Lasting thoughts on the last episodes of « The Last Dance »…
Lasting thoughts on the last episodes of “The Last Dance”…
In the final minutes of the Bulls/Michael Jordan documentary, there is much talk about whether the club could have run it back in 1998-99 with the same cast to take a shot at a seventh championship. Michael says he believes that, if the organization was willing, he could have gotten all the players and coaches to come back.
From the look of things up close at that time, I’d have to rate that possibility as highly doubtful. Too many trust bridges had been burned. Nuked even. Owner Jerry Reinsdorf had the power to make general manager Jerry Krause go back on his preseason statement that, no matter what the season’s result, this would be Phil Jackson’s last year as head coach. But could Jordan really have gotten Scottie Pippen to sign a one-year deal when there was so much more to be made elsewhere? Hard to see that happening.
Krause eventually helped Pippen by making it a sign-and-trade move with Houston, which got Scottie significantly more than he would have received in a straight free agent transaction.
Jordan already had his money. Pippen, through his own choice to take longer deals for security rather than being able to negotiate new contracts when his leverage improved, had yet to have his most serious payday. So, easy for Michael to say.
But even Jordan was wary of the situation in Chicago. The mistrust ran deeper than Lake Michigan.
The documentary shows Michael watching on a tablet the interview in which Reinsdorf states that bringing back the same team would have been “suicidal,” because “their market value individually was going to be too high. They weren’t going to be worth the money they were going to get in the market.”
Jordan watches this with a facial tone of both doubt and bemusement.
And that feeling was heard well before the end of that season.
Michael was preparing for another contract when I approached him with an idea. Before I laid it out, I got him to promise only that if he used the plan, the Herald would have the story. The idea was that he would play for the NBA veteran minimum that year in order for the Bulls to properly pay the players he needed around him. Any money lost in direct contract dollars would be more than balanced by even greater endorsements in his enhanced status as a team player.
Jordan pondered the concept for a few seconds and said, yeah, he’d be willing to do the contract thing, but he couldn’t be sure the club would spend the saved money.
