Don’t Fix Winning Formula

The Chicago Bulls will be remembered for as long as basketball is played, and will be talked about a hundred years from now. At a time in sports when nothing seems to last, the Bulls have won five titles in seven years. Maybe it is the best team to ever play, because maybe Michael Jordan puts them over the top against anybody. Maybe the Bulls will make it six titles in eight years, if the owner and the general manager in Chicago will just leave them alone.

But Jerry Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause seem desperate to take a wrecking ball to the last sports team of the 20th century that really matters. Somehow Reinsdorf the owner and Krause the general manager have gotten it into their heads that they are Jordan and Scottie Pippen. So as recently as the beginning of this week, Krause was looking to trade Pippen to the Boston Celtics for a couple of draft choices.

Reinsdorf and Krause always seem to be looking to get rid of Pippen and they are always looking to get rid of Phil Jackson, who has coached the team to all five titles. As if Jackson is just another nobody. As if the organization is the real star. A couple of months ago, Krause was talking about the season the Bulls played while Jordan was off playing minor league baseball and said something about how it was the most fun the Bulls ever had, and how the Bulls never ran the triangle offense better.

Sure they did. Let’s see how the triangle offense looks in a couple of years without Jordan or Pippen in it. You know what Reinsdorf the owner is going to have when Jordan and Pippen leave the Bulls?

He is going to have the Chicago White Sox.

We talk about ego and arrogance with athletes all the time, and how it can ruin sports. Nobody seems to make as big a deal when we see the same sort of ego, same sort of arrogance, in a front office. Somehow Reinsdorf and Krause have convinced themselves that they are a couple of stars in Chicago, when they are just part of Jordan’s supporting cast, same as everybody else.

“We have a right to defend what we have,” Jordan kept saying after Game 6.

And was absolutely right. The other day he joked about this obsession in Chicago to start rebuilding the Bulls when the Bulls are still at the top of the world, and pointed out how long the Cubs have been rebuilding, right under everybody’s nose.

“It really is about arrogance,” a top basketball official out of the Western Conference was saying. “You know people love to be heroes of their own dramas? Reinsdorf and Krause are desperate to be stars, to give everybody the idea that this isn’t just about Jordan, it’s about them. Only it’s not.

“Give both of them, particularly Krause, their due for what the Bulls have accomplished. Because Krause did assemble good people around Michael. But how in the world can you do anything except keep this team together for as long as possible?

“Why are these people so desperate to be like the rest of us?”

The guy laughed.

“Hey, Michael’s probably only going to play one more season,” he said. “They’re going to be like the rest of us soon enough.”

Jackson works year to year, and maybe he only got this last year out of Reinsdorf and Krause because Jordan gave them an ultimatum: If Jackson wasn’t coming back, neither was he. Maybe that is all that will bring Jackson back for 1997-98, after which Krause can hire his heart’s desire, Tim Floyd of Iowa State. Somehow Krause looks at Floyd and every single time sees John Wooden looking back at him. Somehow Krause has decided he is a kingmaker here.

He is not. Michael Jordan is. It all comes back to him. Krause runs these new guys past him, and Jordan makes Krause look like a genius. He wins when Craig Hodges bombs away from the outside, he wins when John Paxson bombs away, and finally with Steve Kerr. He wins with Rodman and he wins without him. He wins when Bill Cartwright is the center, or Luc Longley, or Bill Wennington. Jordan wins when Scott Williams comes off the bench to get him rebounds, or Stacey King, or Brian Williams.

There is one constant: Pippen riding shotgun for him. Jordan and Pippen, to me, are the most versatile one-two combination in the history of the game, and that includes Magic and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. For years, we have heard about the greatness of John Stockton and Karl Malone in Utah. And they have had a remarkable run. They got into the NBA Finals against Jordan and Pippen and looked like an opening act, from Jordan’s jump shot to win Game 1 to Pippen’s diving steal to close out Game 6. In basketball, at this time, they are Ruth and Gehrig.

Once, back in the 1980s, Joe McIlvaine was explaining why he had started trading away people like Kevin Mitchell and Lenny Dykstra so soon after the Mets had won 108 regular season games, and the World Series, in 1986. You don’t want to get into that Green Bay Packers syndrome, McIlvaine said, talking about the Packers of the 1960s.

He meant he didn’t want everybody to get old at once. It was really McIlvaine’s own ego at work. As if his organization was the star. He was such a brilliant judge of talent he would remake the Mets. He wanted to show everybody. And sure did.

The Bulls have gotten old, all at once. And have kept winning. Have remained the only sports team worth talking about. Leave them alone. They will be the White Sox soon enough.