Good morning, Tim Floyd.
Your team has little quickness on defense, even less speed on offense and no chance to win 20 games for the second straight season thanks to the way Jerry Krause trashed this roster, so the question has to be asked: Did you ever think it would be this horrible?
“If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it all over again,” Floyd said, “but once I get through this, I won’t do it again.”
– How would you like to be a Bulls player who has an NBA championship ring or six and then you hear your Chairman tell fans of his baseball team, “believe me, I would trade all six of those rings for one White Sox World Series ring.”
How would you like to hear that after being part of the basketball team of the 1990s and now having awful times, and then the guy in charge disses the accomplishment of a lifetime that way? Indeed, how would you feel, Randy Brown?
“Is that what he said?” Brown asked, incredulously. “Really?”
Yes. Really. Cross my fingers. The Chairman said he would trade all the NBA riches of the decade for a Series title. Could he have diminished a magnificent accomplishment any more than that?
“I don’t know how to answer that,” said Brown, member of the last three Bulls champions and a White Sox fan, to boot. “The White Sox had opportunities to have a good team, but for some reason they didn’t keep that (right) player. I don’t think it diminishes the championships. But it’s kind of weird to hit at that. I mean, that was a dynasty team that won six championships in the ’90s, one of the best teams ever to step on the court.”
Small potatoes, apparently, compared to getting Jaime Navarro a Series ring.
– Floyd, of course, has a different take on the Chairman’s comments: “If you’re (manager) Jerry Manuel or (General Manager) Ron Scheuler, there’s a real commitment on his part to get it where (the Bulls franchise) was. He’s not saying that he doesn’t want another NBA championship, because I’ve heard that from him as late as last week. He said he wants another one.”
Golly, yes, the Chairman wants another one so much that he and hoops henchman Krause collapsed a championship team to do it.
– Saturday night, he’s watching the Bulls in Atlanta. Monday night, it’s Knicks-Bucks in New York. Last year, Los Angeles. Everywhere but the United Center. Not only is Michael Jordan making the point that he won’t watch the disaster area that is his former team in its home, but also making it near impossible for the Bulls to get mega-free agents Tim Duncan or Grant Hill next year.
At least, that’s the thought around the NBA, and here’s the big reason: The way the Chairman and his hoops henchman pushed aside Jordan, including that inexplicable decision to scrap a run at a seventh NBA title in an advantageously shortened season to perpetrate a fraud that now enters Year 2. I mean, why do you think the only game Jordan has seen in the UC involved the Blackhawks?
In fact, his loathing of Krause, especially, is so well known that people in the NBA office are stunned by the enmity. Said one ranking NBA official: “They ran off the greatest recruiting tool a team like that could want, so why would (Duncan or Hill) sign there?”
– At the Bucks-Knicks game, Jordan had this for Milwaukee’s Scott Williams, a Bull for the first three-peat from 1991 to ’93: “You haven’t done (anything) since ’93.”
– The end: From “Late Show” host David Letterman: “Ahh! Autumn in New York. That wonderful time of the year when Hillary (Clinton) starts pretending she’s a Knicks fan.”
