrap between the two. “That’s their thing,” he said.
Johnson did, however, have some fun speculating over the outcome. Actor Jack Nicholson, the Lakers’ superfan, said that if he were a betting man, he’d put his money on Jordan, the premier individual player in the game, as opposed to Johnson, who was considered pro basketball’s consummate team player.
Johnson, though, refused to concede any speculation. “I’ve been playing one-on-one all my life,” he said. “That’s how I made my lunch money.” Asked his best one-on-one move, Johnson said, “I didn’t have a best move. My best move was just to win, and that’s it. I did what I had to do to win.”
Basketball fans were disappointed that the one-on-one match wasn’t held. “A lot of people wanted to see it,” Johnson said at the time. “Michael is really disappointed. His people are disappointed. We’re all disappointed. It was something we were all looking forward to.”
That summer of 1990, Jordan had agreed to play in Magic’s charity all-star game, but tried to consume too many golf holes the day of the event and arrived late. Rather than start the event without the star of the league, Johnson had decided to delay it to give Jordan time to be there for tip-off, which reportedly infuriated Isiah Thomas. Apparently Jordan was delighted that he had inconvenienced his nemesis.
With the championship series, Magic Mike of Laney High was finally coming face to face with his hero. Johnson, having led the Lakers to five NBA titles, was seen as the ultimate purveyor of the team game, while Jordan was the one-man show who couldn’t seem to keep from referring to his teammates as his “supporting cast,” no matter how many times he was reminded not to do so. As if that wasn’t trip enough down memory lane, Jordan also faced his two college teammates James Worthy and Sam Perkins. Worthy had a badly sprained ankle, which greatly reduced his mobility. Some insiders figured that Worthy’s injury would cost the Lakers the series. His loss would be a tremendous blow to Los Angeles. Others, such as former Lakers coach Pat Riley, who was broadcasting the series for NBC, projected that the Lakers would still use their experience to win.
Jordan and his Bulls played nervously out of the gate but still managed a two-point lead at halftime in the first game. The second half, however, became a matter of the Lakers’ post game, run through Perkins, Vlade Divac, and Worthy, versus Chicago’s jump shooting. It came down to jump shots at the end. Perkins hit an unlikely three-pointer while Jordan missed an eighteen-footer at the buzzer to give Los Angeles Game 1, 93–91.
Jordan scored 36 with 12 assists, 8 rebounds, and 3 steals on 14 of 24 shooting from the floor, but even this magnificent performance left some of his teammates quietly fuming about his shot selection and one-on-one play. Although his team had just lost the home-court advantage, Jackson actually seemed relieved after the game. He had seen that Los Angeles struggled any time Johnson was out of the game. Jackson figured that would prove too great a burden for a player at the end of his career, and he was right.
There was another development that Jackson hadn’t foreseen. He had begun the series with the six-six Jordan defending the six-nine Johnson. And in Game 2, that effort brought Jordan two early fouls. His teammates, particularly Grant and Cartwright in the post, had already gotten off to strong starts. Jordan’s time on the bench did two things: it gave them more opportunities, and it meant that the taller Pippen would move over to cover Johnson.
At the time there was an assumption that the twenty-five-year-old would struggle to handle basketball’s wiliest veteran, the master point guard of his time. Just the opposite happened. The long-armed Pippen immediately limited Johnson, and suddenly the momentum shifted. With Jordan and Pippen taking turns guarding him, the Lakers big guard shot just 4 of 13 from the floor. Pippen, meanwhile, contributed 20 points with 10 assists and 5 rebounds as the Bulls won Game 2 in a swarm.
“We started to see that we were wearing him down from a physical standpoint,” Pippen happily recalled, “especially myself being able to go up and harass him and trying to get him out of their offense. He wasn’t as effective as he had been in the past against some teams, being able to post up and take advantage of situations. I saw the frustration there.”
“Some of it was to rest Michael,” recalled Johnny Bach. “We didn’t want him on Magic all the time. Scottie went in, and suddenly we realized that he was so long and so big that Magic could not throw those over-the-top passes. We called them halo passes, right over the top of the head. He would throw the ball right past littler guys. But now Scottie was in front of him. He was really a little taller than the six-seven he said he was. Scottie had long arms and big hands. And Magic was starting to fade. He was getting older. Youth doesn’t wait for the aged.”
Jordan had opened the game in a generous mood, sending no-look passes to Cartwright and Grant for easy baskets. From that beginning, the Bulls shot better than 73 percent from the floor to drive a blowout, 107–86. Jordan made 15 of 18 from the floor to finish with 33, plus 13 assists, 7 rebounds, 2 steals, and a block. Jordan scored thirteen straight field goals through the heart of the second half, a streak capped by perhaps his most memorable attempt with a little under eight minutes left in the game. He took a pass at the top of the key and attacked the basket head on through traffic. He rose in the lane with the ball outstretched high in his right hand to dunk until he encountered a defender, then switched to his left at the last instant and reached around the left side of the goal to flip in a bank shot that left the building buzzing, Phil Jackson smiling and shaking his head, and broadcaster Marv Albert raving. This one would be labeled “the move” to sit in tandem with “the shot” from 1989 against Cleveland.
Even with his grand performance, Jordan was outshot by Paxson, who went 8 for 8 from the floor. “Does Paxson ever miss?” Perkins asked afterward.
Perhaps the thorniest issue was Jordan’s taunting of the Lakers’ bench as the blowout unfolded, pumping his arms or appearing to give the dice a shake and a roll after he made baskets, especially “the move.” Los Angeles would file a complaint about him with league offices, an
d even his teammates attempted to restrain him.
Despite the loss, the Lakers had gotten a split in Chicago Stadium and were headed home for three straight games in the Great Western Forum. They had a huge advantage in experience over the Bulls, and just about all of the experts figured that would be the difference.
The first order of business for the Bulls before Game 3 was a videotape Jackson had prepared showing Johnson sagging off Paxson to play a zone and create havoc for the Chicago offense. Jordan had to recognize this and give up the ball to the open shooter, the coach emphasized, a message he would repeat after each of the next two games. Even though Jordan averaged better than 11 assists during the 1991 championship series, the issue hung over the team.
Having Pippen defend Johnson in Game 3 backfired on Chicago in the second half as the Lakers moved to a 13-point lead when center Vlade Divac found it easier to score over the shorter Jordan. The Bulls narrowed the lead to a half dozen at the end of the third, and trouble caught up with the Lakers from there. Johnson continued to weary from the heavy minutes he had to play, and Worthy’s ankle finally became the factor the Lakers coaches had feared it would. Jordan hit a jumper with 3.4 seconds left to send Game 3 into overtime. There, the Bulls ran off 8 straight points for a 104-96 win and a 2-1 lead in the series. In Game 4, the Bulls harried Los Angeles into shooting 37 percent from the floor. They managed a total of 30 points over the second and third quarters. Perkins, in particular, found the going difficult in the low post while shooting one of fifteen from the floor. Cartwright led an interior defense that delivered a 97–82 win. Jordan turned in yet another stellar night in his first championship series, with 28 points, 13 assists, 5 rebounds, and 2 blocks.
Michael Jordan Page 46