The Jordan Rules (20 page)

Grant attempted 8 shots and was outraged again about the failure of Jordan and Pippen to pass the ball to anyone or run the offense. “We'll never beat good teams that way,” he said as he walked briskly to the waiting team bus. The reserves felt they were being blamed for the team's failures, and the new rotation in which the all-reserve unit was broken up made things tougher. They were getting less time and even fewer shots because neither Jordan nor Pippen would pass any of them the ball, then when they did miss, they were singled out for the losses. “How are you supposed to average fifteen a game when you get three shots?” wondered Hopson.

Afterward, Jackson talked about changes in personnel and in the lineup if the Bulls could not come back a week later on Christmas Day to defeat the Pistons.

It was a quiet trip home, filled with glassy eyes and glum looks. Jordan unfurled the stat sheet on the bus and offered: “Headache tonight, Scottie?”

The Lakers were next, but the Bulls were still stewing about the Pistons. After the coaches watched the films, a regular postgame practice in the NBA now, they became even further enraged by Detroit's bullying tactics. Cliff Levingston had been kicked in the groin by Vinnie Johnson, and the Pistons again were allowed more latitude by the referees than other teams, the coaches felt.

“It's their style,” fumed Jackson. “The referees get accustomed to the way you play and allow you to play within those parameters. So Detroit is allowed to play more physically.”

The Bulls were so frustrated that they felt they had to do something. They decided to complain to the league, as the Pistons had years ago, a tactic that had resulted in fewer trips to the foul line for Jordan. Krause and Jackson complained intensely to operations director Rod Thorn that they could not compete with Detroit if the Pistons were allowed to play this way. They would send tapes.

At the same time, Jackson tried to encourage the team to get more physical. “You've got to hit someone,” Jackson counseled Grant after the Detroit game. “When we play Detroit, you've just got to hit guys, anyone. Punch someone. Get thrown out of the game. Just do some damage.”

Grant listened, but he was hesitant; that wasn't his game. Bach agreed. “Sure, we need to hit someone, but who's going to do it?”

The Bulls could fly, but they could also be as harmless as birds.

The game against the Lakers showed just how magnificent the Bulls could be in full flight. The Bulls were too quick and athletic for the Lakers; both Jordan and Pippen missed triple doubles by just 1 assist. They forced turnovers, slashed to the offensive boards, and grabbed most of the loose balls. In Jordan, Pippen, and Grant, they had perhaps the quickest “two-three-four” trio in the league. It was their ultimate strength. But Bill Cartwright also bullied Vlade Divac out of the way, and in the fourth quarter, when the Lakers pulled within 3, it was Jordan, Pippen, and Grant scoring 22 of the team's 24 points.

The next night, the Bulls blew by the Pacers to take a 14-point first-quarter lead, this time with John Paxson hitting his shots; he would get 23 points for the game. The Bulls led by 20 before halftime and relaxed. The Pacers made a run, but the Bulls regrouped behind Pippen and Jordan, who scored 7 straight after the Pacers got within 1, 104–103, in the fourth quarter. The Bulls coasted to a 10-point victory.

But all thoughts were still on the Pistons, who were coming in next, on Christmas Day. And Jackson had an idea.

The Bulls, especially Jordan, knew they needed more scoring to defeat Detroit. They once had hopes that either Hopson or Walter Davis would come to the rescue. But Davis had decided to stay in Denver, although he was now on the market and the Bulls were talking about trading for him. And Hopson couldn't seem to find his way in the Bulls' system and seemed almost to resent the coaching at times; a wall was going up between him and Jackson that would only grow bigger as the season progressed. Jackson had toyed the previous year with the idea of starting King in hopes of getting him into the offense and bringing Grant off the bench. But Grant was in a fragile emotional state for much of that season because of his contract negotiations, and Jackson feared Grant would read the move as an attempt to lessen his bargaining power, so he stayed with him.

But now Grant had a new three-year deal and Jackson felt it was time to make the change. Perhaps Grant could score more coming off the bench, and Jackson liked the matchup of Grant coming in to play John Salley, who gave the Bulls trouble. Jackson also thought a start might jump-start King's game, which had been drowning under his massive ego. He'd already had a pair of scoreless games—King said he'd never had one in his life—and a third of his shots were being blocked. King seemed to be getting desperate; he told Bach he was going to change his number to change his luck, but Bach informed him he couldn't do that during the season. He got a trendy haircut in which several geometric designs were shaved into his head above his ears; Jackson, seeing one was triangle-shaped, asked him if he was trying to learn the offense by osmosis. But Jackson felt he needed King, and always believed if he left King on the court long enough he would score, maybe 14 to 16 points per game. So he decided to let King start against the Pistons.

Word began to circulate on the players' grapevine. King was upset about playing little, even if he'd rarely played well. The talk was that King's agent, the powerful David Falk of ProServ, had threatened the team: Play King or we are going to blast the Bulls in the press. Actually, Falk had merely talked to Krause about King's status. But there were rumors. And Grant believed the rumors.

And with good reason. When King first came to the Bulls, he was all confidence and swagger. He loved to talk. He made up nicknames for himself, like “Sky” and “the Pearl.” He was a journalism major and he had a great story: He was an Oklahoma kid whose father had served two tours of duty in Vietnam and was decorated for drenching himself in water in order to put out a fire threatening a munitions dump. His mother was tough and demanded a good education for her son; when Oklahoma tried some questionable recruiting tactics, she told the newspapers, “I don't want my baby to go to Oklahoma. I want him to be able to read a stop sign.”

King did have academic problems—yes, even at Oklahoma—when he started; he lost his eligibility as a freshman and struggled somewhat as a sophomore. But with opposing defenses geared to stopping Harvey Grant, he blossomed and became a big-time scorer. The knock on him was that he was “soft,” in the pro scouts' vernacular—that he didn't rebound well despite that 10-per-game average, and he didn't guard the middle. He played in an offense suited to his quick style, so he didn't have to power to the basket as he would in the pros. But all that was forgotten as the draft drew near; he was projected as the Bulls' power forward of the future, but for now he would play behind Horace Grant.

This was made clear when King arrived, and King said all the right things. But privately he boasted about becoming a starter, and King's girlfriend, when she met Grant's wife, Donna, boldly said, “My boyfriend's going to take your husband's job.”

Donna, a shy, sensitive South Side Chicago girl who'd met Horace at a local club when he was a rookie, was devastated. She cried about the meeting, and would again when the starters were introduced on Christmas Day with King at power forward and the girlfriend in the stands taunting her. “Told you, told you,” King's girlfriend, Lisa, shouted from about six rows behind Donna in the wives' section. “My boyfriend is the starter and Horace is never going to get it back.” Eventually, Jackson would have to call both players in and tell them to tell the women to cool it.

The Bulls beat the Pistons on Christmas Day and they even got rough; Grant pushed Joe Dumars in the fourth quarter and was ejected. Bullies? By then, though, the Bulls were ahead by 12 and the game was pretty much decided. They shot well, 52 percent, which they didn't do against Detroit in Auburn Hills; Grant did hold Salley down, although Salley tends to coast in the regular season and play harder in the playoffs. But King was a bust, shooting 2 for 7 and scoring 6 points. Mostly, the Bulls won with an aggressive third quarter. Since they have no shot blocker and aren't an exceptionally strong rebounding team, they rely on their defense to create opportunities and their quickness to stymie shooters. They held Detroit to 4-of-17 shooting and 14 points in the third quarter and went from 5 down at halftime to 9 ahead. They pretty much controlled the game afterward.

The win didn't exactly trigger a celebration. They had defeated the Pistons at home before, three straight in Chicago in the 1990 conference finals; what had they proven?

“We're
supposed
to win at home,” said Hodges. “It's like Eddie Murphy said, ‘Show me something. Here, Stevie [Wonder], you take the wheel and drive.' Now that's something. We haven't shown anything.”

And the Bulls marketing staff was disappointed. For the big national-TV Christmas Day game they had hoped to put the Bulls in red uniforms, but the league had rejected the request. They had wanted the team to wear green uniforms for Saint Patrick's Day the year before, but Jackson had squelched that. They were hoping to revive an indoor fireworks display they had tried earlier in the season, but the players complained about being hit by falling debris from the rafters of the elderly hulk that was Chicago Stadium. It was a constant battle Jackson would fight with management. “What's all this stuff with mascots and dancing Blues Brothers and blimps floating all over the place?” he'd say. “Why can't it be just basketball? They seem to do all right with that in Boston.”

It's the NBA, he was told. It's Fan-Tastic.

The Bulls had little trouble with Golden State two nights later, although the game became something of a spectator event for everyone but Jordan and Pippen.

The latest results in the All-Star voting had come out and Pippen was fifth in the fan balloting for the two Eastern Conference forward positions. He studied his statistics before the game, and while they were good, he knew Bernard King was having an All-Star season after knee surgery and Dominique Wilkins and Kevin McHale were always coaches' favorites for the team. Charles Barkley and Larry Bird were sure to be selected by the fans as starters and it was unlikely more than three more forwards would be selected by the coaches. “I've got to get myself up there in the voting,” he said.

So he started taking the ball to the basket, and by halftime he had 15 points and 11 shots, 1 more than Jordan. “The General's not going to like that,” Hodges whispered to Paxson as the teams left the court at halftime with the Bulls ahead by 14.

Sure enough, Jordan took 6 of the Bulls' first 7 shots of the second half and scored 18 points in the third quarter, although Pippen would not quit: He added 14 as the Bulls went ahead 105–85.

“It's just two guys,” Grant said later, having scored 1 point off the bench. “Two guys are doing what they want and the rest of us don't seem to matter.”

On the bench, Winter was threatening to quit. “They won't run the offense,” he told Jackson. “If we don't want to run the offense, I'll just leave.”

Were Jordan and Pippen being selfish? Jackson was asked afterward.

“We like to call them scorers, not selfish,” Jackson offered.

Jackson finally gave Pippen a long rest in the fourth quarter, and he would finish with a career-high 34. But Jordan had 42, and an AP wire-service reporter summed up every writer's defense for not featuring Pippen in the game story: “You've usually got to lead with the high scorer,” he explained.

King had started again, and after he scored only 2 points and shot 1 of 4, Jackson had to admit the experiment was a failure. With Seattle coming in, Jackson decided to go back to Grant as a starter to face Shawn Kemp. “He'll be jumping over Stacey and standing on his shoulders,” Jackson told his coaches.

Again, the game was no problem. The starters gave the Bulls a 38–27 lead after one quarter. Seattle pulled within 8 at the half, then the Bulls took a 17-point lead after three quarters and had it up to 29 before calling in the end of the bench. But there wasn't enough time to get Scott Williams into the game.

The rookie free agent had been the surprise of the training camp and the early season. He hadn't been drafted because of shoulder problems—the pros had figured he'd need surgery. But the Bulls signed him, and despite several excruciating episodes in which his shoulder popped out of place, Williams insisted on playing through the season. And he would play so well at times later in the season that Jackson would use him ahead of King and even Grant.

Jackson, though, generally believes in seniority, so Williams had to wait his turn. He was doing that on the bench as the Bulls stretched their lead to almost 30 against the SuperSonics in that last game of December 1990. Finally, Jackson called for him to go in, but as he waited at the scorer's table no fouls were called, the clock didn't stop, and the game ended.

In the locker room afterward, Williams sat crying.

Jordan whispered something to him. They'd put the rookie next to Jordan because Jordan had helped recruit him for North Carolina and had wanted him with the Bulls. Rookies can get lost sitting next to Jordan. It was harder on 1989 rookie Jeff Sanders, whom Jordan didn't care for because of his lazy attitude. Jordan often demeaned the slow-moving, slow-talking Sanders as he sat not three feet away. Once when Sanders rebounded and slammed in practice, Jordan shouted, “Hey, the No Doz must have worn off.” Before the season, the Bulls traded Sanders to Miami, which later released him. He went to the CBA and got called up on a ten-day contract by the Charlotte Hornets; “It's probably a twelve-day,” Jordan said when he heard about it. “He needs two days to wake up.”

But Jordan liked Williams and sympathized with him. He knew what the problem was, and it wasn't just that Williams had become frustrated by not getting into a blowout game.