Following the pro basketball season is sort of like watching a spring bulb flower. After things are planted in the fall there is a long, cold, dreary time in which nothing much seems to happen. It’s important only for how it alters the chemistry of the bulb. While NBA teams, of course, try to win every game during the cold winter months of the regular season, they’re reluctant to put their full array of tricks on display. It would be difficult to sustain such a pace for a full 82-game season, and the team’s secrets would be picked over by every scout. A good coach makes sure a team keeps something in reserve, then deploys that something at critical moments toward the end of the season and in the playoffs, with hopes that even scouts will be, for a moment, confounded as to how a team is doing what it now does. That’s why spring is the full flowering of pro basketball, the most intense play matched with the most involved tactics.
In the teams’ previous two meetings, a home-and-home set in March, the Bulls had swamped the Hawks at the Stadium, in large part because Scottie Pippen and Toni Kukoc proved too mobile for the Hawks’ big front line of Kevin Willis, Danny Manning, and center Jon Koncak. In the days before their next meeting, in Atlanta, the Hawks prepared a new set of tactics to go with a new starting lineup–a smaller, quicker group with forward Duane Ferrell replacing Koncak, and Willis moving to center–and they dealt the Bulls an equally decisive defeat.
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From there, tactics took a backseat to intensity, and the Bulls had all of that for a time. Myers came flying down the wing on a fast break. Kerr tossed him the ball, and Myers just kept on going at the same high speed. Then he dished to Horace Grant in the lane for a slam dunk, and as Grant jammed the ball Myers continued running full-out under the hoop and back up the other sideline, all the while his hand held aloft as if to say “I did it, I did it.” That gave the Bulls a 30-11 lead, and they soon went up by 20.
Atlanta had, in fact, beaten New York in their final meeting, but then the Hawks had lost to the Miami Heat (unlike the Celtics, a playoff team). By losing to Boston the Bulls had blown a shot at the Eastern Conference title, and were assured of being seeded third in the playoffs, behind both the Hawks and the Knicks.
Kukoc entered the game for the fourth quarter, but he had the look of a badly beaten dog about him. The Knicks’ defense was intense, and Ewing was dominating the game on offense when he wasn’t sitting down with foul trouble. At one point the Knicks triple-teamed the ball in the corner. Somehow the pass was made to Kukoc. He drove the baseline only to find Ewing standing in the lane under the hoop. Kukoc was so intimidated he hopped into the air and made a meek little flip at the basket, even though Ewing had four fouls and was only standing his ground, determined not to draw a ticky-tack call. The ball dropped to the ground; the Knicks rebounded it and took it the other way. It was the defining moment of the game. The Knicks went on to win, 92-76.
