Counting Ways Seattle Can Triumph
A day after the Bulls suffered the unthinkable - a second straight defeat, suffered for the second time in eight months - the Page One headline atop the early Sunday editions of the Chicago Tribune did not choose to tap dance about an urgent civic crisis.
“Those Chicago sports blues creeping in,” The Tribune noted in its usual dour tone. The accompanying story actually mentioned the Bulls - who are a game away from winning the franchise’s fourth world championship since 1991 - in the same breath as the Cubs, last proclaimed world champions 88 years ago, during the presidential administration of Theodore Roosevelt.
But not everybody here is as prone to overreaction as the local newspaper. A friend of mine Saturday challenged me to give him a single good reason the SuperSonics can storm past the The Winningest Team in NBA History.
And I said, pal, I’ve got a slew of reasons why Seattle can win. Is eight enough?
Exposure. Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, who between them own three Olympic gold medals - Pippen figures to take home more gold from Atlanta this summer - are playing to win a championship ring, yes, but also to leave some vaguely defined imprint in the sports-history books.
On the other hand, Shawn Kemp and Gary Payton, who were rejected from the 1996 Olympic Team, are playing as if The Finals are a chance to personally engrave their professional-basketball reputations. Say what you want about fresh legs, but it’s the hearts of Kemp and Payton that’ve turned the series into a series. They’re hungrier than the Bulls.
The No-Hitter That Wasn’t Factor. You know how an already tired pitcher invariably lets down when his no-hit bid is ruined in the eighth or ninth inning? That’s how Chicago looked Friday night in Game 5, after the Sonics prevented a four-game Bulls sweep on Wednesday. Phil Jackson’s team appeared, in a word, demoralized.
Having won 72 times during the regular season, Chicago’s thrill was sweeping its way through the conference finals and the NBA Finals, submitting a convincing bid for immortality. Once the Sonics busted up the Bulls’ run in Game 4, though, the thrill was gone.
The United Center. Chicago owns a home-court advantage in that the players recognize the zip code and know the parking-lot attendants who oversee their cars outside the stadium. But after three games in KeyArena - a place that felt like a dance floor captive to a killer band returning for another encore - the United Center is sort of like that museum wing where the finger-food arrangement is as proper as the string music.
Physical deterioration. Today the Chicago Bulls will play their 100th meaningful game since opening the schedule last fall. Consumed by a successful drive to break the single-season record for victories, the team is paying the price: Guard Ron Harper has a bum knee; Luc Longley is awaiting surgery to remove bone chips, and Pippen is a mere shell of the MVP candidate he was through midseason.
Colors. Disgusted over the premise the NBA Finals were supposed to be a necessary “learning experience,” the team in green got going when it started to see red. Their future clouded by several critical contractual stalemates, the team in red got soft when it started to see green.
The Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders, the only two clubs in major professional sports who did bounce back from a three-game deficit to win a best-of-seven series. The Leafs ended up beating Detroit to win the 1942 Stanley Cup Playoffs; the Islanders managed to survive Pittsburgh.
The idea isn’t to win four games at once, which is impossible. It’s to win once four times, which isn’t.
Riots, and Chicago’s uniquely indelicate history of responding to such. As the late Mayor Richard J. Daley pronounced during the 1968 Democratic Convention, “da paleece aren’t here to restore disorder, day’re here to preserve disorder.” (Hizzoner also said: “Tagedder, we will reach higher and higher platitudes.”)
At any rate, because the Bulls only have won three of the past five NBA championships, it wouldn’t be a shock tonight if victory-starved Chicagoans took their celebration to the streets, overturning cars, firing guns, smashing the occasional storefront window and removing everything inside.
Realizing that accomplishment in the sports arena is not without a weird and troubling flip side, such revered Bulls players as Jordan have made public-service announcement appeals telling Chicago to cool it. Still, deep down in the soul, in that quiet place where thoughts mingle with feelings, can the Bulls be helped knowing a clutch free throw will lead to emergency alarms and rampant looting?
Dennis Rodman. A bane of the Sonics through the first three games of the series, Seattle is finally learning that while Rodman can’t be beaten in arguments with four-letter words, he is devasted by a simple three-letter retort to his name.
Who?