After not mentioning the name of a certain minor-league baseball player in our last column, it’s time we admitted that the Bulls miss Michael Jordan. They miss him not merely for his 30-points-a-game average and his infectious will to win, but because the team was designed to complement his talents. It’s not that the Bulls have become a team of shooters–the elementary conclusion to be drawn from their play this season, especially of late. It’s that these players have always been primarily shooters, shooters assigned to a certain spot on the floor, to create the proper spacing for Jordan to operate in and to act as safety valves when the opponents ganged up on him. Even this year’s additions, Steve Kerr and Bill Wennington, seem to have been recruited to fill spot-up roles in the offense.
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But wait; snap out of it. Let’s get back to reality. Jordan’s retirement has benefited Pippen; he has brought a confidence to his game that not many people thought him capable of. His outside shooting has quite often been marksmanlike, and he has developed a nifty turnaround jumper–all angled elbows and pointed feet, delivered with a balletic pirouette. Yet the increased responsibility has not been so beneficial for Kukoc. Like most rookies, he has played in fits and starts, game-winning bank shots mixed with crises in confidence. He is a talented and endearing player, there’s no doubt about that. He enters the game with a sleepy-eyed gaze and his hair somehow slick, looking like the sidekick in those old Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich movies, the one who drops by in the morning for a ride to school, compliments the parents as Henry slips him an extra flapjack, then provides comic relief the rest of the film. Kukoc, however, has too often displayed that character’s befuddlement and too rarely his own ballyhooed talents on the basketball floor.
That really should have been expected. The transition from European basketball to the National Basketball Association is perhaps even more difficult than the transition from the major- college level to the pros. There are not only the longer season and the more demanding tactics–both problems for players fresh out of school–but also the immense differences in culture and language, changes that influence a European player’s every waking minute. When proven European talents like the late Drazen Petrovic had struggled at first in the NBA, it was unreasonable to expect Kukoc to excel right off the bat, even if he was the best player in Europe and even if he did show flashes of brilliance early on.
Pippen is not only an athletic but an intelligent player, and he produced a delightful moment in that first quarter. Miller came up with a steal and went sprinting down the court for the hoop. Pippen was with him step for step, and Miller appeared to expect to be fouled. There is a lot of bad blood between these teams, and between these two players, who made a point of trying to show each other up in a series of meetings earlier in the season. So Miller plotted, quite clearly, to leap into Pippen, both to draw the foul and to allow his body to act as a buffer so that he could get the shot off for the possible three-point play. Pippen, however, did not foul him, and in fact began to drift off to the side. By the time Miller went up and into Pippen, Pippen had lured him well wide of the basket, so that Miller had a low-angle bank shot and muffed it.
Still, with the Bulls turning up the defense to match the Pacers– at one point there were back-to-back 24-second violations at opposite ends of the floor–they managed to hold a 78-71 lead through three quarters.
