When Bulls Lose, They Really Lose It

Bad night for the greatest team in basketball history.

A funny thing happened on the way to immortality. While riot cops deployed in sweet home Chicago, the Bulls, who had spent two days bestowing every known honor upon themselves, turned into a lump of clay, taking a 107-86 pounding at the hands of the Seattle SuperSonics that should cut down the superlatives here for a day or two. Greatest team in history? How about Michael Jordan and 11 schleppers?

Typically, they took it badly. Coach Phil Jackson managed to say some gracious things in the postgame interview but soon tired of the effort.

“One more question,” an NBA official said.

“No,” said Jackson, stalking off, “That’s it.”

Jackson, Jordan and Scottie Pippen also had the bad grace to complain about referees’ calls, even some in garbage time.

Even superstars get the blues. Jordan isn’t divine, he merely appears so on TV every other game or so, but Wednesday he was was an angel flying too low to the ground. He missed 13 of 19 shots. At halftime, when the Bulls were down by 21, he had a Pippen-like seven points.

With the SuperSonics playing well--gosh, what if they’d thought of this a game or two ago?--without a functioning Jordan to lead them, the Bulls fell apart, right on time.

Pippen, the second-best player on this alleged collection of greats, was in the tank as usual, on his way to four for 17 from the floor. He’s shooting 35% in the finals, so if they want to close this out here Friday, Jordan had better relocate his trusty jump shot fast.

“You’ve got to remember,” Jordan said later, trying major spin control, “this team [Seattle] won 64 games. Coming in here, expecting to sweep them was really stretching it.”

And stretch it, the Bulls had.

In the two off-days before Game 4, Jordan acknowledged having long had his sights set on a best-ever 15-1 postseason record, which would have entailed the sweep.

“Why not?” Jordan asked of 15-1. “Everything else has been going our way.”

For his part, Pippen, announced flat-out the Bulls were, indeed, history’s greatest team. Not one of them. It.

“The fact that there is no comparison says it all,” Pippen said. “And that is, we’re the greatest team of all time. That’s my opinion.”

It wasn’t only a press corps gone mad and needing an off-day story, because there were plenty of those. Jackson, whose contract negotiations reportedly have stalled at $1.6 million,said he might quit and go home to Montana for a year.

Seattle Coach George Karl, sentenced to work for $1.1 million, pronounced himself insulted by the $3 million the New Jersey Nets will pay John Calipari and suggested he deserves no less.

Said Karl with admirable candor: “I’m not going to deny that I desire money.”

Oh, and Shawn Kemp said his teammates had “quit.” And Ervin Johnson said Karl had told him, “You don’t have enough talent to be on the floor right now.” And Vincent Askew, who was upset about his playing time, blew off a media session and was fined $11,000.

Yes, it was a long two days, but even if it looked as if the SuperSonics were about to turn on each other again, it didn’t turn out that way.

They started with their usual rock slide of three-point bricks, missing eight of their first nine shots overall, but were heartened to find the Bulls missing right along with them.

The SuperSonics started playing. The Bulls never got it together.

For the would-be greats, indignities piled up atop each other.

Jordan was called for a technical foul and a flagrant foul. He went bonkers over a double-dribble call in the fourth quarter (replays showed he was clearly wrong; Mike must have been asserting royal privilege.) He was lucky he wasn’t in the face of Joey Crawford, the referee with the hair-trigger finger, instead of Billy Oakes, or he would have been ejected too.

Kemp did a highlight film spin and reverse over-the-head dunk on Dennis Rodman.

The scoreboard did celebrity look-alikes, putting up pictures of Grace Jones and Rodman in makeup, while Aerosmith’s “Dude Looks Like a Lady” blared over the sound system.

“We’ve played extremely well to this point,” a subdued Jordan said later. “I guess we’re entitled to a bad game. Just put this down as a bad game and look forward to Friday night.”

They still lead the series, 3-1, and seem in scant danger. But the SuperSonics are out of the bottle, so the Bulls better try something different Friday--like showing up.