The Jordan Rules (32 page)

But if the Bulls were looking ahead a little, it was hard to blame them. Much had been made in the newspapers and on TV about the rematch with the Pacers because of Reggie Miller's comments. Copies of the quotes about the Bulls' lack of talent beyond Jordan had been pasted above the players' locker stalls. Everyone was asked before the game about them. Miller felt his remarks had been taken out of context and stopped talking to reporters even before the team got to Chicago. In the game, he was heartily booed every time he touched the ball, but he played well and scored 34 points. He had plenty to say in the game, however.

The Pacers are a team known for what the players like to call “talking trash.” Talking trash is the on-court banter and brinkmanship some players use to motivate themselves or harass teammates. Not much goes on among Bulls players, but in Miller and Chuck Person the Pacers have two of the boldest trash talkers in the league.

Early in the game, Pippen went down against a Miller rush to the basket, trying to draw a charging foul. “Get up, you punk-ass motherfucker,” Miller screamed at Pippen. Pippen got the ball the next trip down, drove at Miller, and lost the ball trying to elbow Miller in the head. Pippen would be so annoyed he'd get into early foul trouble, commit 6 turnovers, and score just 10 points. “I should have waited to get him later in the game,” Pippen decided afterward. The taunts and cursing continued throughout the game, but the Bulls could not shake the Pacers until late even after an 11–3 start.

“We got too carried away with all that stuff,” lamented Cartwright. “We expended too much energy early.”

But the game became a riot. Detlef Schrempf got ejected for arguing after being called for a foul. He had previously been elbowed in the head by Cartwright and he was called for pushing with his elbow to ward off Cartwright. And Chuck Person was ejected late and drop-kicked the basketball thirty rows up into the stands in a wild display of emotion that had referee Bill Oakes screaming at him as he left the court.

With three of the six Pacers' starters gone—Vern Fleming having already left with a back injury—the Bulls took control and won 133–119. It was their twenty-sixth straight home win, and it gave them the second-best all-time NBA home win streak. It would turn out to be good playoff practice for the Bulls, both physically and verbally. But another potentially explosive game was coming up: Olajuwon and the Rockets were coming into the Stadium Monday for the first time since Olajuwon's injury.

Rockets management had gone near berserk after the injury and had done everything short of posting a bounty on Cartwright's head. But Cartwright remained cool, and before the game he met Olajuwon on the court and thanked him for his restraint. In Houston, they were now talking about Cartwright as the Rockets' most valuable player. The Rockets had run off eleven straight wins and had gone 15–10 without Olajuwon. They'd found they had players who could perform and not just watch while Olajuwon spun and drove and shot. And those players, the guards particularly, sliced up the Bulls. Kenny Smith, Vernon Maxwell, and Sleepy Floyd blew by Bulls defenders. The Cartwright-Olajuwon matchup would quickly be forgotten as both seemed timid in trying to avoid another controversy. Olajuwon shot 5 of 17 and Cartwright 2 of 9.

Jordan scored 34 points, thanks mostly to abandoning the offense after halftime and driving to the basket, but he, too, was frustrated. He was hardly satisfied the Bulls were a championship-caliber team yet. “Every time I'd switch guys, then they'd go to the other guy and he'd score,” he complained afterward. “I switch to Kenny and then they go to Maxwell and then B.J.'s in there at the end short-arming shots. Where was Hodges to spread the floor? And they played off Pippen [who went 4 for 17] and he couldn't do anything. We're going to see more of that in the playoffs.”

The media celebrated Jordan afterward for playing heroically despite a head cold. Jordan had slept in the trainers' room before the game and wore a towel around his head at halftime. Both stunts amused the team, since Jordan had gotten sick because he had gone out to play golf Sunday on a cold, windy day after an all-night card session at home with friends. “I asked him why,” said Cartwright, “and he said he doesn't sleep much. I've never seen a guy sick so much in my life.”

The players thought Jordan made much of his illnesses to impress the media, and they were especially appalled when he came out to shoot after halftime wearing a towel like a turban. “Maybe he thought someone in the building didn't know he was sick,” said Grant.

Earlier, while Jordan slept, Levingston, who had gotten a nasty reputation on the team for sticking by Jordan and becoming something of a cloying toady, lay down next to Jordan and slept. He, too, claimed he was sick. “Cliff play golf, too?” Paxson wondered. “Don't think so,” said Hodges. “I think it's sympathy pains.”

The Rockets won by 10 and, more distressing, the Bulls scored 90 points for the second time in three games in playoff-style defensive ball. The Bulls' bench came up short again, although Armstrong did score 15 points despite a couple of late misses when Houston went on a 9–0 run to assure the victory. Hopson didn't even get in the game; Levingston played only five minutes and Stacey King, eight. Perdue had now taken King's time at backup center and King was being used behind Grant, although Jackson felt he didn't rebound enough to play power forward and threw off the team's offense when he was in the game.

The Rockets were now the hottest team in the NBA with their twelfth straight win. The Bulls' twenty-six game home winning streak was over. They were just 12–12 against the top ten teams in the NBA and 4–7 against the top six in the Western Conference after having been swept in the season series with Houston. Jackson, though, had a way of keeping the team on track, and with a matchup against Boston looming at the end of the month, he knew he had to keep the team from looking ahead.

“Unless we win the next two games [against New Jersey and Washington], playing Boston isn't going to mean anything,” said Jackson. The Boston game would be the last stand for the Celtics in their effort to overtake the Bulls for best record in the Eastern Conference and home-court advantage should the two teams meet in the playoffs. Kevin McHale hadn't played in two weeks because of an ankle injury, but the Bulls expected to see him. Larry Bird was laboring like an elderly man with his back problem. Reggie Lewis had sustained back spasms, and Brian Shaw was playing on a bad ankle. The red-shirted Bulls would be the big bad redcoats coming into New England. But before that, there were the Nets and the Bullets.

“Those are the most important games we have coming up,” Jackson insisted. No one believed him.

Jackson was thinking about his offense. He was thinking about the playoffs and isolating Jordan on top of the floor. “It's the offense everyone fears,” he agreed. But doing so ran counter to the principles preached by Winter and Krause. Jackson was a disciple of the team game, but he recognized the weapon he had in Jordan. And he knew Jordan's distaste for the offense tended to sabotage it because he refused to cut without the ball.

For about a month or so, Jackson had been able to implement his plan to get Jordan to run upcourt ahead of the ball, bringing defenders with him and making the ball handler's job easier. But that, too, had been a struggle. “We had to try to trick him,” Jackson acknowledged. So he persuaded Jordan that he could get easier scoring opportunities as a post-up player. Jordan, unsurprisingly, quickly became the best post-up player on the team, scoring easily against smaller guards, especially now that he had built himself up to around 210 pounds. But Jordan eventually caught on to the ploy, and the Bulls were able to run that way less and less as the season progressed.

The trouble with putting Jordan on the top of the floor was that when he gave up the ball he'd often step back instead of cutting through. “He could make the offense so much more effective,” Jackson lamented. Yet Jackson needed a happy Jordan to win, and he knew how Jordan chafed under the so-called equal-opportunity triangle offense. But tonight against the Nets would be a good time to experiment.

Jackson had one of his tips about the Meadowlands baskets. In watching the tapes, he had seen too many balls rattle out on the rim in front of the Bulls' bench. The Bulls would be shooting at that basket first. “Everything comes out of that basket,” Jackson instructed the team before the game. “Let's stay with every shot even if it looks like it's going down.”

By halftime, the Bulls had 18 offensive rebounds on the way to a season-high 29. Horace Grant had 9 in the first half. The Bulls had a 69–56 lead and were pulling away. It had been a Jordan show; when the cat's away, Perdue joked, Michael gets to play.

Winter was at the NCAA Final Four, a perk the Bulls annually allowed him as a veteran college coach, while Krause was out of the country with Reinsdorf on yet another trip to Yugoslavia. Jackson spread the floor, put Jordan on top, and he went left, right, left, dancing all over the Nets on the way to a 28-point first half. He scored 19 points in the last five minutes of the second quarter. Everybody else could have taken a seat. Jordan was thrilled; he took 26 shots in thirty minutes. His teammates weren't as happy, even though the Bulls pulled away to an easy 128–94 win. It was the kind of game that tended to corrode the relationship between Jordan and his teammates further because it was a game in which he could have deferred to the other players, but didn't.

“He didn't have to score that many,” noted Cartwright about Jordan's 42 points. Yet even Jordan wasn't thrilled, since Jackson took him out after three quarters.

“He's not going to let me get fifty this season,” he would say afterward.

But Cartwright couldn't understand. “We're going to beat this team anyway,” he said. “This was a game we all could have gotten twenty [no other Bull scored more than fourteen]. That's the thing that gets me.”

“Hey, Hodg,” Grant yelled across the room as about two dozen reporters made a thick circle around Jordan. Hodges had been calling Jordan's act “the show” for some time and the term had caught on. “What were you doing during the show?” Grant asked. “I went out and got some popcorn. Did anyone miss me?”

The Bulls moved into the Washington, D.C., area the next day, a stormy Good Friday. When they left for the Capital Centre from their suburban Maryland motel, Stacey King wasn't on the bus. He arrived in the locker room about forty-five minutes later and said he'd been stuck in traffic, that he'd gone to see his agent on a promotional deal and traffic was bad. It was; Washingtonians handled rain-slicked highways about the way a lady in high heels navigates an icy driveway. Jackson took King aside and warned him about such violations of team rules.

What Jackson didn't know was that King hadn't gone to see his agent, who wasn't even in Washington. King had begun his own little campaign. He pretty much figured his days with the Bulls were over—or should be—and he decided he'd help them end. He'd outlined the plan to a friend. He'd force the Bulls into trading him by coming late for meetings, games, team buses, and so on. He'd become too much of a distraction. He felt his plan was validated that night when Horace Grant played forty-one minutes (and King eight) even though Grant had a painful stiff neck and could barely hold his head straight. “Now I know I'm finished with this team when I can't even play when Horace is hurt,” King would tell teammates later.

The Bulls won by 18 even though the Bullets, playing without leading scorer Bernard King, made one hard run in the second quarter, cutting a 17-point Bulls lead to 1. Jackson had instructed the Bulls before the game to pack in their defense. “This is the worst three-point-shooting team in the league,” he said. The Bullets hit 4 straight three-pointers in the second quarter in their run. Oh, well, Jackson thought.

Despite the stiff neck that had him running like a scarecrow, Grant scored 22 points and grabbed 13 rebounds, and Pippen performed an impressive Jordan act, swooping down the lane for 22 points while Darrell Walker was harassing Jordan into a 7-for-17 shooting effort.

The Bulls could now enjoy Sunday's last-day-of-March national-TV game. They'd won the easy two and Boston had even lost in Miami to fall two and one-half games behind with twelve to go. The Celtics had to have this one. Jackson watched the NCAA Final Four UNLV-Duke game in the hotel-lobby bar in Boston with some reporters. He admired UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian for his methods, if not for his reputation. “He gets those kids to play hard,” Jackson marveled. That was what coaching was still all about. He thought UNLV's Stacey Augmon would be another Scottie Pippen. He had some Sam Adams on tap, smoked a cigarette, and fended off a request from the bartender for two tickets to Sunday's game. “For me and my kid,” the bartender said in his flat New England accent

“How old is your kid?” Jackson asked.

“Twelve,” the bartender replied.

“I can't help you,” Jackson said softly, staring hard at the man. “But it's nice that you thought of your son.”

Chip Schaefer, the young rookie trainer of the Bulls, still marveled at the Boston Garden. The famed parquet floor looked like a collection of lumberyard throwaways to him. “If you bought a new house,” Schaefer was remarking before the game, “and you had this floor, you'd say the house was great, all except for the floor, that you needed new hardwood. This thing's a mess. It's got cracks and bumps and even looks old.”

The visitors' locker room in the Boston Garden was equally appalling. Foil-covered pipes snaked around overhead so the players could barely straighten up, and the heat was turned up so high you had to run in place to keep from falling asleep. “Same old stuff every time you come here,” said Craig Hodges.

“This is great compared to the way it used to be,” said Bach, who played for the Celtics in the late 1940s. “At least you've got a urinal in here now. We used to have to go out in the hall with the fans and they'd be yelling at us, ‘You piece of shit, you mother-fucker.' It was unbelievable. At least you get to stay in here until the game starts.”