Bulls Finally Get Uncorked

They are, at the very least, the greatest team of this season, and that’s worth something. The chance to hoist the championship trophy. The right to stink up your locker room with the smoke from dozens of victory cigars, a stench that after 90 minutes of puffing hung in the air like Michael Jordan in his prime.

So when the moment finally came Sunday night, a season of dominance complete and the NBA title theirs with an 87-75 victory over the Seattle SuperSonics at the United Center and a 4-2 series win, the Chicago Bulls proved it to be anything but anti-climatic. So what that it had been expected for only seven months.

A fourth trip to the summit in six seasons brought Jordan to tears, this being Father’s Day and the first championship without his father, and drove Coach Phil Jackson to say he is confident a new contract will get done so he can return in the fall. It sent most Bulls to stand on the scorer’s table, arms held high. It may even have sent Dennis Rodman’s mind racing about the creative ways to wear his championship ring.

“It’s the ultimate,” Ron Harper, the former Clipper, said after gutting out 38 minutes on a left knee that limited him to only 15 minutes the previous three games and will undergo surgery this week. “This is what kids dreamed about.”

That and being like Mike. Jordan continued to struggle to find his shot, making only five of 19 and finishing 41.5% for the series, but had 22 points, nine rebounds and seven assists and was named finals’ most valuable player. That made him the second player ever, along with Willis Reed in 1970, to win the award for the regular season, all-star game and championship round in the same season.

It’s just that James Jordan, killed in the summer of 1993, was not around to help him enjoy it. Playing with, and through, those emotions, Michael choked up during a postgame interview on national TV, then broke down behind closed doors, laying face down and sobbing as he clutched the game ball.

“This is probably the hardest time for me to play the game of basketball,” he said. “I had a lot of things on my heart, on my mind. I had the good fortune of a team that came in and played extremely well. I just had a lot to think about, and maybe my heart wasn’t geared to where it was.

“But I think deep down inside, it was geared to what was most important to me, which was my family and my father not being here to see this. I’m just happy that the team kind of pulled me through it because it was a tough time for me.”

Under any circumstances, it was a crescendo months in coming, probably all the way back to when the season opened in November and the only questions were about whether they would falter, not whether some opponent could keep up if the Bulls hit full stride. Could Jordan regain the greatness after struggling the previous spring in the months after his comeback? Would Sideshow Rodman prove too big a distraction?

The answers came: yes and no.

The Bulls went 12-2 in November, then 13-1 in December. That second month ended with two consecutive victories, what would become the start of an 18-game winning streak.

“I think that’s when the team really started to jell together and we became confident in each other,” Jordan said. “Roles and responsibilities started to become fulfilled. From that point on it was, ‘How far can we take this? This is fun. Let’s see if we can extend this further and further.’

“It seemed like everything was starting to fall in line. It was a dream year almost. The puzzles were fitting very, very easily and the picture was becoming even more clearer.”

By the end of the regular season, the Bulls were No. 1 in the league in six different team categories, everything from scoring to steal-to-turnover ratio, and in the top three in five others. Most of the playoffs presented challenges in kind--a three-game sweep of Miami in the first round, a 4-1 victory over New York in the second and a four-game dismissal of Orlando, the closest thing out there to a rival, in the Eastern Conference finals.

Come the finals, they struggled the first two games at Chicago, but won. In Game 3 at Seattle, they rolled. That was followed by two double-digit losses, creating a series after all and a budget problem for the city: It had spent about $3 million on extra security to guard against celebration disguised as looting and rioting, then saw it go down the drain because the Bulls couldn’t uphold their end of the deal.

With another $1.5 million on the line Sunday, they pulled away in the third quarter behind Rodman’s spark on the boards and on the defensive end.

“One thing about this championship: We were expected to win,” Jackson said. “Whenever you’re expected to do something, the pressure is great on a basketball club. It’s a relief to win, rather than an exultation. Tonight was just kind of a relief.

“We knew we were good enough to win. We just had to put that nail in the coffin and close the lid on the series.”

And the season.