All’s Not Lost for the Bulls With Clippers Still Around

Say goodbye to 10,000 paying customers.

Everyone has their favorite Michael Jordan memory. The Clippers’ was their one sellout of the season for the Bulls. That dropped off Sunday when an announced 6,118 (no doubt arrived at by the usual method, multiply the crowd by 1.5) turned up for the new Bulls without Jordan, Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Luc Longley, Steve Kerr, Scott Burrell and Jud Buechler.

Not that the Clippers could have been very impressed, since they turn over seven players and a coach most years.

Talk about your opportunities. The Clippers hadn’t beaten the Bulls here in eight years but turned in a first half that was even more lifeless than usual, wound up losing, 89-84, and are now up to nine years.

The Bulls are 1-1, which is expected to be their high-water mark of the season.

“Forty-nine and one?” someone asked new Bull Brent Barry.

“It’s better than 0-50,” Barry said. “That’s what Coach [Tim] Floyd has been hearing all year long.”

The Bulls had this game circled on their schedule as the one they’d better get if they wanted to notch a win in the first week, or month. They played like it too, taking 18 of the first 23 rebounds and running up a 20-point lead before halftime.

The Clippers, of course, are easing into this season, having waited until Jan. 13 to hire Coach Chris Ford. Maybe they also neglected to tell him they’re only playing two exhibition games this season, and this weekend counted in the standings.

“We knew it would be an opportunity for us,” said Floyd, “and there aren’t many opportunities.

“They’re in a state of flux like us. They have a new coach, a first-rounder [Michael Olowokandi] they’re trying to work in. That takes time.”

For the Clippers, it has taken all of this century.

For the Bulls, obliged to undergo fierce scrutiny with a humble cast, it has already been a difficult experience. They arrived here, to be asked the same questions they had heard in Utah, and will hear in 27 more league cities, about replacing Jordan, starting over, etc.

“I think people around basketball, around the game, understand that there’s nothing you can do,” said Barry before the game. “I mean, Michael Jordan didn’t leave a void in Chicago, he left a void in the game of basketball.

“You don’t replace something like that ever, and the people in and around Chicago understand that. I think in and around the league, the people who have covered the game for so long are disappointed that they don’t get to come into this locker room and see No. 23 getting ready for a ball game.”

Said Ron Harper, the lone returning starter:

“After you hear about it for so long--for the past two years, we heard about it, guys were trying to leave early, get out, change teams. It finally happened. It’s like, you hear about it so long, you know somewhere down the line, it’s gonna happen. And it happened.

“Thank God it’s a short season.”

The Bulls were supposed to be running into each other in the triangle offense, which has finished coaches outside Chicago who tried to implement it-- often within months--but they looked OK. Especially when the Clippers let them retrieve all their misses in the first quarter and put them back in the basket.

The interesting question is, just how many Bulls would have had to leave for the Clippers to beat them? At halftime, the answer seemed to be all of them.

Of course, the Clippers rallied in the second half. Of course, they came almost all the way back. And, of course, everyone is going to have to be patient with this young team, as they have been with all the young teams before it. . . . .

Anyway, it was a a rare bright spot for a bunch of innocents who needed one, even if it wasn’t all it could have been.

Rodman called his old employers, asking for four tickets, which they left for him. Having gone three years without talking to his former teammates, maybe he felt bad and wanted to introduce himself to them.

However, just as he no-showed on an invitation to sit in Jerry Buss’ box for Friday’s Laker game, and no-showed on an invitation to join Buss’ team, he no-showed at the Sports Arena.

That’s how the first weekend of the weird short NBA season of 1998-99--well, 1999, anyway--will be remembered, as the one when Rodman no-showed on both sides of town.

Let’s just hope it gets better from here.