ESPN NBA

• Remember when Michael Jordan burst into tears after winning the NBA title? You can watch it on video, and read more about it by clicking to read more below. I wrote an article about that series that was in the NBA Finals program this year.
• RealGM passes on a report from the website of TV station WTHR saying Al Harrington has been traded to the Pacers. But as far as I can tell, WTHR.com has no such story at the moment.
• Steve Bulpett joins a lot of Boston 12-year-olds in imagining lots of big-name stars joining the Celtics.
• If the U.S. team is to return to glory, it will do so powered by turkey bacon and Japanese balls. There's plenty of education ahead. Chris Sheridan says he has asked Joe Johnson, Bruce Bowen, Dwight Howard, and Gilbert Arenas how you call a timeout under FIBA rules. They all got it wrong. In international games, coaches call timeouts.
  
  
• Tuesday is the day Coach Krzyzewski chooses the 15 who will travel to Asia. Three of those will only play in exhibition games.
• SactownRoyalty goes into campaign mode. Gotta get them a stadium deal passed this fall, or risk losing the team.
• In 2004, Sam Smith called Pavel Podkolzin a stiff. Mark Cuban went bananas on his blog. He made a big public bet with Smith that Smith had never even seen Podkolzin play, and if Smith lost the bet, Cuban wanted him to change his title to "sports gossip columnist." Fast forward two years. Here's Maverick Moneyball on Pavel Podkolzin in yesterday's summer league game  "A bad summer league showing got worse for Pavel Podkolzin last night. In eight minutes of play, PPod was called for four fouls, had zero points, zero blocks, but he did have one rebound." I hate to defend Sam Smith, but it's looking like the man was right.
  
  
• Brian McCormick is seeing his ideas being embraced by Sonny Vaccaro, and he is pissed.
• Geezer with hook shot ponies up cash, books floor time with his buddies in Madison Square Garden.
• Cabrini Green, the notorious housing project in Chicago (with lots of basketball connections--it was home to William Gates of Hoop Dreams, and it's where the Bulls mascot was busted with pot last year, and I'm pretty sure there are some NBA players from there although I'm drawing a blank) is being demolished, and commemorated in an underground documentary. You can watch some online. (Via Nah Right) It's not pretty.
• The fish that got away? Maybe John Salmons isn't going to Toronto.
• Larry Bird vs. Dr. J in a 1983 video game.
• David Friedman: "Sebastian Telfair made the First Team last year and the Second Team this year. His game is well suited for summer league play, but don't expect him to show up on any regular season All-Star teams. He has some of the same weaknesses as his cousin Stephon Marbury--overdribbling, poor defense--and these problems are compounded by his small size and questionable outside shot. He is a good penetrator and can make some flashy passes but I think that by the end of his career he will have a bunch of All-Summer League awards but very pedestrian regular season statistics/honors."
• The Steve Nash hair jokes have been pretty lame. But this is my favorite so far.
• Luke Walton gets his own highlight reel. That kid can pass the basketball.

Seattle Stuff

• The last few days have not been at all good for the PR of Howard Schultz, and this Frank Hughes column could be the low point.
• Seattle fans, if you want to remember the 1996 Finals when you almost knocked off the Bulls, click the link to read more at the bottom of this post, and don't stop reading until you get to the last quote, which is enough to make you like George Karl again.
• Clay Bennett doesn't like that people don't believe him. Danny O'Neil of the Seattle Times went to Oklahoma City to meet him. "A person who makes a statement and has some level of a track record should be given some level of credibility," he said. "We're serious business people. We all have track records. We all have done what we said we're going to do for years and years. That's exactly what we're going to do now." 
• In another O'Neil article, Clay Bennett gets credit for telling the same story to Oklahoma City fans that he told to Seattle fans: 12 months of clean slate making it work in Seattle, then evaluating all options. O'Neil also describes how the group that owns the Sonics sponsors, and has season tickets, for the Hornets. Weird.
• In the Post-Intelligencer, Art Thiel says bareknuckle politics from the governor might be they key to getting a new stadium in Bellevue.
• This article actually bothers to point out that if the Sonics move, a certain state run liquor store won't sell as many minature bottles of liquor to fans wanting to sneak hooch into the game. (I'm not even going to go into how weird it is that if you want to break the rules to sneak hooch into a game, it's the state government that will be your for-profit accomplice.)

The Best of Both Worlds

Chicago beat Seattle in an NBA Finals that was a career pinnacle for everyone involved.

by Henry Abbott



Like every great playoff series, the 1996 NBA Finals is a story of triumph for one team, and heartbreak for the other.



But with a decade of hindsight, the 1996 Finals offer a twist: Despite the fact that the Chicago Bulls won the title and the Seattle SuperSonics did not—those 11 days in June represent the top highlight of nearly every career involved:

• The Lakers’ Phil Jackson coached the Bulls that year, and calls it “the greatest season ever.” Denver’s George Karl remembers that season at the helm in Seattle as “my most rewarding season as a coach.”
• For Michael Jordan, it was the championship that made him break down in tears—of his six, this was the first since the murder of his father. He won it on Father’s Day, then collapsed, sobbing, on the locker room carpet.
• For Dennis Rodman, it was a chance to be a game-changing player on a history-making team—cementing his reputation as a game-changing defender and rebounder who succeeds on the biggest stage.
• For the vast majority of the players and coaches on the Sonics it would be their only trip to the NBA Finals ever—and the crowning achievement of what Karl described as a “fantastic Cinderella fantasy” march through the regular season and the western conference playoffs.
• For the record books, it would be a 72-win team squaring off against a 64-win team. That might have been the last time two teams with a combined 136 regular season victories ever meet in any playoff series.

The story really starts with Michael Jordan playing baseball in 1995. Unable to master the art of hitting a curve ball, Jordan abandoned his second sport and returned to the Bulls for the last part of 1994-1995. The Bulls thrived, but with kinks still to be worked out. They lost to Shaquille O’Neal, Penny Hardaway, and the Orlando Magic in the eastern conference finals.



The off-season saw two important changes: Jordan worked out as hard as ever and returned in tip-top shape. And Jerry Krause rolled the dice by sending center Will Perdue to San Antonio for the gifted but volatile Dennis Rodman.



The refurbished Jordan and dogged Rodman joined Scottie Pippen, Toni Kukoc, Ron Harper, Luc Longley, Steve Kerr, Bill Wennington, and Randy Brown on a juggernaut that streaked to the best record in NBA history.



To keep the team stoked for a playoff run, Harper had t-shirts made for his teammates. “72-10 don’t mean a thing,” they read, “without the ring.” The Bulls got the message, and breezed through Miami, New York, and Orlando while losing just one game before meeting Seattle in the finals.



The Sonics, meanwhile, were putting together one of the best seasons franchise history. Not only had they won a franchise record 64 games, but they had freshly vanquished the demons of playoffs past: for two years, Coach Karl’s teams had been fantastic in the regular season, but had lost in the first round of the playoffs. In 1996 they knocked off Sacramento, swept the defending champion Houston Rockets in the second round, and then scratched out a seven-game victory against their arch-nemesis Utah Jazz.



As the Seattle-Utah series dragged on, the Bulls had an unfathomable ten days of idleness.



Jackson filled the time with motivational movie clips. One was a colorfully unprintable quote from Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction—the gist of which was that their work was not yet done.



Another was the zany political film King of Hearts—which included gentle guidance about how to view the Sonics. “Payton and Kemp were great athletes who played on the edge of fury,” Jackson writes in the epilogue of his book Sacred Hoops. “The theme I wanted [the Bulls] to pick out was the subtle message of who’s sane and who’s insane in this bizarre movie.”



The t-shirts, the movies, and the human resolve machine that is Michael Jordan kept the Bulls fresh enough to hold serve in the first two games at home.



But astute viewers realized that this series was not going to be a cakewalk. Seattle’s Shawn Kemp (reportedly bitter at having been left off the Dream Team starring Jordan and Pippen that would go to the Olympics a few weeks later) established that he would be a major force in the series. In the two games he averaged more than thirty points per game while taking just 16 shots per game—numbers that surpassed even Jordan’s. Meanwhile, Seattle’s unconventional defense (which forced the ball to the sidelines and the baseline, with double-teams greeting anyone who ventured into the lane with the ball) was keeping the Bulls out of their comfort zone.



Game three was to be in Seattle, and the Sonics flew all night immediately after their second loss. The Bulls, on the other hand, went home for a good night’s rest, and took a leisurely daytime flight the next day. Legendary UCLA Coach John Wooden has written that one of the most important elements of game preparation is getting a good night’s sleep two nights before the big game. The night before the big game, he reasons, no one gets a good night’s sleep anyway.



He looked prophetic in game three. Coach Jackson felt his Bulls were fresher, and in the first half, Jordan pounced. He stuck 23 points on the Sonics before their defense settled down. It was the only blowout of the series.



Down 3-0, the Sonics were assumed to have been done. No team has ever come down from that kind of deficit, especially against the best team in NBA history. Game four would be, it seemed, a coronation. The champagne was ready in the Bulls locker room.



But Coach Karl had some tricks up his sleeves. His team had been having trouble scoring, so he benched defensive center Ervin Johnson in favor of fan favorite Frank Brickowski. “If I have any regrets about that series,” says Karl, “it’s that I didn’t stick Brick in there earlier. He helped us out of jams all season long, and he did some good things.”



Perhaps the most important change in game four was that backup Seattle guard Nate McMillan was able to fight through his back trouble to play a little bit.



“With Nate on the court we were pretty incredible,” says Karl. “I think we won seven out of nine quarters. He wasn’t the best player on the floor, but he was the glue. That was the thing about that team: we could throw defense at you, we could throw shooting at you, we could throw big guys at you. Whatever we were doing, Nate knew how to make it happen. Gary Payton is a great point guard, but Nate was the true point guard of that team.”



The Sonics won game four by 21 points. They won game five by 11, while holding Michael Jordan to just two points in the entire fourth quarter as the Bulls fought to keep it close.



By the time the teams flew back to Chicago, it was clear that Chicago’s formula was not perfect. Something would have to change for them to win.



Their approach was to make game six a defensive battle. Chicago’s Ron Harper, who was in and out of the series, returned to guard Gary Payton, freeing Jordan to check Hawkins. Jordan took nineteen shots and made just five. Seattle’s Hersey Hawkins was held in tight check by Jordan, and scored just four. Sweet shooting Seattle big man Sam Perkins missed 11 of his 14 shots. Kemp played well, but Seattle had a hard time even getting him the ball in key parts of the game. McMillan—who had a Ph.D. in getting the ball to Kemp—mustered just ten minutes.



The result was a low-scoring slog that perfectly suited just one player on the floor: Dennis Rodman. “The worm” with the multicolored hair set a finals record with 11 offensive rebounds, and 19 total.



Seattle’s Detlef Schrempf explains that Jordan and Rodman worked well together in that environment. “You expend a lot of energy trying to contain the best player ever,” he says. “Rodman took advantage of that with his tenacity.”



When the Bulls had the ball, Rodman typically lingered on the baseline, watching the Sonics exhaust themselves on defense. When the shot went up, he scrapped like an alley cat—and frequently came up with the ball.



The Bulls won game six 87-75, and the Bulls won the rings, and all of the season’s awards. Jordan was named MVP of the series, the season, and the All-Star game. Jackson was named coach of the year, Krause executive of the year, and Kukoc sixth man of the year.



The Sonics were left with some very valuable consolation prizes: including the memories of an extraordinary run.



“I think about it,” says Schrempf. “I have a picture of Key Arena from that season up in my house. It was a great time.”



How to react to the greatest run of your career, even if it ends in disappointment? “You get your friends and you go have a hamburger,” says Karl. “You drink some beer, you complain about the referees, and you wish Michael Jordan could have hit a curve ball.”