70 S Timeline

Let’s say you were tasked with making a basketball timeline for someone who had been living under a rock all his life. This timeline was to tell a linear story of the history of basketball from the time Naismith put up a peach basket until now. The rub is that you can only use, say, 20 plot points.

What goes on your timeline? Red Auerbach drafting Bill Russell? Magic and Larry meeting in the ’79 NCAA Championship? The ’72 Gold medal game between the USSR and the US? The NBA-ABA merger? The first time a ball bounced at Rucker Park? Do the Harlem Rens get on there?

This much we know: Michael Jordan, in some fashion, makes the timeline. And if you were to ask me which event during his career meant the most to the League and his legacy, I’d say it happened 20 years ago this month, when he won his first championship along with Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen and the rest of the gang.

To commemorate this watershed moment in NBA history, I talked to some principal members of that team and the folks around them, as well as researched old articles, to craft a sort of oral history of that season. They painted the picture of a desperate organization and a driven squad led by a transcendent talent, all on a quest to exorcise demons, slay a nemesis, save faces, make names and win rings.

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The Bulls previous season ended with a 93-74 Game 7 Playoff loss to the Detroit Pistons. It was the third season in a row the Pistons bullied the Bulls into submission. Jordan had 31-9-8 in that hostile final game, while his teammates submarined. It was Pippen’s “Migraine Game,” after which Pippen said, “I had trouble seeing my teammates.” Jack McCallum, writing for (Jordan’s agent, who, over the next 10 years, would become one of the most powerful men in sports): There were observers, including myself, that thought [Bulls general manager Jerry] Krause was trying to increase the degree of difficulty for Michael. I used to say that if you took Michael and Scottie and then you took three brandy sniffers and put the names of all the guards in one, forwards in one and centers in another and made 13 blind picks, you could come up with a better team than the one Krause constructed. He always wanted credit, so he’d take the long shot. The fact that they won those championships didn’t mean he crafted a great team, it was just that Michael was such a transcendent player. Michael had to convince himself that the team was good enough to win. I use this as a compliment when I say that he would con himself into thinking he had a great team.