Michael Jordan As A Non-Hero Not Satisfying

This is all very nice for basketball fans, I suppose, this Team Michael stuff, this spreading the ball around and playing within Himself, this shooting in single coverage and after a return pass, screening and honoring the Triangle.

There must be those who like all this sharing and working well with others. Anyone with a Red Holzman play book is no doubt applauding today.

But record TV ratings and street gossip and elevator chatter between strangers do not depend on Michael Jordan being, oh, Doc Rivers, for instance.

There is a world waiting for its next Michael flap. There are theories to be supported and conspiracies to be floated, arguments to be fertilized. And there Jordan is, passing the ball out of the double team.

What does the world have to talk about today? O.J.’s DNA? I mean, this was network TV and there is a whole day before the next game. How will parents know what to buy for their children if Michael doesn’t show them?

If Michael cannot fill the basket as he used to, at least he can fill the empty lives of Nielsen families.

The Bulls won, but that is not important. This is what is important.

Michael did not change numbers.

Michael did not throw the game away.

Michael did not make the winning shot.

He did not contradict himself nor confirm his myth. It was neither a Good Air day nor a Bad Air day, and that will just not do.

“I believe Michael made a conscious effort to involve his teammates,” Phil Jackson said.

This is like saying Pavarotti hummed so we could hear the piccolo.

Jordan was in all ways just another bald guy in a white shirt and compromise black shoes, applauding while Toni Kukoc hit the critical 3-pointer, not even trying to beat triple coverage, passing the ball so often the shot clock even honked in surprise.

So common was Jordan that at the end of the game in Crunch Time, he was only one of the five Bulls on the floor in double figures. This includes Will Perdue, who got considerable playing time after Luc Longley injured his ankle.

Longley had gotten off to a decent start and has standing permission, on any night that he outplays Shaquille O’Neal, to change the spelling of his name to Luq.

It was Kukoc, not Jordan, of whom Jackson would say, “He’s a clutch player who hit the clutch shot.”

No doubt those No. 7 shirts will just fly off the shelves today.

Oh, there is still this business of Jordan not speaking to the press. He did stop to say something to a network chum, though it is unclear if the mountain came to Ahmad or Ahmad to the mountain, but Jordan is not speaking yet to the rest of us.

But even this is another facet of his blending in. To show just what a team player Jordan has become, Scottie Pippen did the same and in the Orlando lockerroom so did O’Neal and Anfernee Hardaway.

This caused much talk about not talking, but this is mostly intramural irritation and hardly enough to carry the rest of the world through breakfast.

I am very disappointed in Jordan, and in O’Neal, not because they are silent, but because they have yet both to play a good game at the same time. This series is supposed to be measured by gasps and breaths not taken, with Jordan soaring and O’Neal smashing backboards.

Neither has happened. It is as if the bull and the matador have shown up in different rings.

I had hoped maybe that will change back in Orlando, where the series returns Tuesday night. And then Orlando coach Brian Hill explained O’Neal’s relative dullness was because he was “unselfish, a team player.”

Shaq, too?

There’s just too much of that going around.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Bernie Lincicome Chicago Tribune