by Phil Jackson
Sanders became more audacious after he got his raise, grousing continually about how I distributed playing time. During the first round of the playoffs, against the Toronto Tornados, I got fed up and took him out of a game early. Moments later I looked down the bench and saw he’d taken off his shoes. “What are you doing?” I screamed. “Put your shoes back on.”
“No,” he said defiantly. “I’m going down to the locker room. My foot hurts.”
“Your foot doesn’t hurt. Put your shoes on. I want you back in the game.”
Sanders gave me a cold look and walked off court.
Afterwards I told him I was suspending him for the next two games. We had already dropped the first two games of the series on our own court, in large part because of Sanders’ selfish attitude. Now we faced two must-win away games. I didn’t want him around poisoning the team.
When we arrived in Toronto the next day, Coyne called and said he was reinstating Sanders because “we can’t live without him.” My gut told me this was a bad idea, but I went along with him. Coyne promised that Sanders would apologize to the team. Instead Frankie mumbled a few meaningless words, then led the team to victory with a 35-point shooting barrage. After that he was impossible to control.
The unspoken laws of basketball are strange and mysterious. When you violate them, as Sanders did in the Toronto series, you pay a price, but never in a predictable way. I felt as if I had invited disaster by caving in and letting Sanders return. After we finished off Toronto and took on the Tampa Bay Thrillers for the championship, the drama finally played itself out.
The Thrillers’ coach, Bill Musselman, had packed his team with NBA veterans, and they put a lot of pressure on Sanders. At one point during the second game, Sanders stole the ball on a breakaway and, as he passed the Tampa Bay bench, yelled “Fuck you, Muss.” Musselman went nuts, and later that night called Sanders in his hotel room and told him that if he did it again, he’d sic his bodyguards on him. To prove that he was serious, he brought two 300-pound professional wrestlers to the next game.
It all came down to the last seconds of the final game. We were ahead by two points with three seconds left, but the Thrillers tied the game at the buzzer and then won in overtime. It was probably the worst loss I’ve ever endured. But it taught me something important—above all, trust your gut. This is the first law of leadership. Once you’ve made your move, you have to stand by your decision and live with the consequences because your number one loyalty has to be to the team. In the case of Sanders, I compromised my principles to placate my boss, and the players picked up on my ambivalence immediately. The solidarity that had taken so long to build suddenly evaporated. Not only did we lose the series, we were lost as a team.
WHEN RIGHT ACTION MEANS CALLING IT QUITS
After that experience, I decided to split up the team and start all over again. It was time, I told the players, to get off the CBA treadmill and look for jobs in Europe, where they could make good money and not be haunted by an NBA dream wish. I thought it would be easy to find replacements, but the competition for talent had taken a nasty turn in the CBA. Musselman’s success that year—winning his first of a record four straight titles—encouraged other coaches to follow his lead and stock their teams with NBA veterans. Some owners were offering players $1,000 to $1,500 a week and slipping them illegal cash bonuses on the side. Overnight what used to be a training league for young players had turned into a cutthroat business where the owners were obsessed with winning and most of the players were cynical and self-absorbed. I wondered how long I could last.
It wasn’t easy practicing enlightened management in such a climate. The team I pieced together was composed primarily of CBA lifers who weren’t that receptive to my experiments with communal basketball. Discipline became a chore. We weren’t spending as much time together off court, in large part because we were flying to most of our games instead of taking the van. Then Charley Rosen got a head coaching job with the Savannah Spirits, and I lost a trusted colleague, and the only person on the team that I could really talk to.
I finally lost it a few days before Christmas in 1986. At the time I was trying to figure out what to do with Michael Graham, a forward who was as naturally gifted as any player I’d seen in the CBA. He had started as a freshman for Georgetown’s 1984 NCAA championship team, but he left school shortly afterwards and now was trying to make a comeback. What troubled me about him was his inability to concentrate. Every now and then he’d make a great play, but the rest of the time his mind would be floating in the stratosphere, completely unfocused. Nothing I said made any difference. Whenever I tried to talk to him, his eyes would glaze over and he’d retreat to some dark inner corner nobody could penetrate. Finally I gave up and released him.
He took it hard, but not nearly as hard as I did. Driving home that night in the rain on the New York State Thruway, all my doubts about coaching flooded my mind. Was it really worth it? Here was a kid who was born to play basketball, someone who had enough talent to be a star in the NBA, and yet despite all my sophisticated psychology, I couldn’t reach him. (Actually Graham would play a few more years in the CBA, but at the time I thought I was ending his career.) Why did it have to happen this way? Why did I have to be the person to snuff out his basketball dream? As I pulled off at the Woodstock exit, tears were running down my face.
Talking it over with June that night, I decided to leave the Patroons at the end of the season and look for another job, perhaps even change professions. I put some feelers out around the NBA and got a lukewarm response. The Knicks flirted with me for months about a possible assistant coaching slot, but when that fell through, I began to explore other fields. The jobs I was best suited for (according to the career placement test I took) were: 1) housekeeper, 2) trail guide, 3) counselor, and 4) lawyer. Realizing I wouldn’t be able to put five children through college on a trail guide’s salary, I made plans to attend law school.
It looked as though my life in basketball was over. In my mind I was getting ready to move on. Then the week I filed for unemployment, Jerry Krause gave me a call.
Five
SELFLESSNESS IN ACTION
One finger can’t lift a pebble.
—HOPI SAYING
The Bulls’ owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, once told me he thought most people were motivated by one of two forces: fear or greed. That may be true, but I also think people are motivated by love. Whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not, what drives most basketball players is not the money or the adulation, but their love of the game. They live for those moments when they can lose themselves completely in the action and experience the pure joy of competition.
One of the main jobs of a coach is to reawaken that spirit so that the players can blend together effortlessly. It’s often an uphill fight. The ego-driven culture of basketball, and society in general, militates against cultivating this kind of selfless action, even for members of a team whose success as individuals is tied directly to the group performance. Our society places such a high premium on individual achievement, it’s easy for players to get blinded by their own self-importance and lose a sense of interconnectedness, the essence of teamwork.
THE WAY OF THE BULLS
When I arrived in Chicago to join the Bulls’ coaching staff, I felt as if I was setting out on a strange and wonderful adventure. No longer hampered by the responsibilities of being a head coach, I was free to become a student of the game again and explore a wide range of new ideas.
The Bulls were in a state of transition. Ever since he had taken over as vice president of basketball operations in 1985, Jerry Krause had been feverishly rearranging the lineup, trying to find the right combination of players to complement Michael Jordan. A former NBA scout, Krause had been nicknamed “the Sleuth” because of his passionate desire to scout a game incognito, but he has an uncanny ability to find extraordinary prospects at small, out-of-the-way colleges where nobody else had bothered to look. Among the many stars he had drafted w
ere Earl Monroe, Wes Unseld, Alvan Adams, Jerry Sloan, and Norm Van Lier. In his first two years running the Bulls, he had drafted power forward Charles Oakley, who would later be traded to New York for center Bill Cartwright, and acquired point guard John Paxson, a tough-minded clutch performer who would play a major role in the Bulls’ drive for the championship. Krause’s biggest coup, however, was landing Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant in the 1987 draft.
Scottie’s rise to the NBA read like a fairy tale. The youngest of eleven children, he grew up in Hamburg, Arkansas, a sleepy rural town where his father worked in a paper mill. When Scottie was a teenager, his father was incapacitated by a stroke, and the family had to get by on his disability payments. Scottie was a respectable point guard in high school, but at only 6'1" he didn’t impress the college recruiters. But his coach believed in him and talked the athletic director at University of Central Arkansas into giving him an educational grant and a job as the basketball team’s equipment manager. In his sophomore year, Scottie grew four inches and began to excel, and by his senior year had become a dynamic end-to-end player, averaging 26.3 points and 10 rebounds a game. Krause picked up on him early and tried to keep it a secret. But after Scottie excelled in a series of predraft tryout games, Krause knew he would be one of the top five prospects. So he worked out a deal to flip-flop picks with Seattle in order to acquire Scottie’s draft rights.
Scottie, the fifth pick overall, was the kind of athlete Krause loves. He had long arms and big hands, and the speed and leaping ability to become a first-class all-around player. What impressed me about him was his natural aptitude for the game. Scottie had a near-genius basketball IQ: he read the court extremely well, knew how to make complicated adjustments on the run and, like Jordan, seemed to have a sixth sense about what was going to happen next. In practice Scottie gravitated toward Michael, eager to see what he could learn from him. While other young players shied away from covering Michael in scrimmages to avoid being humiliated, Scottie wasn’t afraid to take him on, and often did a credible job guarding him.
Horace, the tenth pick overall, also came from a rural Southern town—Sparta, Georgia—but that’s where his similarity to Pippen ended. Unlike Scottie, Horace, a 6'10" power forward, took a long time learning the intricacies of the game. He had trouble concentrating at first, and often had to make up for mental lapses with his quickness and sheer athleticism. This made him vulnerable against teams like the Detroit Pistons, who devised subtle plays that took advantage of his defensive mistakes.
Horace has an identical twin brother, Harvey, who plays for the Portland Trail Blazers. They were close growing up—so close, in fact, they claimed to have had virtually identical dreams. But their rivalry became so intense playing basketball at Clemson that Harvey decided to transfer to another school. Horace and Scottie became best friends during their rookie year, and we nicknamed them Frick and Frack because they dressed alike, drove the same model car and were rarely seen apart. As a twin, Horace expected everyone on the team to be treated equally, and later criticized management publicly for giving Jordan preferential treatment. Everyone liked Horace because he was guileless and unassuming, and had a generous heart. A devout born-again Christian, he was once so moved by the professed faith of a homeless man he met in front of a church in Philadelphia that he put him up in a hotel and gave him several hundred dollars in spending money.
THE JORDAN PROBLEM
The Bulls’ head coach, Doug Collins, was an energetic leader brimming with ideas who worked well with young players like Horace and Scottie. Doug was a popular sports figure in Illinois. The first Illinois State player to be named an All-American, he scored what should have been the winning foul shots in the controversial final of the 1972 Olympics, before the clock was set back and the Soviet Union snatched the win in the closing seconds. A great outside shooter, Collins was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers, the number one pick overall, and made the All-Star team four years in a row before being slowed down by injuries. Having played alongside Julius (Dr. J) Erving, the Picasso of the slam dunk, Collins had enormous respect for what Jordan could do with the ball and was reluctant to try anything that might inhibit his creative process.
Though Collins’ coaching experience was limited, he had a sharp analytical mind, and Krause hoped that, with guidance from his veteran assistants, Tex Winter and Johnny Bach, he could solve the Michael Jordan problem. This was not an easy assignment. Jordan was just coming into his own as the best all-around player in the game. The year before I arrived—Collins’ first season as head coach—Jordan had averaged 37.1 points a game to win his first of seven straight scoring titles, while also becoming the first player to make 200 steals and 100 blocked shots in a season. Jordan could do things with a basketball nobody had ever seen before: he seemed to defy gravity when he went up for a shot, hanging in the air for days—sometimes weeks—as he crafted his next masterpiece. Was it merely an illusion? It didn’t matter. Whenever he touched the ball, everyone in the stadium became transfixed, wondering what he was going to do next.
The problem was that Jordan’s teammates were often just as enchanted as the fans. Collins devised dozens of plays to get the rest of the team involved in the action; in fact, he had so many he was given the name Play-a-Day Collins. That helped, but when push came to shove, the other players usually faded into the background and waited for Michael to perform another miracle. Unfortunately, this mode of attack, which assistant coach Johnny Bach dubbed “the archangel offense,” was so one-dimensional the better defensive teams had little difficulty shutting it down. Our nemesis, the Detroit Pistons, came up with an effective scheme called the Jordan Rules, which involved having three or more players switch off and close in on Michael whenever he made a move to the hoop. They could get away with it because none of the other Bulls posed much of a scoring threat.
How to open up the offense and make the other players more productive was a constant topic of conversation. Early on, I told the coaching staff about Red Holzman’s axiom that the sign of a great player was not how much he scored, but how much he lifted his teammates’ performance. Collins said excitedly, “You’ve got to tell that to Michael.” I hesitated. “No, you’ve got to tell him right now,” Collins insisted. So I searched the gym and found Michael in the weight room chatting with the players. Slightly embarrassed, I repeated Holzman’s adage, saying “Doug thought you’d like hear this.” I expected Michael, who could be sarcastic, to dismiss the remark as a product of basketball’s stone age. But instead he thanked me and was genuinely curious about my experience with the championship Knicks.
The following season, 1988–89, Collins moved Jordan over to point guard in midseason and made Craig Hodges, one of the league’s best three-point shooters, the shooting guard. The point guard’s primary job is to move the ball upcourt and direct the offense. In that position Michael would have to focus more attention on creating scoring opportunities for his teammates. The switch worked pretty well at first: though Michael’s average dropped to 32.5 points per game, the other players, especially Grant, Pippen, and the newly acquired Bill Cartwright, made up the difference. But the team struggled in the playoffs. Playing against Detroit in the Eastern Conference finals, Jordan had to expend so much energy running the offense he didn’t have much firepower left at the end of the game. We lost the series, 4–2.
THE TAO OF BASKETBALL
The problem with making Jordan the point guard, as I saw it, was that it didn’t address the real problem: the fact that the prevalent style of offense in the NBA reinforced a self-centered approach to the game. As I traveled around the league scouting other teams, I was amazed to discover that everybody was using essentially the same modus operandi—power basketball. Here’s a typical sequence: the point guard brings the ball up and passes it inside to one of the big men, who will either make a power move to the hoop or kick the ball out to somebody on the wing after drawing a double team. The player on the wing, in turn, will either shoot, drive to the basket
, or set up a screen-and-roll play. This style, an outgrowth of inner-city playground basketball, began to infiltrate the NBA in the late seventies with the emergence of Dr. J and other spectacular open-floor players. By the late eighties, it had taken over the league. Yet, though it can inspire breathtaking flights of creativity, the action often becomes stagnant and predictable because, at any given moment, only two or three players are involved in the play. Not only does this make the game a mind-numbing experience for players who aren’t big scorers, it also misleads everyone into thinking that basketball is nothing more than a sophisticated slam dunk competition.
The answer, in Tex Winter’s mind, was a continuous-motion offense involving everybody on the floor. Tex, a white-haired “professor” of basketball who had played under legendary coach Sam Berry at the University of Southern California, had made a name for himself in the 1950s when he turned little-known Kansas State into a national powerhouse using a system he’d developed, then known as the triple-post offense. Jerry Krause, who was then a scout, considered Tex a genius and spent a lot of time hanging out at Kansas State practices trying to see what he could absorb. The day after he was put in charge of the Bulls, Jerry called Tex, who had recently retired from a consulting job at LSU, and coaxed him into moving to Chicago to help rebuild the franchise.
Collins had decided against using Tex’s system because he thought it was better suited for college than the pros. He wasn’t alone. Even Tex had his doubts. He had tried to implement it as head coach of the Houston Rockets in the early seventies without much luck. Nevertheless, the more I learned about Tex’s system—which he now calls the triangle offense—the more convinced I became that it made sense for the Bulls. The Bulls weren’t a big, powerful team; nor did they have a dominant point guard like Magic Johnson or Isiah Thomas. If they were going to win the championship, it was going to be with speed, quickness, and finesse. The system would allow them to do that.