Here’s the tale of the people who’re condemned to be in short shorts forever.
It’s June 2003.
Just last month, in the real world, Michael Jordan — the most famous basketball player of all time — said goodbye to playing that sport professionally for the third and final — as of writing — time. He was in Philadelphia and no longer wearing that famous number 23 for the Chicago Bulls, but he still got a lengthy standing ovation from everyone in the building.
Here, though, the playoff crowd that’s packed into Chicago Stadium almost a decade after it was demolished are sick to their stomachs. Paul Pierce has just drained a three pointer with 38 seconds to go in a game seven, but it means nothing. The New York Knicks have a double-digit lead. The Bulls have run out of time to make a comeback, and they won’t get another.
Was Chicago’s NBA team coming off of a near decade of utter domination, it wouldn’t sting so badly, but it does, because that isn’t the case. To get to the bottom of why, we have to ask a very important question.
Why are so many people still wearing short shorts?
I’ll start off my answer by taking you back to 1998. A Seattle SuperSonics team that’s got far too many point guards — including both Jason Kidd and Penny Hardaway — is romping to victory over the Milwaukee Bucks to cement itself as the league’s top dog. The seasons of just 22 other teams, rather than 28, all end in defeat and disappointment. The Bulls are one of these teams, finishing with a record of 26 wins and 56 losses as the third worst team in the entire league.
In a season when they should have won 62 games, they end up with the consolation prize of drafting Pierce third overall, having had no chance to luck their way into one of the top two selections that’d have afforded them even more choice when it came to selecting one of the country’s most highly-rated prospects. As it stands, they’ve not done too badly anyway, as the man who’ll come to be known by the nickname ‘The Truth’ is a bonafide star in the making. He’ll come to compliment Shareef-Abdur Rahim, the addition that awaited Chicago at the end of a 32-50 1996 season that should’ve been a 72-10 campaign that would have stood as a record until 2016, pretty well.
