The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

and saw Horace [Grant] and Scottie [Pippen] screwing around, joking and messing up,” Jordan told an acquaintance later. “They’ve got the talent, but they don’t take it seriously. And the rookies were together, as usual. They’ve got no idea what it’s all about. The white guys [John Paxson and Ed Nealy], they work hard, but they don’t have the talent. And the rest of them? Who knows what to expect? They’re not good for much of anything.”
    It was a burden Michael Jordan felt he had to bear. The weight of the entire team was on his tired shoulders.
    The Pistons had taken the first two games by 86–77 and 102–93, and Detroit’s defense had put the Bulls’ fast break in neutral: The Bulls had failed to shoot better than 41 percent in either game. Jordan himself had averaged only 27 points, stubbornly going 17 for 43. No team defensed Jordan better than the Pistons, yet he refused to admit that they gave him a hard time, so he played into their hands by attacking the basket right where their collapsing defensive schemes were expecting him. The coaches would look on in exasperation as Jordan drove toward the basket—“the citadel,” assistant coach John Bach liked to call it—like a lone infantryman attacking a fortified bunker. Too often there was no escape.
    Although Detroit’s so-called Jordan rules of defense were effective, the Bulls coaches also believed the Pistons had succeeded in pulling a great psychological scam on the referees. It had been a two-part plan. The first step was a series of selectively edited tapes, sent to the league a few years earlier, which purported to show bad fouls being called on defenders despite little contact with Jordan. The Pistons said they weren’t even being allowed to defense him. “Ever since then, the foul calls started decreasing,” Jordan noted, “and not only those against Detroit.”
    Step two was the public campaign. The Pistons advertised their “Jordan rules” as some secret defense that only they could deploy to stop Jordan. These secrets were merely a series of funneling defenses that channeled Jordan toward the crowded middle, but Detroit players and coaches talked about them as if they had been devised by the Pentagon. “You hear about them often enough—and the referees hear it, too—and you start to think they have something different,” said Bach. “It has an effect and suddenly people think they aren’t fouling Michael even when they are.”
    It only added to Jordan’s frustration with Detroit.
    At halftime of Game 2, with the Bulls trailing 53–38, Jordan walked into the quiet locker room, kicked over a chair, and yelled, “We’re playing like a bunch of pussies!” Afterward, he refused to speak to reporters, boarded the bus, and sat in stony silence all the way home. He continued his silence—other than a few sharp postgame statements—for the next week. He would not comment on his teammates. “I’ll let them stand up and take responsibility for themselves,” he told a friend.
    Jordan had really believed that the Bulls could defeat Detroit this time. Of course, there was no evidence to suggest it could happen, since the Pistons had knocked the Bulls out of the playoffs the previous two seasons and had taken fourteen of the last seventeen regular-season games between them. But hadn’t there been similar odds in 1989 when the Bulls had faced Cleveland in the playoffs? The Cavaliers had won fifty-seven games that season to the Bulls’ forty-seven, and they were 6–0 against the Bulls, even winning the last game of the regular season despite resting their starters while the Bulls played theirs. The Bulls’ chances were as bleak as Chicago in February.
    Jordan promised that the Bulls would win the Cleveland series anyway.
    Playing point guard, Jordan averaged 39.8 points, 8.2 assists, and