The Jordan Rules (10 page)

The Bulls crew for 1990–91 had been assembled and its air show was about ready to take off. There was plenty of turbulence ahead.

P
HIL
J
ACKSON WAS WONDERING JUST HOW HE WAS GOING TO WIN
with Michael Jordan on his team.

The Bulls hadn't been able to—at least they hadn't won the big prize, the NBA title. They had become the most successful team in franchise history, winning fifty-five games in the 1989–90 season and going to the conference finals for the second straight season, a feat achieved only once before, when Dick Motta coached a highly competitive Bulls team in the early 1970s. And much—if not all—of the Bulls' recent success could be attributed to Jordan.

“I can't stand losing and I hate people who accept losing, although I had to learn to deal with it better when I came to the Bulls,” Jordan once said. “But I made a vow that every year I played for the Bulls we'd make the playoffs.”

For six years now, the Bulls had tried it Jordan's way, and while they hadn't exactly failed, they hadn't truly succeeded. The Pistons stood in the way, and they figured to again in 1991, while other teams, particularly those in the Western Conference, were getting better.

Jackson couldn't think of any teams that had ever won the NBA title with the league's leading scorer. It had happened only once—the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971 with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—since the NBA adopted the shot clock for the 1954–55 season. Jackson thought about his former Knicks teammates Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, and Willis Reed, any of whom could have scored 25 or 30 points per game if he wanted to. But by sharing the ball and getting everyone involved, the Knicks became a five-man threat, refusing to let defenses cheat or double-team because they always looked for and found the open man. Jordan's style of play made it too easy for the defense.

“I knew it would be a hot issue and I would be on the hot seat. I was nervous, sure,” Jackson conceded later, “but the Bulls had been through the era where Michael would average thirty-six or thirty-seven and still came up short against the top-echelon teams. Michael having to score so much and everyone else scoring only eight or ten hurt our chances in the long run, I believed. I felt the team had exhausted that. We'd gotten rid of half a dozen point guards to find someone to play with him, and we had to keep moving people around to accommodate him.”

That would have to stop, Jackson decided. It was time for Jordan to start accommodating others, and the coach didn't believe that doing so would limit Jordan's greatness. He still intended to use Jordan as a weapon, especially at the end of the game. He was not, as Jordan would suggest later, trying to make him just another player. “Even if you put [Jascha] Heifetz in the orchestra, he's still going to be the featured player,” Jackson said. “Michael still will be the featured player in our system.”

Jackson did not reach this conclusion overnight; he is not a spontaneous man. He is deeply contemplative and tends to internalize. While Jackson rarely discusses his team problems at home, where the frenzy of his four children are a welcome escape, his wife, June, would occasionally turn over in bed at 5:00
A
.
M
. and see Phil lying on his back, his eyes closed and his glasses on.

“Phil, you're awake,” she'd say. “Why don't you get up?”

“I'm thinking,” was Jackson's reply.

“So take your glasses off.”

“I think better with them on.”

And even better with a fly reel in his hand, the snow-covered peaks of Glacier National Park over his shoulder, and his lure bobbing in Flathead Lake. Jackson used his playoff share from the 1973 Knicks title win to buy about nine acres just west of the Continental Divide in Montana, where he built a home to return to each summer, a peaceful retreat near his childhood home. He didn't get there until late in the summer of 1990, as Krause dragged him off to the Goodwill Games in Seattle to watch Toni Kukoc and then to watch the Bulls' summer-league team, but finally Jackson went home. He didn't hike the bumping foothills quite as much as he used to or attack the great billowing waves of mountains at the Continental Divide for his solitude. His hip and back injury from his playing days no longer allowed it. But he loved the country nonetheless. It was the real Montana described best by Ivan Doig in books such as
This House of Sky
and
English Creek.
Jackson could lose himself for days in the thick, lumbering forests and craggy mountain ranges, or wander the arteries of limpid creeks with a fishing rod. It gave him time, again, to enjoy the land and consider his team's options for the 1990–91 season. The Bulls still weren't the team they should be. Perhaps the media were right when they called the Bulls “Michael and the Jordanaires.” Jackson and the rest of the Bulls resented the implication, but there was some truth to it, he knew, and Jordan didn't seem to mind much. That had to stop if the Bulls were to become a team.

The principal change would come from the use of “the system,” although Jordan, and later Pippen, would spend as much time outside of it as in. But it would be there for the players who needed to feel a structure and for Jordan, who needed to learn to work within a team concept. In the clear air and open sky of Jackson's Montana retreat, anything seemed possible.

Several weeks before training camp was to open, Jackson called Jordan, trying him again and again, but he was still out on America's back nine. Jackson had much to discuss with his star: the upcoming season, the system, and his strong feeling that maybe Jordan shouldn't win the scoring title this season.

The system that Jackson chose to implement was one he had started with the previous season. It had been refined by assistant Tex Winter and explained in a book Winter wrote some thirty years ago called
The Triple-Post Offense.
It relied upon quick passing and very few play calls, so the idea was uncomplicated. Players moved the ball quickly while they moved to certain spots on the floor. Since they weren't running plays, but instead using tendencies, the defense couldn't anticipate their movement, and the tendencies depended on where the defense moved. That's what made the system difficult for some players, and Jackson had introduced it in bits and pieces his first season as coach. But its strength was that when the defense tried to double-team—and any player could move into the post at any time—the quick passing allowed for open shots. The down-side, as some (including Jordan) saw it, was that in theory it allowed as many shots for John Paxson and Bill Cartwright as it did for Michael Jordan.

Jordan had spit out the words “equal-opportunity offense” a lot during Jackson's first season, although it hardly worked out that way, and Jackson never planned it to. You don't take the best scorer in the game and reduce him to just another player among five. Jordan would still have ample opportunity to go one-on-one, for Jackson would bastardize the system to open the floor up and provide Jordan those opportunities even as other players moved within the system's constraints. The system was a form of motion offense in which players formed triangles on different parts of the floor, exchanging position in the post as the defense rotated. Of course, Jackson used pro-style screen roll and post-up plays, but the triangles would always be there for the players to fall back upon. The offense had helped Winter's smaller Kansas State teams stand up to Wilt Chamberlain's great Kansas team in the 1950s, but some wondered whether it was merely a college system, outdated for the bigger pro players of the day.

The important thing, Jackson felt, was that the Bulls have some system. “Cream always rises to the top,” he noted. “Michael is always going to find a way to score, but if he could play within a system then he might also find ways to score more easily.”

And, more importantly, so would others.

“I frankly didn't like the game they played here,” Jackson said about his impressions when he arrived. “I didn't want to set up a conflict between Michael and the organization, but I always knew there was something better that could come from what he did. So much of the game here had been ‘Throw him the ball and then clear out and he's going to go one-on-five and everyone's going to stand there and watch and everyone's going to come running at him and maybe he makes some outstanding move and pops through or he crashes to the floor and burns.' But how many times does this guy have to go down before he's putting himself in more jeopardy and taking unnecessary risks?

“We don't want to see this guy bum himself out in forty-minute games just trying to keep it close when there are other guys who can step up and help us. Because if you play a system, eventually he and his teammates are going to learn certain routes and they'll be able to find him at critical situations and they'll be in position to contribute.

“This system utilizes passing and shooting skills, what we consider clean basketball, where you're passing the ball within two seconds so that when you're shooting you don't have the pressure of defense on you quite as much. The basic idea, though, was we'd moved as far as we could with what we were doing. We were not going to beat Detroit with this one-on-one dribble-penetration game, which they're so good at defensing.”

Jordan finally putted out the first week of October and gave Jackson a call. He would come into camp more serious this year than in the past. The failures were beginning to haunt him, although he doubted anything would change. To some extent, he believed he was reaching—or had reached—the apex of his majesty. “Yeah,” he said as camp was about to begin, “people may have seen my best, although it's not that much due to me. Defenses are not going to let me get to the basket like I used to. Everyone's going to make me take the outside shot. When Detroit started knocking me on my ass, everyone started playing me that way, so I'm not allowed the creativity in the halfcourt game as much. But I feel like this is the most serious I've ever been at this time of year because [a championship] is something I want to achieve so badly. Before, I was more or less relaxed and enjoyed this time of year, this kids'-game time. But now it's like a business for me.

“I want to prove the critics wrong. We may not ever get a chance to win a world championship, and we may not ever get a chance like this again. This is the strongest team I've ever played on here, assuming we don't have any injuries. So I want to see some serious moves from management, which I really haven't seen that much of yet, and I want to see more serious attitudes from my teammates this year when it comes to the playoffs. In the past, it's been more or less a joking thing, sort of a ‘Well, we're here, so let's have a good time.' Not this year. It's time for us to get serious because that's the only way we'll win.”

Jordan and Jackson would finally have their conversation when Jordan stopped by the coach's office in the Multiplex. He was wearing a diamond stud in his ear, but the sparkle in his smile soon faded.

“Look, M.J.,” Jackson said, “we're going to stick with the system this season.”

Jordan wasn't thrilled.

“I know I can recognize what to do,” Jordan said, “but I'm not sure they can.”

Jordan often thought his teammates about as reliable as a newspaper street-comer sales box when all you had was twenty-five cents in your pocket.

“This is what you've got to remember,” Jackson said: “Maybe these guys are not as talented as you'd like them to be, but this is as good as they're going to be. And this is as good as we can get under the present situation. But if we run a system, everyone is going to have an opportunity to perform. They can't do the spectacular one-on-one things that you can do, but they can have some level of success and perform on some level, even in critical situations.”

Jackson talked about his Knicks teams from the early 1970s again, and about how many weapons they had at the ends of games.

“Teams just don't win with one man doing all the scoring,” Jackson said, “because when you need to you can shut down one individual, and Detroit has done that to us.”

“But that's when they're supposed to score,” said Jordan.

It didn't work that way, Jackson said. Jordan's teammates had to be worked into a system so they were prepared for those opportunities. They just couldn't shoot in times of desperation, with a few seconds left on the shot clock. When they were open, they had to get the ball, not afterward. The Bulls had good shooters; Paxson, Grant, and Cartwright had all been 50 percent shooters in their careers, and Pippen was on the cusp of some form of greatness. This was a team going into its third year together. It was time to take advantage of the group, for what was a team, Jackson said, but a collection of individuals with a common goal? The best thing for the Bulls, Jackson said, was for everyone to move the ball around so the threats might come from anywhere on the court.

“We need to score as a group, and score consistently as a group, to win,” Jackson said.

It might not be a bad idea, Jackson added, if Jordan didn't win the scoring title this season. It wasn't necessary. And Jackson said he was going to curtail Jordan's playing time, perhaps down to thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes per game, probably fewer than Pippen and maybe even Grant.

The last was met with silence. The talk was over.

“Well,” Jackson thought to himself, “at least now he's been warned. He knows, and we're going to stick with this. We'll see what he does.”

Jackson, like his predecessors, admired Jordan's skills, although he refused to compare him with players of previous eras. He would only say that Jordan was among the best in the game in his own era. Jackson was not a man of hyperbole.

He had once thought he was going to be a man of the Lord, telling coach Red Holzman when he first arrived in New York after being drafted by the Knicks in 1967 that he intended to become a minister. Jackson's father was a Pentecostal minister and his mother was an evangelist. They embraced the then mystical and charismatic Pentecostal wave sweeping some of the upper Midwest. Jackson remembers attending services where the congregation would speak in tongues, and his mother always preparing him for the apocalypse. Their house was without TV or any conveniences, and Jackson's family did not believe in conventional medicine.