Pacers Bulled Over in Game 5

So much for the worldwide anti-Bulls conspiracy.

Recoiling from the horror of not getting as many calls as they wanted, the Chicago Bulls took the advice of their poorer but wiser coach--”Shut up and play”--and returned to championship form Wednesday night in a thunderclap 106-87 wipeout of the Indiana Pacers, seizing a 3-2 lead in the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals.

It was over long before halftime, by which time the Bulls led, 57-32. The Pacers missed 18 shots in a row in one stretch, going scoreless from the floor for 14:13.

Meanwhile, the Bulls were walking on them at the other end. Of Chicago’s first eight baskets, five were on layups and a sixth was on a five-footer.

Of those six tone-setting baskets, three were by Michael Jordan, who backed limping Reggie Miller under the hoop time after time and put the ball up over him.

“I don’t have a problem backing Reggie in,” Jordan said. “To me, he’s 100%. If he’s going to go around and make threes on a bad ankle, I don’t think of him as being hurt.”

It was the Bulls’ most impressive game of the postseason, coming after their excruciating Game 4 loss in which they blew an eight-point lead in the fourth quarter and complained about referees’ calls, Coach Phil Jackson comparing it to “Munich ‘72” and Jordan noting it was “us against the world, no matter how you look at it.”

Could they spell w-h-i-n-e-r-s? If they were reading their reviews the last few days, even in adoring Chicago, they would have had no trouble. The Chicago Sun-Times ran zingers from newspapers around the country under the headline: “National Media Are Lining Up to Take Their Shots.”

By game time, Jackson, hit for a $10,000 fine by the league, was finally letting go of the issue. At the Wednesday shootaround, someone asked him if he’d gotten his money’s worth.

Jackson smiled. “That depends,” he said. “We’ll see tonight.”

Said his opposite number, the Pacers’ Larry Bird, on the pressure on the Game 5 officials: “Well, Phil’s hand-picked these, so I’m sure he’s happy.”

If Jackson wasn’t, he soon would be.

The Bulls were upset and it’s not good to upset the Bulls. In the euphoria after Game 4 in Indianapolis, someone asked Miller if Jordan was suddenly looking “mortal.”

“No, no, no,” Reggie said, shaking his head and smiling.

Miller predicted that Jordan, a believer in fire and brimstone oratory, would harangue his teammates for the whole flight home. It didn’t turn out that way, but it might as well have.

“I didn’t yell and scream,” said Jordan, who scored 29 points in Game 5. “I didn’t say much. That’s like yelling and screaming sometimes.

“I’m usually a pretty vocal guy on the plane, but there wasn’t much to say. It [the loss] was unfortunate. For 48 hours, it stuck with us. I didn’t get much sleep. With me being quiet the last 48 hours, I’m pretty sure that’s like screaming and yelling.”

It was a lean and hungry-looking Jordan who started the game Wednesday, a newly aggressive Scottie Pippen (20 points, eight rebounds, seven assists), and a resurgent Toni Kukoc (19 points, seven assists). The Pacers were spectators without tickets.

“I think all 11 guys who suited up tonight really should be embarrassed,” Miller said after the Pacers shot 34.3% (23 of 67).

“I’m very disappointed in the way we played tonight,” Bird said. “It surprises me, in the biggest game of the year, they come out and they play passive like they did. . . .

“Like I told ‘em, I hate to end the year up with a game like this, after everything they accomplished and how hard they worked all year, to come out and play like that. I really don’t have any answers for ‘em.

“If you lay a couple of them [Bulls] on the floor, they don’t come in there next time. We just didn’t do that.”

You get the impression Friday night in Indianapolis will be different. That Pacer flight home might not have been a love-in, either.