by Phil Jackson
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My intention was to give the players the freedom to figure out how to fit themselves within the system, rather than dictating from on high what I wanted them to do. Some players felt uncomfortable because they’d never been given that kind of latitude before. Others felt completely liberated.
As the 1990–91 season opened, I decided to leave Michael alone. I knew he needed time to figure out how to work within the system in a way that made sense for him. During the off-season he had decided that he needed to bulk up to fend off the physical beating he was taking from the Pistons and other teams. He hired Tim Grover, a physical-training specialist who put him through a grueling series of workouts to increase his endurance and strengthen his upper and lower body. As always, Michael was incredibly disciplined about the workouts and arrived at training camp looking much bigger and stronger, particularly in his shoulders and arms.
Michael loved challenges. So I challenged him to imagine a new way of relating to his teammates. He expected his teammates to perform at his level, even though there were only a handful of players in the league who could meet that standard. I encouraged him to take a fresh look at his role on the team and try to envision ways he could serve as a catalyst to get all the players to work together. I didn’t dictate to him what I wanted; I simply pushed him to think about the problem in a different way, mostly by asking him questions about the impact that this or that strategy might have on the team. “How do you think Scottie or Horace would feel if you did this?” I would say. I treated him like a partner, and slowly he began to shift his way of thinking. When I let him solve the problem himself, he was more likely to buy into the solution and not repeat the same counterproductive behavior in the future.
Looking back, Michael says that he liked this approach because it “allowed me to be the person I needed to be.” Sometimes I would tell him that he needed to be aggressive and set the tone for the team. Other times I’d say, “Why don’t you try to get Scottie going so that the defenders will go after him and then you can attack?” In general, I tried to give Michael room to figure out how to integrate his personal ambitions with those of the team. “Phil knew that winning the scoring title was important to me,” Michael says now, “but I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t take away from what the team was doing.”
Every now and then, Michael and I would have a dispute, usually when I criticized one of his ego-driven moves. But our run-ins never blew up into major fights. “It took me a while to calm down,” says Michael. “Maybe I had to look at myself in the mirror and try to understand exactly what Phil was saying. And I imagine he did the same thing. Every time we had one of those encounters, our mutual respect grew.” I agree.
Another player who made a significant leap that season was Scottie Pippen. Of course, he was used to making big leaps. He grew up, the youngest of twelve children, in Hamburg, Arkansas. His family didn’t have much money, in part because his father had been disabled by a stroke while working at a paper mill. Still, Scottie was the golden boy in the family. Though he didn’t get any scholarship offers, he enrolled at the University of Central Arkansas and worked his way through school, doing odd jobs and serving as varsity team manager. His debut as a walk-on for the freshman team was not spectacular: He averaged 4.3 points and 2.9 rebounds per game. But over the next year he grew four inches to six feet five and returned to school, after playing hard all summer, far better than anyone else on the team. “I was always a good ball handler,” says Scottie. “And that was a big advantage when I grew because now you had to be a center to guard me. And there weren’t that many big guys in the league.”
Scottie, who hit six feet seven by the time he graduated, averaged 26.3 points and 10 rebounds a game and was named a consensus All-American in his senior year. Jerry Krause, who had spotted him early, made a few deft trades in order to draft him fifth overall in 1987. But Scottie was pegged as a traditional small forward and had a difficult time fitting into that role because he wasn’t a strong outside shooter. But he did have the rare skill of being able to grab a rebound and drive all the way through traffic to attack the basket at the other end. Guarding Michael in practice also turned Scottie into a formidable defender. But what impressed me most when I first started working with him was his ability to read what was happening on the floor and react accordingly. He’d been a point guard in high school and still had that kind of share-the-ball mentality. While Michael was always looking to score, Scottie seemed to be more interested in making sure the offense succeeded as a whole. In that respect, he modeled himself more after Magic Johnson than after Michael Jordan.
So in my second year as head coach I created a new position for Scottie—“point forward”—and had him share the job of moving the ball up court with the guards—an experiment that worked out far better than I expected. That switch unleashed a side of Scottie that had never been tapped, and he blossomed into a gifted multidimensional player with the ability to break games wide open on the fly. As he puts it, the shift “made me the player I wanted to be in the NBA.”
Scottie finished second on the team in scoring (17.8), rebounds (7.3), and steals (2.35) in 1990–91 and would be named to the All-Defense First Team the following year. The effect on the team was powerful. Shifting Scottie to point guard put the ball in his hands as much as in Michael’s, and it allowed M.J. to move to the wing and play a number of different roles in the offense, including leading the attack on transition. The shift also opened up possibilities for other players because Scottie was more egalitarian than Michael in the way he distributed the ball. All of a sudden a new, more collaborative group dynamic was evolving.
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At that time most coaches subscribed to the Knute Rockne theory of mental training. They tried to get their players revved up for the game with win-one-for-the-Gipper-style pep talks. That approach may work if you’re a linebacker. But what I discovered playing for the Knicks is that when I got too excited mentally, it had a negative effect on my ability to stay focused under pressure. So I did the opposite. Instead of charging players up, I developed a number of strategies to help them quiet their minds and build awareness so they could go into battle poised and in control.
The first thing I did with the Bulls was to teach the players an abbreviated version of mindfulness meditation based on the Zen practice I’d been doing for years. I didn’t make a big deal of it. We sat for about ten minutes or so during practice, usually before one of our video-viewing sessions. Some players thought it was weird; others used the time to take a nap. But they humored me because they knew that meditation was an important part of my life. From my point of view, getting the players to sit quietly together for ten minutes was a good start. And some players, notably B.J. Armstrong, took a serious interest in meditation and pursued it further on their own.
I wasn’t trying to turn the Bulls into Buddhist monks. I was interested in getting them to take a more mindful approach to the game and to their relationships with one another. At its heart, mindfulness is about being present in the moment as much as possible, not weighed down by thoughts of the past or the future. According to Suzuki-roshi, when we do something with “a quite simple, clear mind . . . our activity is strong and straightforward. But when we do something with a complicated mind, in relation to other things or people, or society, our activity becomes very complex.”
To be successful at basketball, as author John McPhee once pointed out, you need to have a finely tuned sense of where you are and what’s happening around you at any given moment. A few players are born with this skill—Michael, Scottie, and Bill Bradley, to name a few—but most players have to learn it. What I discovered after years of meditation practice is that when you immerse yourself fully in the moment, you start developing a much deeper awareness of what’s going on, right here, right now. And that awareness ultimately leads to a greater sense of oneness—the essence of teamwork.
John Paxson once sent me an
article from the Harvard Business Review that he said reminded him of me. The article—“Parables of Leadership” by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne—was composed of a series of ancient parables that focused on what the authors called “the unseen space of leadership.” The story that had caught Paxson’s eye was one about a young prince who was sent by his father to study how to become a good ruler with a great Chinese master.
The first assignment the master gave him was to spend a year in the forest alone. When the prince returned, the master asked him to describe what he had heard, and he replied, “I could hear the cuckoos sing, the leaves rustle, the hummingbirds hum, the crickets chirp, the grass blow, the bees buzz and the wind whisper and holler.”
After the prince finished, the master told him to return to the forest to listen for what more could be heard. So the prince went back and sat alone in the forest for several days and nights, wondering what the master was talking about. Then one morning, he started to hear faint sounds that he had never heard before.
Upon his return, the prince told the master, “When I listened most closely, I could hear the unheard—the sound of flowers opening, the sound of the sun warming the earth, and the sound of the grass drinking the morning dew.”
The master nodded. “To hear the unheard,” he said, “is a necessary discipline to be a good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen closely to the people’s hearts, hearing their feelings uncommunicated, pains unexpressed, and complaints not spoken of, can he hope to inspire confidence in the people, understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs of his citizens.”
Hearing the unheard. That’s a skill everyone in the group needs, not just the leader. In basketball, statisticians count when players make assists, or passes that lead to scores. But I’ve always been more interested on having players focus on the pass that leads to the pass that leads to the score. That kind of awareness takes time to develop, but once you’ve mastered it, the invisible becomes visible and the game unfolds like a story before your eyes.
To strengthen the players’ awareness, I liked to keep them guessing about what was coming next. During one practice, they looked so lackadaisical I decided to turn out the lights and have them play in the dark—not an easy task when you’re trying to catch a rocket pass from Michael Jordan. Another time, after an embarrassing defeat, I had them go through a whole practice without saying a word. Other coaches thought I was nuts. What mattered to me was getting the players to wake up, if only for a moment, and see the unseen, hear the unheard.
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Getting ready for the NBA playoffs is like preparing to go to the dentist. You know the visit is not going to be as bad as you think it is, but you can’t stop yourself from obsessing about it. Your whole being is pointed toward that event. The anxiety often creeps up on me in the middle of the night, and I’ll lie in bed thinking and rethinking our strategy for the next game. Sometimes in those wee hours, I’ll turn to meditation to unlock my mind and give me some relief from the barrage of second-guessing. But the most effective way to deal with anxiety, I’ve discovered, is to make sure that you’re as prepared as possible for whatever is coming your way. My brother Joe often talks about faith being one of the two things that can help you cope with fear. The other is love. Joe says you need to have faith that you’ve done all you could to make sure things turn out right—regardless of the final outcome.
There’s a story I love to tell about how Napoléon Bonaparte picked his generals. After one of his great generals died, Napoléon reputedly sent one of his staff officers to search for a replacement. The officer returned several weeks later and described a man he thought would be the perfect candidate because of his knowledge of military tactics and brilliance as a manager. When the officer finished, Napoléon looked at him and said, “That’s all very good, but is he lucky?”
Tex Winter called me “the luckiest coach in the world.” But I don’t think luck has a lot to do with it. Sure, someone might get injured or some other calamity might befall the team. But I believe that if you’ve taken care of all the details, the laws of cause and effect—not luck—will usually determine the result. Of course, there are plenty of things you can’t control in a basketball game. That’s why we focused most of our time on what we could control: the right footwork, the right floor spacing, the right way to handle the ball. When you play the game the right way, it makes sense to the players and winning is the likely outcome.
But there’s another kind of faith that’s even more important—the faith that we’re all connected on some level that surpasses understanding. That’s why I have players sit together in silence. Sitting silently in a group without any distractions can make people resonate with one another in profound ways. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Invisible threads are the strongest ties.”
I’ve watched those ties form several times in my career. The deep feeling of connection that occurs when players pull together is a tremendous force that can wipe away the fear of losing. That was the lesson the Bulls were about to learn.
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Midway through the 1990–91 season, all the pieces started falling together. As the players became more comfortable with the triangle offense, Tex started to get them to focus on a sequence of critical actions we called “automatics,” which could be set in motion if the opposing team was overloading coverage in one area of the floor. The critical point was what Tex called the “moment of truth” when the player moving the ball up court encountered the defense. If the defense focused a lot of pressure on him at that point, then he could launch an automatic play to shift the action to another part of the floor and open up new scoring possibilities. One of the team’s favorite automatics was what we called “the Blind Pig”—an action in which frontline players came up to relieve pressure on the point guard and the weakside forward (aka the pig) broke free, took the pass, and disrupted the defense. The Blind Pig was a critical play not only for the Bulls but also later for the Lakers, because it brought a shooter off a double screen on the weak side and put two of our best players in scoring position.
The players were enthusiastic. The Blind Pig and other automatics allowed them to adapt to what the defense was doing in a coordinated way, without having to rely on me to call plays from the sidelines. “That became our number one weapon,” recalls Scottie. “We felt very good about coming down the floor and just throwing the ball into play. We all started to run to certain spots because we were comfortable there. Everyone was happy. Michael was getting his shots increasingly. We had better balance getting back on transition. We were becoming a better defensive team. And then it became second nature for us.”
The automatics also taught the players how to take advantage of the defense by moving away from pressure rather than trying to attack it directly. This would be important when the team faced stronger, more physical teams, such as the Pistons. To beat Detroit, we needed to be resilient and not back down. But we were never going to beat them if we got into a wrestling match with them every time we came down the floor.
Just before the All-Star break, the Bulls took off on an 18-1 run, including a morale-boosting 95–93 win over the Pistons in Auburn Hills. Even though Isiah Thomas was out with a wrist injury, the game was a key turning point in how we viewed ourselves as a team. After that, the Bad Boys didn’t seem so “bad” anymore.
We finished the season with a league-leading 61-21 record, which gave us home-court advantage throughout the playoffs. We swept the Knicks 3–0, then won the first two games of the series with Philadelphia easily but ran into problems in game 3. Jordan arrived with tendinitis in his knee (probably picked up playing golf between games) and the 76ers’ big forwards—Armen Gilliam, Charles Barkley, and Rick Mahorn—started pushing Horace Grant around and throwing him off his game.
Horace was a six-ten power forward who had exceptional foot speed and good rebounding instincts. Johnny Bach called him “the intrepid one” be
cause of his ability to trap quick ball handlers and make the pressure defense work. Horace, who’d grown up in rural Georgia, had bonded with Scottie early on and once told reporters that Pippen was “like my twin brother.” But they’d drifted apart during the 1990–91 season, as Scottie gravitated closer to Michael. Meanwhile, Horace, who was trying hard to save his marriage, had turned to religion for solace.
The previous year Johnny had suggested that I use Horace as a “whipping boy” to motivate the team. This is a fairly common practice on pro teams. In fact, I had played that role briefly when I was with the Knicks. The point was to designate one player who would get the lion’s share of criticism as a way to motivate the rest of the players to bond together. I didn’t entirely buy into this type of old-school coaching, but I was willing to give it a try. I knew the players liked Horace and would rally around him if I pushed too hard. And Johnny, who had a solid relationship with Horace, assured me that he was tough enough to take the pressure.
We explained the idea to Horace and he was on board, at first. Ever since he was a kid, he’d dreamed about becoming a Marine, so strong discipline appealed to him. But as time went by, he began to bristle at the criticism. It all came to a head in the third quarter of game 3 against the 76ers.
Gilliam had been hitting Horace in the back and pushing him off position all game, and the refs had been letting him get away with it. When Horace finally retaliated out of frustration, the refs noticed and called the foul.
I was furious. I pulled Horace out of the game and started screaming at him for letting the 76ers manhandle him. Horace yelled back, “I’m tired of being your whipping boy.” Then he started cursing me—unusual for him.
Needless to say, we lost the game. I admit this wasn’t my finest moment. But I learned a key lesson: how important it was to relate to each player as an individual, with respect and compassion, no matter how much pressure I might be feeling. I met with Horace when the air had cleared and told him that we needed to start over. From that point on, I said, I would focus on giving him constructive criticism, and I hoped that he, in turn, would give me feedback on anything that might be troubling him.