Bulls Testing the Limits of Ego Conflict : NBA playoffs: But their new underdog role might be the thing to bring them together again.

No. 1 in their hearts, No. 2 in the Eastern Conference, No. 3 in the NBA, the Chicago Bulls have begun life as an underdog.

Just in time, too. After two triumphant years of internal squabbling, they could use an external threat.

This is the story of what might still be the best team in basketball, the man who is certainly the best player in basketball and the weird science by which it all runs.

It stars all your old favorites, seemingly stuck forever in the roles they created, like the cast of “Rocky” or “Star Trek”: Phil, the wiggy coach; Michael, who is beyond description; Scottie, who is torn between trying to be like Mike or Horace; Horace, the consummate team player who claims to hate every moment of it; Pax and Mr. Bill, the lovable old codgers returning haltingly from their convalescence; Stacey, Will and Scott, the three young backups to Mr. Bill who vie for playing time and the first trade out of town, and Jerry, the small but feisty general manager who drives them all nuts.

It doesn’t sound like a championship basketball team, does it?

In real life, their names are Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, John Paxson, Bill Cartwright, Stacey King, Will Perdue, Scott Williams and Jerry Krause, respectively. If that sounds like a lot, simply remember Phil, Michael, Scottie and Horace. As Horace would tell you, that’s one more than anyone else remembers.

It’s not as though the Bulls were ever the merriest troupe on earth, but what has happened?

“You know how a newlywed husband will come home immediately after work the first two years after the marriage?” Jackson said at midseason.

“This is like the fourth year after the marriage, and sometimes he goes down to the bar and has a drink, maybe, before he goes home. He’s not quite as attentive to all the needs. That’s kind of the way the team is with this coaching staff and each other.”

Says Jordan: “I think you learn how to be the type of team we are. Certain things you have to deal with, along with success.

“I don’t think it’s really as bad as people make it seem. Naturally, when you’ve got brothers and sisters, they’re going to argue. But they still love each other, and they still want the same things for the family.

“Yeah, we’re going to have our differences, but I don’t think it’s any type of difference that once you step on a basketball court, it affects the way we play together.”

Evidently.

SCOTTIE AND MIKE’S INCREDIBLE ADVENTURE

That the Bulls won their two titles was something of a surprise. They swept to them and a 30-9 postseason record without much size, without a substitute who could average 10 points, with two starters scoring in single figures.

Only when you learned to appreciate their formidable team defense could you account for their success.

Then you began to notice, not only are they puny-looking, they don’t get along very well, either.

Group dynamics revolve around Jordan, who is too mighty to be ignored; too nice to be disliked; too arrogant, with all this “my supporting cast” stuff, to be swallowed. That $20 million he earns annually means he can say whatever is on his mind, and he often does.

Jackson, the former Knick flower child with elbows, was regarded by admirers as the antidote to today’s ultra-intense coaches, but he has disappointed them by becoming more like Pat Riley than Riley, cordoning himself off as the pressure mounts.

Jackson still retains enough humility to go to Jordan to explain things, even after Jordan has disagreed with him publicly, effectively confining the Bulls’ many brush-fire controversies.

Pippen, the small-town guy from Hamburg, Ark., used to be best friends with Grant, but now he patterns himself after Jordan.

Grant, another small-town guy from Sparta, Ga., is the Bulls’ Mr. Nice Guy. Totally lacking in guile or pretense, he is a writer’s first move after Jordan. Jackson cautions Grant against saying what’s on his mind all the time. Grant then manages a discreet month or two before doing so again.

Grant’s mobility is a key to the Bulls’ defense, but he dreams of having a play run for him on offense. Many nonscorers claim they would do better with more shots, but Grant has proof. His twin, Harvey, has averaged 18 points for the Washington Bullets the last three seasons.

On the other hand, however much Grant complains or vows to writers before games that tonight is the night he will put up 20 shots, he stays in line. He keeps insisting he will become a free agent and bail out after next season, but he’s still with the program.

All in all, it has been a season to remember, even if the Bulls would rather not.

When training camp opened, Michael and Scottie had recently returned from the Olympics.

Scottie said he was glad he went, but wouldn’t go again.

Michael, a reluctant participant in the first place, said he wished he hadn’t gone, period.

“The experience the first time (in the 1984 Games, the summer before he began his NBA career), I guess it was enough to carry me,” Jordan said. “It wasn’t quite the same experience the second time. And I certainly wouldn’t try to do it again.”

Krause, the general manager, had been worrying out loud about fatigue since the Bulls won Game 6 against the Portland Trail Blazers last spring. Jordan was allowed to report to camp a week late. It was a little awkward, because he spent his vacation in Los Angeles, shooting commercials.

Pippen was in camp, but didn’t work for the first week.

With Paxson and Cartwright coming off injuries, Grant was the only starter required to go through two-a-days and stomped out of a practice in protest. Jackson suspended him.

Said Pippen: “Horace--I think right now he has his priorities in the wrong order. I think he needs to concern himself with his own business and not any other player’s.”

Grant, informed of this comment, was incredulous.

“I couldn’t believe (it), after all the times I’ve stood up for Scottie--the headaches, the ankle sprain, whatever,” he said. “I was always in Scottie’s corner. I didn’t believe it until I saw it in the papers and on TV. . . .

“I understand we win because of Michael. Scottie thinks we win because of Mike and Scottie.”

The Bulls eased out of the gate, far off last season’s 35-5 pace. Krause’s big move to shore up the bench, getting Rodney McCray, was a disaster. One month into the season, McCray was fifth on the team in minutes played, 11th in scoring and all but begging out of the rotation.

Jordan, not one to forgive Krause anything, lamented the loss of Cliff Levingston, the minimally talented but highly charged reserve who had been allowed to go to Europe in a little-noted move.

Williams announced that he would try to fill the enthusiasm gap. A day later, stung by Krause’s refusal to guarantee his contract for the rest of the season, Williams asked to be traded.

Whether because of fatigue or for some other reason, Pippen started slowly. Jordan’s shooting percentage drooped, but his minutes actually increased, because he wouldn’t let Jackson take him off the floor.

Points were getting hard to come by, although a mid-January spurt by Grant helped. In three games, he scored 70 points.

“He’s playing very well,” Jordan said, measuring his joy. “He’s getting quite a few shots, so he should stop complaining.”

Finally, Jordan decided the new phenomenon had gotten out of hand. After Grant scored 26 points during a victory at Orlando, Jordan told him to get back to his dirty work.

“One thing about Horace,” Jordan said. “Every time he gets offensive-minded, he tends to forget about rebounding, so Scottie and I had to pick up the slack.”

Grant stomped out of the dressing room without comment.

Comments were getting hard to come by, too.

Jordan, thought by some to be feeling rivaled by the Shaquille O’Neal boomlet, scored 64 points in an early season upset by the Magic in Chicago Stadium. Neither Pippen nor Grant would talk afterward, but Pippen pointed to Jordan’s numbers--49 shots, one assist--on a statistics sheet.

Jackson, worried about the sluggish defense at midseason and looking to a nine-game, 17-day trip, said he was going to slow the team down to conserve energy.

He put in a deliberate plan for the first game at San Antonio--only to have it countermanded at halftime by Jordan. Upset that the Spurs had jumped ahead, Jordan rounded up Grant and Pippen and told them to start pressing and running. The Bulls rallied, but lost.

“The success of this team is about running,” Jordan said. “. . . It just kind of hit me. I said, ‘Hey, this team is running right past us!’ After I got our players together, everyone started to come alive.”

After the mandatory victory at Dallas, the Bulls lost at Houston, then amazed themselves by falling at Denver.

“It’s human nature that we’re coming around,” Jordan said in a stunned dressing room after the Denver defeat. “Everybody’s fat and everybody’s independent where before everyone was supportive, committed and tight. That’s going to be the ultimate destruction of this team.”

The next game, they rallied from 20 points behind in the fourth quarter and won at Utah. Then they won 12 of the next 14.

But the Knicks eased into the East lead, winning a key game at Chicago when Jordan was suspended for punching Indiana’s Reggie Miller.

The next night, a subdued Jordan reported back to work.

“Krause says he wants to win a championship without me,” he said before the game. “Good luck.”

The Bulls chased New York down the stretch, losing every key game, an ominous sign for a team that believed it could still reach back when it needed to. The Phoenix Suns beat the Bulls in Chicago. The Cavaliers beat them in Cleveland and won the season series, 3-2. The Bulls, who had won 15 in a row from the Cavaliers, have lost the last three and figure to have to go through Cleveland to get to New York.

Needing a victory at Charlotte last Friday to force a showdown with the Knicks for best record in the East, the Bulls lost, reducing Sunday’s game in New York to symbolic importance. The Bulls lost it, anyway.

Pippen slumped in the final two weeks, finishing the regular season with a two-for-16 game at New York. A year ago, the Bulls needed their home-court advantage to edge the Knicks in Game 7. This spring, a seventh game would be in New York. Aside from that, the Bulls’ world is merry and bright.

MALE BONDING: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

For some men, as the Omar Sharif character says in “Lawrence of Arabia,” nothing is written. For the Bulls, nothing that is written is a problem, even if they wrote it.

“Well,” said Bob Hansen, a Bull last season, now retired and living in Iowa, “I don’t think it’s like the old Oakland A’s, the team that I followed as a kid with Gene Tenace, Joe Rudi--squabble a lot, fight or brawl. . . .

“Horace has been part of the championship teams, and he understands that’s better than to go out and score 25 points and play in obscurity. I think he’s smart enough. He may, at times, tell people he wishes he had more shots, but I don’t know. I read an article somewhere where Michael said (Grant is) a lot like (Charles) Oakley was. Oakley would complain of wanting more shots or getting more involved in the offense, but it seemed like he just kept going out and getting rebounds and doing things that helped them win.

“The Bulls were pretty damn dominant last year. They won 67 games, lost 15 and were never out of any game they lost. . . .

“The book, ‘The Jordan Rules,’ what that served to do was sort of bind them together. My feeling--I wasn’t involved in it--I read the book right away and asked John Paxson and Bill Cartwright, ‘Where did they get this stuff?’ This guy (author Sam Smith) wasn’t in the huddle, the guy wasn’t on the team bus.

“But Pax said, ‘Yeah, a lot of it’s true. But a lot of it’s blown out of proportion and taken out of context.’

“Guys saw that and kind of said, ‘ . . . them, . . . the world. We’re going to go do this and get it done.’ ”

It might not sound like John Wooden’s pyramid of success, but so far, so good.

“I don’t dislike any of my teammates,” Pippen says. “I won’t say we’re straight-out running buddies, but once we’re on the court, they’re the best friends I have. . . .

“I think we feel as hungry. It’s still getting to be a long, long time, but it’s a lot of fun because you enjoy being cocky. You enjoy being on top. You enjoy carrying that ego. It has been long, and it doesn’t seem like it’s getting easier, and it’s not.”

Once they were young and hungry and played to win. Now they are on top and playing not to lose.

“Well, that’s pretty much how you can phrase it,” Pippen says. “ . . . After two championships, you spoil everyone. You spoil your fans. Now they don’t expect anything less than a championship any time you’re on the floor.

“They pretty much just sit back and watch us play. It was a lot of fun when we were trying to dig in and be hungry and the fans would intimidate teams coming in. But now they’re pretty much laid back fans. . . . Pretty much spoiled rotten.”

This season, then, was the perfect antidote.

“It’s really been a grind,” Jordan said. “Nothing has come easy to this team, partly because of ourselves but partly because of the competition. . . .

“But with the success we’ve had, we’re in a great position to do it for the third time. No matter what people say and how much they make us be underdogs, it’s a good position to be in, knowing you’ve already done it twice.”

So are the Bulls united at last, ready to put selfish considerations behind them for that last big push? Almost.

“It was a big game,” Scott Williams said after scoring 12 points as a reserve in Sunday’s finale against the Knicks. “Because I was thinking, I guess my contract is officially finished with the Bulls. So I’ve got a lot to play for.”