As the Bulls began the National Basketball Association playoffs against the Indiana Pacers on Saturday, they were blithely unburdened by the legacy of failure that dogs their contemporaries on the Chicago sports scene. Six championships in 45 years of existence will do that for a team, as will the indelible memory of the best there has ever been in hoops.
The Blackhawks are only a year removed from winning hockey’s grand prize, but so many missteps occurred during their 49 seasons between titles that last year’s endless victory celebration evoked a surreal feeling, as if it weren’t really happening — not to this team.
Sure enough, that team has scattered to the winds, a victim of salary-cap miscalculation that makes a Stanley Cup defense thoroughly unlikely.
Michael Jordan was making his seventh run at it when the Bulls achieved their first title in 1991. Before that they had never been to the finals, a 24-year stretch of futility that was almost Cub-like. But when five more championships followed in the next seven years, M. J. and his supporting cast were appropriately hailed as a dynasty.
That simply doesn’t happen here — not since the 1940s Bears had a Chicago team even hinted at domination. Jordan’s transcendence changed the way the city felt about itself.
Thirteen years have elapsed since the last Grant Park party, and the Bulls haven’t been within two playoff rounds of another championship since. Meanwhile, the Blackhawks, the Bears and the White Sox have all either won a title or played for one. Yet the memory of Jordan ruling the basketball world is so powerful that it sustains the image of a championship-caliber franchise, even though some of the moves made since he left suggest a head-scratching cluelessness. Think of Ron Mercer and Eddie Robinson as the Jordan and Scottie Pippen of a parallel universe.
That was Jerry Krause’s doing. Krause, the Bulls’ blustery former general manager, deserves Hall of Fame props for assembling two platoons of complementary talent that helped Jordan collect those rings. But his ego-driven, unseemly haste to prove he could win without M. J. led to some inexplicably bad decisions. Putting Tim Floyd — hopelessly overmatched as an N.B.A. coach — in the seat that Phil Jackson had occupied was probably the worst of them, though the cheesy pursuit of the uninterested Tracy McGrady was a better metaphor for how far the franchise had fallen. By the time he was moved aside in 2003, Krause had to go.
The climb back to respectability began with John Paxson’s elevation to basketball boss. That move begat Scott Skiles, who as coach orchestrated the first two post-Jordan playoff trips, including a tentative foray into the second round in 2007.
The Paxson-Skiles partnership ended badly, but there was an upside: failure to salvage a playoff berth from the wreckage of the 2007-8 season sent the Bulls into the draft lottery, and they emerged with Derrick Rose. That is franchise-altering good fortune, akin to the Portland Trail Blazers liking Sam Bowie more than Jordan in the 1984 draft. But it’s one thing to catch a break and quite another to know what to do with it.
Finding a coach who’s comfortable in his own skin is a good start. Jackson, as tranquil as Doug Collins was hyperkinetic, brought out qualities in Jordan that none of his other pro coaches could tap, most notably a team-first, share-the-ball (occasionally) mentality. Rose, having survived two years of Vinny Del Negro’s deer-in-the-headlights tutelage, is flourishing under Tom Thibodeau, an old N.B.A. soul with a knack for maximizing a player’s talents while neutralizing his shortcomings. Their relationship is likely to produce the league’s most valuable player as well as its coach of the year.
Skeptics maintain that the Bulls are too young and untested to win the title, though they entered the playoffs as the Eastern Conference’s top seed. The N.B.A. is star powered, especially at playoff time, and the Bulls have none besides Rose. (But the Thibodeau Effect on Luol Deng’s tidy all-around game can’t be discounted: Deng, the 26-year-old forward from Duke, is playing the best basketball of his life.)
And about all the Bulls have done since the calendar turned to 2011 is win: they are 41-10 since Jan. 1, including 8-0 against Boston, Miami and Orlando. Their 62 wins are a 21-game improvement over last season, with a new coach and eight new players.
?Still, doubt surrounds them. Carlos Boozer doesn’t get it done every night. Keith Bogans still can’t hit a shot. Joakim Noah’s manic energy has gone missing. Kurt Thomas somehow seems older than Dick Stockton.
We’ll see. This team grows on you. Rose is terrific, and Thibodeau is really good. Right now I see the Bulls handling Indiana before a tough seven-game series with the Orlando Magic in the second round. Then the Miami Heat unloads its guns and prevails in the conference finals.
Enjoy the run, regardless of where it leads. The N.B.A. is a mess, with several small-market outposts in financial distress, and an off-season of rancorous labor strife is a given. Pro basketball could be going away for a while, just as the Bulls are getting something going.
Maybe they could try out for the Cubs.
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