The Jordan Rules (34 page)

Also unhappy was Armstrong, whom Jackson had pulled with just a few minutes left in the game. The coach was keeping both point guards on a short chain and neither was too happy about it, although Paxson would show his displeasure less. Make a turnover, B.J., and you're out. Miss a shot, John, and you're out. Both would invariably come muttering back to the bench.

For Armstrong, it would carry over to practice the next day as the team prepared to go to New York. Jackson watched him for a while, and then finally shouted at him to sit down. “You're not into it,” he yelled. Later, Jackson made it clear: “Michael is taking the shots,” he said.

Armstrong knew what he had to do. “When I get it,” he told Grant, “I'm shooting it. Jordan doesn't get it from me.”

“Me, too,” said Grant. “Watch me against New York. I'll shoot it every time I get it.”

It was a little game the two played. They knew it wouldn't happen. Like Paxson, who made the threat before almost every game, they were too programmed to pass off. They'd feel too guilty about being that selfish.

When the team pulled into New York Wednesday night, April 3, NBC was waiting. The Bulls would be on national TV Sunday against Philadelphia and the network wanted some interviews. Jackson, Pippen, and Grant showed up to meet with former Lakers coach turned broadcaster Pat Riley, but Jordan refused. He had substantially cut down on his media appearances in the 1990–91 season. The demands on his time were intolerable; he was convinced that he was merely being used by others, and he resented it. Instead, he went to his room to meet up with comedians Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray.

Grant had been carrying a touch of the flu and had tried to get out of the pregame shootaround Thursday, but Jackson told trainer Schaefer to make sure Grant was there. Grant fumed.

“When Michael's sick, he just calls off practice,” he told Schaefer.

The Bulls all looked sick against the Knicks, who were without Charles Oakley and Gerald Wilkins. If they had heard the line about New York leading the nation in people around whom you shouldn't make sudden moves, the Bulls had paid close attention. They were in slow motion.

Blitzed by Mark Jackson and Brian Quinnett, they fell behind by 24 late in the first half and would trail by 18 at the end of the second quarter. Phil Jackson kept the coaches out of the Bulls' locker room at halftime.

“Let them sit and think about it,” he said. “Let them look at the guys responsible.”

Jordan was pretty sure he knew who was responsible: Jackson and the triangle offense. He had 9 points on 4-of-12 shooting, and he was enraged. “No more triangle,” he promised himself.

In the second half, Jordan came out on the attack and Jackson cooperated; he went into the new open offense the team had been working on to isolate Jordan on top of the floor, and within ten minutes the Bulls had tied the game as the Knicks collapsed like the city's economy. They committed 9 turnovers in the third quarter and were outscored 30–12. It was an impressive display of Bulls strength. The Knicks held on to a tie after three, but the result was as inevitable as death, taxes, and bobbing corpses in the East River: The Bulls won by 10. They still could turn it on, but they knew it was getting hard to keep it on.

“We knew we could be tired by this point,” Jackson said.

The main topic of conversation after the game was Patrick Ewing. He had seemed content to take fallaway jumpers along the baseline, even against Will Perdue, who could have done little to stop Ewing if he'd tried to drive. And Ewing certainly would have gotten the foul call against the young Bulls backup center if he had.

Knicks insiders believed that Ewing, frustrated over the constant swirl of controversy in New York, the collapse of the team, and some failed renegotiations of his own, had pretty much quit for the season, or at least until the playoffs. Thinking about it after the game, John Bach just shook his head. The Bulls had turmoil, too, he knew, but the players always competed hard. It was a tribute to both them and Jackson, he thought.

In the twenty-five-year history of the Bulls, there had been just one division title. It came in the 1974–75 season, in what would signal the end of the great Dick Motta defensive club of those early 1970s. The Bulls were then in the Western Conference, and they had never been able to get past Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Milwaukee Bucks teams in their division—and if the Bucks didn't take care of them, the Lakers and Wilt Chamberlain did. But Abdul-Jabbar broke his hand in the exhibition season in 1974; Milwaukee would collapse and finish last in the division, and Chamberlain had left the Lakers. The Bulls' 47–35 record wasn't their best ever—they'd won fifty-seven games in 1971–72—but they had the second-best record in the conference, one game behind Golden State. It would be thirteen years and nine coaches before the Bulls would win as many games again.

Jackson admired Motta's Bulls for their team play as much as he disliked the Bucks and their one-man approach to the game. “It seems that [Bucks coach Larry] Costello consistently overcoaches his teams,” Jackson wrote in his 1975 book,
Maverick.
“Knowing that only Kareem will take the important shot, no matter what number may be called, allows a defense to do a lot of double-teaming and forcing. This can make the Bucks have to go somewhere else for their offense and that disrupts their flow … The fact is that Milwaukee's predictability makes them lose too many close games. I personally don't particularly like the kind of games the Bucks play. There's just a limited number of things the other four players can be doing when Kareem has the ball. Milwaukee can certainly come out and kill you on any given night, but they really can't function as a team, and a smart club can take advantage of this. I don't believe that basketball can be anything but a team game.”

At the same time, Jackson revered those Bulls for their defense—they still hold the all-time league record for most games in a season in which opponents scored under 100 points. They controlled the court by forcing opponents to alter their offense, a technique Jackson would later adopt for his own Bulls; it would become their most successful tactic.

Describing Motta's team, Jackson wrote, “Chicago stops the ball from moving by taking away the passing lanes. They literally isolate the man with the ball and force a team into playing baseline basketball … Norm Van Lier, for example, can pick off a laterally thrown pass just by outrunning the ball. Playing against the Bulls makes a team slow down and make sure of their passes. It's like playing against an octopus.”

Fifteen years later these words would describe his own team.

If Motta inspired Jackson, he also inspired future NBA coaches Jerry Sloan, Rick Adelman, and Matt Guokas, all of whom played on that 1974–75 team, and Bob Weiss, who was traded by the Bulls before the season. Motta's 1974–75 division winner lost in the conference finals to eventual champion Golden State, although the Warriors actually trailed the Bulls three games to two at one point. Motta later blamed holdouts Bob Love and Norm Van Lier; he demanded that they not get full playoff shares and created a near mutiny among the players.

When the Bulls won only twenty-four games the following season with their aging cast, Motta left Chicago to coach the Bullets, who had lost to the Warriors in the championship series the previous year. It wasn't until Jordan arrived in 1984 that the Bulls began to regain any credibility. The Chicago Bulls had come a long way in twenty-five years, from 1966–67, when coach Johnny “Red” Kerr had to call the newspapers after games to report the score and spell the players' names, to 1990–91, when every kid in America could spell
Jordan.

(And how well Jordan knew it. One day, a reporter was baby-sitting his one-year-old son. Jordan, who gravitated toward kids, kept trying to get a response, but the boy ignored Jordan and fiddled with his father's mini-tape recorder. The reporter joked, “Guess he's not impressed with the superstar.”

“Give him six months,” Jordan shot back.)

The Bulls were moving inexorably toward that second division title. One more win would clinch it, and they were prepared to get it from San Antonio at the Stadium.

But they would have to wait a little longer. The Spurs pushed them all over the court, outrebounding the Bulls 50–29 and taking a 21-point lead late in the third quarter before Jackson switched to a small, quick lineup and began relying on some three-point bombing from Craig Hodges in a fireman's drill exercise. The oft-forgotten Hodges hit 3 three-pointers in about two minutes, and within ten minutes the Bulls had sliced a 21-point deficit to 1. They appeared to be on the brink of yet another impossible comeback, but San Antonio beat their pressure and went on to win 110–107. Afterward, Spurs coach Larry Brown said the Bulls could be awesome if they could get the entire bench scoring the way Hodges had.

Dennis Hopson only wished he could get the chance. For the third time in the last four games, he didn't make it into the game, and he wasn't happy about it. When the Bulls traded with the Nets for him in June 1990, he was a career 13-point scorer after three NBA seasons. But now he was the eleventh man, ahead of only Scott Williams on the depth chart. And despite his $900,000+-per-season contract, he was actually wishing he were back in New Jersey, which he had hated. Hopson wasn't playing much, and he'd drawn Jordan's wrath quickly.

“I know he doesn't like me, but he never says anything to me,” Hopson was telling a friend one day. “You hear all the things he says behind your back and then he comes up to me the other day and asks if I'd heard from Brad Sellers [Hopson's teammate at Ohio State], and how was Brad doing. Can you believe it? The guy tries to run him out, and now he wants to know how he's doing. Like he cares. I just said he was fine.”

Hopson, with his hard, sharp features and tight skin that looked as if it had been stretched over his face and gave him an angry look, had feuded angrily with Nets coach Bill Fitch. “Get off my back,” Hopson had once yelled at Fitch during a game. “If you don't like the way I play, get me out of here.”

“Dennis,” the usually stormy Fitch said mildly, “I'll do my best to accommodate you.”

Fitch told Jackson that Hopson merely needed a change of scenery and could blossom with the Bulls. But Hopson chafed at the reduced role; he couldn't adjust to the idea of coming off the bench. He was the kind of player who needed to get into the flow of a game, and needed more than four- or five-minute intervals to do it. The Bulls were now saying he really was a defensive specialist. Hopson wasn't buying it.

“When I first came here, they told me I'd be a scorer off the bench,” Hopson recalled about his conversation with Krause after the trade, in which the Bulls gave the Nets their 1990 first-round pick and two future second-round selections. “Defense never came up, which makes it look sometimes like I'm crazy. People look at me and say, ‘Here's a guy they brought here to score, so what's the problem? Why isn't he scoring?'”

So Hopson was actually thinking about being back in New Jersey. “Hey, I averaged nine point six my first year, twelve point seven my second year and then fifteen point eight, and I was learning and getting the shots and the opportunities,” he said. The Nets were a veteran team in the process of disintegrating when he arrived as the No. 3 pick in the 1987 draft, a kid who was supposed to breathe new life into a dying franchise. But Hopson was alone in that role. “I had nobody,” he recalled about that lonely first year. “Here, Horace had Scottie, and Stacey and B.J. were together, but in New Jersey they had guys like Mike Gminski and Buck Williams and Roy Hinson and Mike O'Koren, and I was always alone. And there's nothing to do in New Jersey.”

Hopson missed home and wanted to play in Cleveland, mostly because he liked Lenny Wilkens's coaching style and felt the Cavaliers needed a shooting guard. Hopson, a muscular 6-5, 200-pounder who occasionally stunned the Bulls coaches in practice with athletic moves they'd only seen from Jordan and Pippen, told his agent to talk to the Bulls about dealing him to the Cavaliers after the 1990–91 season; he'd already made some inquiries on his own and had found the Cavaliers to be receptive.

Hopson had once looked forward to coming to the Bulls, although he'd been warned that Chicago was a tough place to play. His best friend in college was Sellers, the former Bull who had gone to Greece to play in 1990–91. Sellers told Hopson what it was like to play with Jordan, but Hopson thought it was just a bad match since the fans and Jordan had wanted Johnny Dawkins and Sellers had never had a chance. But then he talked to another friend, Seattle's Sedale Threatt.

“I feel sorry for you,” Threatt told him. “There's a reason there have been so many guards through there. You're not going to get the ball. You play with Jordan, you watch. Sometimes you play more than other times, but mostly you watch.”

Hopson insisted he'd been assured otherwise. The Bulls were looking for him to play twenty to twenty-five minutes and score in double figures off the bench. They'd told him that Paxson, Hodges, and Armstrong were all inadequate because they were small, that teams like the Pistons took advantage of them, and that the Bulls needed a big guard to play with Jordan. He'd get eight to ten minutes behind Jordan and at least another ten beside him and perhaps even more at small forward.

“No way,” his friend Ron Harper, the big guard now with the Clippers, told him. “You're not going to get any minutes there. Just look how they play. Where are the minutes going to come from? Man, it's going to be bad for you.”

The same words had come from another Ohio friend and former Bull, Charles Oakley. Oakley said he liked Jordan, but forget it, man, you weren't going to get to score.

Hopson was starting to get worried, and by training camp he was in a near panic. He and Armstrong had become close friends, and Armstrong told him right away: “You're going to wish you were back in New Jersey. You're going to look back and think it was better.”