It Has Certainly Proven to Be a Bull Market

Even before daybreak, the jubilation of winning a championship had melted away, emotion yielding to hard, cold business considerations that soon will determine whether the Chicago Bulls will be back for an encore in any similar shape or form. The MVP of a team that won an astonishing 87 of 100 games is about to be a free agent, as is the best coach in the league and the greatest rebounder/antagonist in basketball history.

Michael Jordan says he’s not coming back if Phil Jackson doesn’t come back. Jackson says he’s not coming back without Jordan. And Dennis Rodman says he’s not coming back unless Jackson’s back. It’s funny how winning a championship can forge a three-way bond among America’s biggest sporting icon, a Zen master and a cross-dresser. With everybody back, the Bulls would be favored next season to win a fifth title; without any one of the three pieces, the whole thing could unravel before November.

An encore depends largely on Jerry Reinsdorf, chairman of the Bulls, the man who will decide whether Jordan will get $20 million a season for the final two years of his career; whether Rodman is an even bigger risk with the security of a multi-year deal than in this one-year audition; whether Jackson, the best ringmaster ever without a whip and chair, is worth a million less after four championships than the likes of John Calipari, who signed for $3 million with the Nets though he never has coached an NBA game.

Better to try to read the fine print on a billboard from a quarter mile than try to read Reinsdorf, a man careful with the dollar. More than being a great deal-maker, though, Reinsdorf is used to having his way, in stadium negotiations, as chairman of the White Sox, as a mover/shaker in Major League Baseball. We’re talking about a chief executive who is paying Jordan and Scottie Pippen about what Larry Johnson makes.

While the Bulls doused each other with champagne in the aftermath of Sunday’s Game 6 championship, Reinsdorf was being peppered with questions. Depending on whether he liked the questioner, Reinsdorf said his biggest priority this summer is “getting the White Sox to the World Series,” that he “can’t give anybody any assurances of anything,” that he plans to “do everything in my power to keep the team together.”

Of course, the one thing he has to do is re-sign Jordan -- or leave town. If it’s $18 million Jordan wants for each of the next two seasons, Reinsdorf ought to slip him a check for the full amount Tuesday at that victory parade to Grant Park.

Best there ever was, best there ever will be. It says so on the statue in front of United Center. It’s because of Jordan that we went from November midway through June witnessing something completely old-fashioned in sports: teamwork. Yes, the Celtics and Lakers of the ‘80s had more Hall of Fame players on their rosters, but there’s no way they played much better as a team.

The Bulls are worthy of our attention because they did something teams don’t do anymore: They maxed out. They played every night, never took a game off in a sport where pacing is usually necessary for teams with designs on a championship. It’s so much easier to be an underdog than to come in as a world-beater and go out that way, too. Who’s the last person, the last team in sports and entertainment to live up to expectations, even surpass them, 100 times in a year?

And that is because of Jordan. It’s stupid to say he’s better now than he was because he isn’t. He’s probably 90 percent and dropping -- it’s supposed to be that way because he’s 33 years old. The days are gone of Jordan being able to guard the opponent’s best player and still have energy to score 18 points in the fourth quarter of a playoff game. He can’t physically carry a team like he used to, and even if he, Rodman and Jackson return to the Bulls next season, the team is going to need an injection of youthful talent to repeat. Still, the Bulls maxed out this year because of Jordan, whose will to win and raging insistence on being the best made Steve Kerr a better shooter, Ron Harper a better defender, Pippen more resilient, Luc Longley more determined.

Jack Ramsay, ESPN’s NBA analyst and coach of the 1977 NBA champion Portland Trailblazers, said in a conversation this week: “From all the teams in all the sports I’ve watched, Michael Jordan is the greatest competitor of all time. In any sport. His competitive edge is so finely honed it affects all the guys on his team. Steve Kerr now gets up and pressures the ball on defense. You look at the guys being guarded by Chicago now and you almost sense they’re saying, ‘Let me up for a minute, let me breathe.’ And he won’t do it. That’s why so many guys who were dismissed from a lot of teams because they couldn’t cut it, now can cut it. Michael Jordan is why.”

In that regard, it might have been Jordan’s finest season, precisely because he cannot fly anymore, because he can get his shot blocked by Shawn Kemp, but finds a way to compensate and get the two points some other way. It’s as big a thrill watching Jordan re-invent his game on the fly as it was watching him soar through the late-1980s. He wanted to come out of retirement, prove he was still the best and win a championship for his late father, James. That done, he’ll spend the next four months creating new reasons to rage on. And for the next couple of seasons, should the Bulls do the right thing and re-sign Jordan, Jackson and Rodman, the next move will be up to everybody else.